Twilight in Burma: Reconquest and Crisis

Abstract

THERE is no iron curtain in the Tropical Far East. No curtain is needed, for the scene is sufficiently obscured by the smoke of civil strife: Annamese against the French, Indonesians against the Dutch, a communist rising in Malaya; and in Burma also, despite, or, as some would say, because of the withdrawal of British rule, there is no less confusion. Only in Siam is there precarious peace. What does it all mean? Even here in Burma it is difficult to pierce the twilight. Is it the shade of nightfall or the hour before the dawn? What is happening, and what is going to happen? What, if anything, is one to do about it? As these lines are written, Burmans are celebrating the end of Buddhist Lent with lanterns and Chinese crackers; they seem cheerful enough. Need one do anything? And not many miles out of Rangoon, insurgents have just cut off the water supply, and we are dependent on an older reservoir that before the war was thought insufficient for a smaller population. Must something be done? Will the world outside Burma be content to forego indefinitely the rice and oil and timber that Burma formerly supplied? Surely someone should be able to do something. But no one can do much good without a knowledge of the facts, and it may be useful therefore to try and penetrate the smoke screen obscuring them. It was early in May i945 that the British reoccupied Rangoon. There was a vast difference between the land to which they returned and that from which they had been driven three years earlier. Then it had been rich in things that measure the material wealth of nations: rice land yielding an abundant harvest to feed the starving myriads of India; a flourishing timber industry based on extensive teak forests; oil fields, mines and plantations giving a fat return to the fortunate shareholders, with a margin for new capital equipment foreshadowing still larger profits. All this was wholly the product of about a hundred