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By Root 4534 0

the reviving Malayan economy. Some people, however, envisaged more resolute action. Force 136 still cast a long shadow over the whole of Southeast Asia. Rumours still swirled around among the Burmese about the involvement of its officers in the assassination of Aung San and his cabinet. By February Bowker, the British ambassador, had already become uneasy because Force 136 officers were still maintaining contacts with the Karens. Colonel J. C. ‘Pop’ Tulloch was the most active of these men.61 He had been parachuted into Karen country in February 1945 and organized Karen levy attacks on the rear of the Japanese forces which were holding up the 14th Army’s advance on Mandalay. By 1948 he had convinced himself that the Karens were fighting ‘the virus of communism’. He had told Karens that if they were really in trouble members of the force would turn out to help them. As the year wore on, the Karen situation became more and more fraught and the rumours of British involvement more insistent. Nu did his best to continue Aung San’s policy of conciliation, bringing in transitional measures for a form of Karen self-government in the delta while at the same time denouncing the Karenistan movement as ‘undemocratic’.62 But as the government’s troubles deepened so did the determination of some KNU hardliners to go their own way.

In July something happened in London that alarmed both Whitehall and the British embassy in Rangoon. Ex Evening Standard editor Frank Owen, now at the Daily Mail, who had been selected by Mount-batten to produce the SEAC newsletter in 1943,63 asked Esler Dening, now a Foreign Office adviser, to meet at the Carlton Bar ‘someone who had been in Burma’. This turned out to be Tulloch, who was on his way out to the East and was drumming up support for the Karen cause. According to Dening, he said he ‘had been connected with a Karen organisation which aimed at seizing power in Burma’. Dening was astonished to be told that the leader of this insurrection was to be none other than Smith Dun. According to his own account, he immediately told Tulloch that his was a very foolhardy course of action and that it would have ‘unpleasant consequences’ for him. Tulloch said he thought that would be the answer, but that there was a lot of support around for the Karen cause. Tulloch had apparently been to see the Americans, who had expressed interest but cautiously referred him to the British Foreign Office. He had also tried to raise some money from the Burmah Oil Company in the Karen cause. All this put the Foreign Office and the Rangoon embassy in a quandary. Should they tell Nu and the Burmese government? Did they indeed have an obligation to do so under the defence agreement? Could this all be a plot within a plot to discredit Smith Dun and bring about the collapse of the socialist government? One thing that the officials were sure of was that the Karens could not really form a government in Rangoon even if they had the support of other minority groups.64 Any such insurrection was most likely to bring the communists to power even faster.

The Foreign Office’s dilemma was partly resolved by the speed of events. Soon after the meeting in the Carlton Bar, Tulloch turned up in Calcutta. In the last week of August Karen activists moved and began to take over police stations in the delta while hill Karens began to mobilize forces in Karenni. By 1 September Karen paramilitary forces were in charge of the port of Moulmein, a powerful statement of their aim of political separatism. They were joined in this insurrection by another delta people, the Mons. The Mon population was about 300,000. They were the remaining descendants of the once-dominant people of southern Burma who had been defeated, exterminated or assimilated by the Burmese after 1760. This uprising, however, was unlike either the communist insurgency or the military mutinies. At first there was little actual fighting between the Burmese forces and the Karens and Mons. The Karen delta paramilitaries simply took over the running of the towns, blockaded the roads and became