Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [238]
As the year drew to its end the situation in Burma still seemed so grave that the Americans, acutely alert to the threat of communism, were now seriously worried. The sporadic fighting and endemic dacoities surged backward and forward across the delta, the Irrawaddy valley and the forest areas to the north. Of course, this does not mean that the country was in complete anarchy. In many places authority had simply gravitated to the level where it had always been most secure – with the village and township headmen and the chiefs and councils of the wooded and hill areas. But to the Burmese nationalists and the old British Burma hands looking on, the worst nightmares had already come to pass. Murray noted that ‘our only consolation is that we now have nothing left worth losing’. British firms had begun to leave with whatever they could still get their hands on.76 Yet even the communists were divided and incapable of putting on a united face to negotiate with the government. A number of the saner leaders were held under Section 5 of the Preservation of Public Order Act. Because the word for ‘five’ and the word for ‘fish’ were the same in Burmese, people said they were ‘eating fried fish’.77 Many Burmese were now contemplating military rule as the only solution. The problem was that even the military seemed incapable of throwing up a strong leader.
Symptomatic of this dismal end to Burma’s year of hope was the fate of Tin Tut, the redoubtable and clever former ICS officer who had fled with Dorman-Smith to Simla and re-emerged as minister and financial expert of the independent government. Tin Tut had been pushed out of the economics ministry into the Burmese Foreign Office because he was not really acceptable to the former hardline nationalists who resented his earlier connection with the British. In August he had resigned from the government altogether and had taken a commission in the army, complaining that the dictatorial socialists refused any initiative that did not come from inside their own ranks. On 17 September his car was attacked with a hand grenade as he drove through the streets of Rangoon and he died a few hours later in hospital.78 A strong Burmese nationalist, even while within the ranks of the ICS, U Tin Tut, CBE, was almost the last of his kind. Why was he assassinated? Furnivall, by now perhaps prey to endemic Burmese political paranoia, believed that he might have been on the point of declaring a dictatorship with the help of the British services mission. Certainly many Burmese thought so: ‘The Europeans and the few Burmese with any land or money were all resting their hopes in Tin Tut.’79 This easily merged with rumours about Australian bootlegging aircraft dropping caches of arms to the Karens and the shenanigans of adventurers such as ‘Pop’ Tulloch. There was a strong suspicion that Aung Gyi, deputy inspector of the ‘anti-rightist’ and semi-criminal Sitwundan militia, was responsible for the assassination.80
In the long-lost pre-war days, there had been little connection between Burma and Malaya. Now events seemed to be pushing the two regions into a single frame of reference as far as the British, Americans and their communist enemies were concerned. In September Nu himself had written a rather ponderous and complacent letter to Malcolm MacDonald, British Governor General of Southeast Asia. He pointed out that they were both bulwarks against international communism and espoused a moderate democratic socialism that he claimed represented both the British and the Burmese way. As the Governor General contemplated his own equally