The Staggers

The New Statesman’s rolling politics blog

Britain’s dirty Burma secret

The military regime used to be our friend.

By Sholto Byrnes Published 07 November 2010 14:03

Whatever the official results of today's elections in Burma – the first in 20 years (the last, won by Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, were ignored) – there is no doubt that the military regime will remain in charge, as it has done in various guises since 1962. This is why the leading dissident U Win Tin, who until his release in 2008 had spent 19 years in jail, is calling for an election boycott.

"The military junta wants to claim this election as free and fair and so we have to reduce the legitimacy of that claim by not taking part at all," he told today's Observer.

Ever since the crackdown by the authorities in 1988, during and after which Aung San Suu Kyi came to prominence (she only happened to be in the country because her mother was terminally ill), most of the rest of the world has been united in condemning Burma's generals – if divided on how best to express its revulsion, given that sanctions will never work so long as countries in the region happily carry on trading with their pariah neighbour.

What we forget, however, is that for many years we were not at all bothered about the suppression of democracy in Burma. General Ne Win, who took power in the March 1962 coup and ruled until he stepped down in 1988, may have brought ruin to his country with his inept Burmese Way to Socialism and increasingly erratic behaviour, often related to his strong superstitious beliefs, but at least he kept the country out the communist bloc.

That counted for more than the fact that his regime was brutal, capricious and authoritarian. Right up until 1988, Japan was pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of aid into the country every year.

As Dr Maung Zarni, a research fellow at the London School of Economics and founder of the Free Burma Coalition, has put it: "No general in Burma's modern history was more exposed to the west than General Ne Win: even after his coup in 1962, the general was welcome at the White House and was reportedly sipping tea with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. He maintained a house in Wimbledon, played golf in Scotland, received annual medical check-ups in London, saw his psychotherapist in Vienna and stopped in Geneva to check his Swiss accounts."

One British connection is, I'm afraid, particularly embarrassing for the New Statesman – whose long-time editor Kingsley Martin turns out to have been on very good terms with the old tyrant. When Ne Win died in 2002, the former Labour MP Tam Dalyell recalled a visit that Martin arranged for him.

"Given letters of introduction to their friend Ne Win by the socialist editor of the New Statesman Kingsley Martin and his partner Dorothy Woodman, my wife and I were invited to a long and simple lunch of rice and mangoes by Ne Win and his wife Katie in June 1965." Dalyell wrote most sympathetically of the isolation Ne Win had chosen. "He had closed Burma as the only way of keeping his country out of the horrors of the Vietnam/Cambodia war.

"His friends Chou En-lai and the Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong wanted to use the Burmese forests as a haven for guerrillas, which would have invited American bombing and Agent Orange."

Calling on the Burmese dictator in the 1970s "at the modest house in Victoria Road, Wimbledon, which was his refuge", Dalyell said that Ne Win "was very candid about the mistakes that he had made" since his second wife, Katie, his favourite, became ill and died in 1972. Small comfort to the millions impoverished by his disastrous policies, one imagines.

It is entirely right that we should voice our opposition to and revulsion for Burma's generals. But it might also be appropriate to acknowledge our dubious part in that country's past – however much we might prefer not to remember it.

Tags: Burma

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19 comments

Sun, 2010-11-07 19:02 — jie4v7i14

"It ain't half hot Mum" it certainly isn't, these days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc_E3Zs2E-U

Sun, 2010-11-07 22:49 — triedeinsursE

" But it might also be appropriate to acknowledge our dubious part in that country's past -- however much we might prefer not to remember it."

It might also be appropriate to remember what you did in Burma prior to their liberation. The British looted Burma for decades to include, Lumber, Ivory, Precious gems, Taxes. How about you start teaching that little secret in your schools. While you are at it feel free to mention all the other countries that you enslaved and looted in the name of Empire. The British Empire is nothing to be proud of. It is the biggest stain on humanity in the history of the world and you people act as if it never happened.

Tue, 2010-11-09 14:05 — writeoff (not verified)

Christ. It's called Myanmar. You'll be writing about Rhodesia next Sholto, let alone Bombay! This attitude, put about by old farts in the FCO who haven't updated the colonial maps on the office wall has to stop. It makes us look ridiculously patronising to the rest of the world.

Sun, 2010-11-07 23:09 — jie4v7i14

Of course we did, tiger skins in front of the home fires and all that.

