A History of Modern Burma by Michael W. Charney

Author:Michael W. Charney [Charney, Michael W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: amazon
Published: 2020-04-27T04:28:01.534100+00:00

Figure 6.1 Present-day Burmese deliver unhusked rice to mill by boat

The insurgencies

In April 1963, the Revolutionary Council offered amnesty to insurgents who would lay down their arms, and rewards for the capture of leaders of rebel forces were canceled in June. To prevent sabotaging of the peace talks, the government began arresting the central leadership of the AFPFL in early August and its provincial party secretaries in October. Dissatisfied with the terms offered, however, most rebel groups abandoned the talks by the end of the year. The Council responded to the failure of the talks by blaming the National Democratic United Front’s strategy of erecting a parallel government in areas under Communist and ethnic insurgent control. It even claimed that Burma was on the verge of a national divide akin to the divisions between North and South Korea and Vietnam.40

While the Revolutionary Council returned to an offensive strategy, the Communist insurgents were in the midst of a crisis. The souring relationship between the Soviet Union and the PRC influenced the inner workings of the party through cadres who were separately associated with either Moscow or Beijing. While the split that led to the emergence of the BCP and the CPB had been serious, the forthcoming conflict within the BCP threatened to become much worse.

The PRC had been hesitant to become involved with the two Communist insurgencies in Nu’s time. Nu had been careful to develop a very amicable relationship with Burma’s gargantuan and seemingly erratic neighbor. After the Bandung Conference in 1955, the PRC, anxious to promote itself as a neutralist force in world affairs, formally renounced any connexions with the Burmese communists. Things changed, however, after the 1962 coup that put the Revolutionary Council into power. The PRC encouraged both the BCP and the CPB to engage in the 1963 amnesty negotiations. Even the volatile CPB leader Soe, who had gone into hiding in Arakan, agreed to do so, but by August he was unhappy with the terms offered, broke off talks and went back underground. The BCP soon followed. The Council reacted harshly, arresting four senior Communists and 400 above-ground leftist politicians. The Council’s growing relationship with the Soviet Bloc, especially after Aung Gyi was booted out, further alienated the PRC. The growing rift between Burma and the PRC soon led the latter to label the Ne Win government as reactionary and to engage in active but covert support for the Communist insurgencies. Things picked up steam from 1966 with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in the PRC and the attack by PRC thinkers on Khrushchev’s revisionism of Communist doctrine. For its part, the Council was concerned about signs that the Cultural Revolution was being exported to Burma through the local Chinese community. This concern, along with the decision by some Chinese students in Burma to wear Maoist badges to school, sparked riots in Rangoon that, while essentially rooted in anxieties caused by food shortages, nonetheless mobilized an anti-PRC vocabulary. This was followed by an intense media barrage and mass demonstrations before the Burmese embassy in the PRC.

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