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By Root 4529 0

were good reasons, both long and short term, that the Karen issue should come to the boil again in the early summer of 1948. In the first place, the Karens were now acutely aware of how dependent the Burmese government was on the Karen element of the old colonial Burma Army, and in particular on Smith Dun. They saw with mounting alarm the drift of all the other elements in the army either to the communists or to mutiny. But while the government was actually militarily dependent on the Karens and other minorities, the direction of its policy belied this basic fact. Karen leaders were suspicious of Nu’s oft-stated desire to compromise with the communists. They scanned the government’s economic programme with dismay. It was following a slow, centralizing drift that they believed would eventually render the Panglong agreement irrelevant. Christian Karens, in particular, were opposed on principle to ‘godless communism’ and believed that once Nu felt free to escape to a monastery, whatever government came to rule Burma would be hostile to them.

These political perceptions were simply surface issues, of course. What really fuelled the Karens’ and other minorities’ grab for the security of a separate political status was fear of their Burmese neighbours. It was not the political elders who dismayed them so much as the young men of the PVOs and the semi-bandit culture which permeated the delta. It was Burmese thugs, not the Japanese, who had massacred the Karens when the BIA ripped into the delta in 1942 and the raw memory of the hundreds of men, women and children slaughtered fed a much older sense of difference and alienation. Karen fears became sharper in September and October, when leftist army officers decided to raise yet another irregular force, the Sitwundan. A politically moderate Burmese officer, on the point of resignation, identified the leaders of this organization as ‘dacoits or ex-dacoits or people familiar in police records. Some of them are either known criminals or political chameleons.’59

General Bourne of the British mission just happened to be in Smith Dun’s house on 29 August 1948 when a number of the more intransigent KNU leaders were present. They regaled him with stories about the essential difference between Burmese, who were ruthless individualists, and the community-conscious Karens. Burmese politics was simply about faction and personal aggrandizement, he was told. After all, one need only look at the pre-British deeds of the old Burmese kings, who regularly disembowelled and burned alive their own relatives, to sample the Burmese idea of independence. As for Nu, ‘it was his appeasement of communism which they all feared and would never accept’. Nor had they forgotten Nu’s pre-war incarnation as the secretary of the Red Dragon Society, which had translated the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Oliver Ba Thun, one of the most intransigent of the KNU leaders, a public school and Oxbridge-educated barrister, said that he regarded the Labour government as a bitter enemy of the Karens. In contrast he welcomed the strong support the Karens enjoyed among British Conservatives and people in America and Australia.60 Bourne did not mention where Smith Dun himself stood on all this. Ostensibly, he remained a loyal servant of the Burmese government. Still, the Karens had to look after themselves.

Bourne’s presence at this gathering was, of course, far from a matter of chance. He was helping Smith Dun reorganize and strengthen the army hierarchy as mutiny threatened. In this instance, the communists’ allegations were quite correct. The long British love affair with the Karens, which had made the latter so suspect to the Japanese, continued after Burmese independence. The disgruntled Noel Stevenson had now retired from the field but other former civil officers continued to argue their case in London, convinced that the British had betrayed the Karens and other minorities. One crack-brained ‘Zionist solution’ was to ship the irreconcilable Karens out to North Borneo, where they could help expand rice production for