I'm a typical tory to promote such stuff, hold on, I am not, I am a red in the bed, of cousre I am...

Sun, 2010-11-07 23:12 — jie4v7i14

Talking about reds in the bed, via Ukraine, Ada, mmmmm. Only click this link if you are over sixteen,
http://www.met-art.com/c52/Ada-Tellus-by-Chepurnoy.jpg

Sun, 2010-11-07 23:23 — jie4v7i14

More eastern europe check-point charlie nonsense, pow-pow!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OKMuS9xGZg

Sun, 2010-11-07 23:46 — PhilDuval

@ Busckins

yeah Britain's imperial history and legacy is vile. It's also where the States learned its tricks from - from Central and South America to the Middle East and South East Asia - you've done exactly the same and worse. But instead of colouring the map blue you use client states and tie economies to your corporate machine.

But why let that get in the way of black and white - we're right, you're wrong thinking?

Mon, 2010-11-08 20:51 — Mahchael (not verified)

He means The Lefts' Dirty Secret. They were friends with Pol Pot too.

Mon, 2010-11-08 21:08 — Benedict (not verified)

Mahchael,

"In the months and years that followed, the US and China and their allies, notably the Thatcher government, backed Pol Pot in exile in Thailand"

...

"Until 1989, the British role in Cambodia remained secret. The first reports appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, written by Simon O'Dwyer-Russell, a diplomatic and defence correspondent with close professional and family contacts with the SAS. He revealed that the SAS was training the Pol Pot-led force."

...

"On 25 June 1991, after two years of denials, the government finally admitted that the SAS had been secretly training the "resistance" since 1983."

Try reading the rest of "How Thatcher gave Pol Pot a hand" http://www.newstatesman.com/200004170017

Mon, 2010-11-08 01:15 — Amanda Hallawell (not verified)

Well said Sholto !

@ PhilDuval

Buckskins is a vainglorious fool - and best ignored.

Mon, 2010-11-08 02:06 — Sam (not verified)

Unfortunately the world is not the pretty little place we wish it to be. Being friendly with authoritarian governments is nothing new and when it comes to protecting the country or securing our energy needs then I think most people would probably end up not being morally straight all the time if they were the ones who had the pressure of protecting the country.

Mon, 2010-11-08 03:21 — Analmaozedongaphone

@EtchTee: What the hell is up with you and all these links?

Mon, 2010-11-08 03:56 — Hans Castorp (not verified)

How refreshing that an NS article aims to give historical context outside the rabid apologetics of the sub-Chomskyite variety that are other NS writers' stock in trade.

It's no kind of news that the left also has a pretty wretched record of backing, euphemising or spinning for terrible regimes - this has never been the sole preserve of US and UK imperial/post-imperial foreign policy.

Sadly, Sholto doesn't go that step further and ask what it is that we *do* with all this historical remembering. The traditional insinuation from the verkrappt left is to do nothing. Recent examples: nothing against Saddam, Milosevic, Taylor, Taliban, Iran and its proxies, and so on.

The only valid answer to both the legacy of Burma, and the countries in which the UK has had prior deleterious involvement (yes, e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan) is that our noxious past involvement redoubles our duty to remove the disgusting regimes that inhabit such places and press tirelessly for democracy and social justice.

Will NS readers accept this principle, or, given the implications it has for their shibboleths of Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, will they rubbish it in the usual way?

To me it seems the thrust of Sholto's article is that they should not.

Buckskins

While I know you are no kind of hand-wrining leftist liberal, I think you fall into the same guilt trap that such people inhabit.

Shifting from contemporary analysis to a kind of relitigation of the past (Empire in the case of Burma, Vietnam in the case of Iraq and all that) turns the west into an environment where serious is judged by the degree of guilt.

Pilger, who we both I think is awful, is a master of this so-called contextualisation. It is, in fact, a form of guilt by association, a Stalinist show-trial technique.

Pilger's recent article on Chile was a classic case of this - he argued that we should essentially stop celebrating the miner's release because there are ghosts not yet put to rest.

We can leave that sort of supernatural superintending to Pilger I think, and focus on people's lives in the moment.

Analmaozedongaphone

Don't start! This chap is a kind of incontinent NS comment section jester-at-large. To poor effect, most of the time.

Mon, 2010-11-08 04:48 — jie4v7i14

Analmaozedongaphone, get alife, and get a new handle, twat.

Song for you, since I disturb you, you twat,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ5M1uZN274