Myanmar Literature Talk ( Singapore ) - past and for the Future of Burma

Please click on the following link to listen.

For information the below text is the research work of Lian H. Sakhong.
Analysis paper No 1. (Burma Centre for Enthics Studies)

These information complied for reference so that the context of the talk and the relevant document can be correlated and analyzed for future development for the better changes.
Ethnics Issues in Burma:PART ONE - THE FOURTH BURMAN EMPIRE
{This author's note. Based on the very recent archaeological findings Burman, Chin, Kachin ,Mon, and  Siam can be concluded the descendants of the same parent stock of Pyu or Pru or Tritsu , Saka, Kiratas and Kambojas as early as Tagaung of Abhiraj or even slightly earlier.}

The followings are our comments.

     1)      First Burman Empire: Although it was monarchy and the Kings and slave relationship prevail, because of them the identity as Burman and Burma established in the world.

     2)      Fourth Burman Empire. It is doubtful that there was an agreement between U Nu and all ethnic races that they will not pursue for separation from Union of Burma. If that is the case why the military coup is needed or why U Nu had to pass the reign to Gen Ne Win? This requires further research and corroboration to conclude.

      3)     Now if there is an agreement that all ethnic races will not ask for total separation, the peace process has already crossed major hurdle. It is the big milestone! It is also require further research. It cannot be concluded by now.

2.a) This is the statement and opinions of the Sao Noan Oo appeared in Shan Herdle and needs further analysis and corroboration.
Great Loss Burma's Great Loss 
2.b) The below statement is extract from Nel Adams which we do not agree with her.
 "The origin of the name Shan is not very clear, but has been discussed by many scholars. One of the hypotheses concerning the origin of the name Shan is that Shan, Siam and Assam had been derived from the word "Sian" (Hsian, Sein), which designates a group of mountainous people who migrated down for Yunnan in the 6th. century AD. Another says that the Shan people were named after the "Mighty Shan", the Great Mountain Ranges of China from where they had migrated. A third hypothesis suggests that Shan is a corrupt word of Syam, a name given to Kshatriya (warriors) on duty of the Khmer empire in the early period of the Tai history. In fact, all peoples of Mon-Khmer language family call the Tai "Shan", "Shen", "Sham", or "Syam". However, all hypotheses lead to the names Shan and Tai as being one and the same race. {Source:The Tai Of The Shan State by  Nel Adams in Global Shan } Based on her statement we get to know that there is still intention to pursue seperation from Union of Burma.
2.c) The following is our opinion as it is mentioned in Kambojasocietydotcom.
{Cambodia or Kambodia is the English transliteration of the French name Kambodge, which name stands for Sanskrit Kamboja ( Persian Kambujiya or Kambaujiya). In Chinese historical accounts, the land was known as Chenla. The ancient inscriptions of Cambodia always refer to this name as Kambuja or Kamvuja rather than the standard Kamboja. ^[1] Kamboja was the name of the Indo-Iranian tribe and their country originally located in Pamirs and Badakshan in Central Asia but later some clans of this people had moved south and transplanted colonies in eastern and Central Afghanistan also. During early second century BCE, some clans of this people in alliance with the Sakas, Pahlavas, and Yavanas had entered India and spread into Sindhu, Sauvira, Punjab, Rajasthan and Saurashtra/Gujarat from where they spread further into Central, Eastern and Southern India. It is believed that a group from amongst these south-western Kambojas ( i.e. Gujarat/Saurashtra) had sailed to Southeast Asia and founded the Kambuja colony in Mekong valley of Indo-China Archipelago.{Refer Kambojasocietydotcom}} Actually this race include    Siam (သွ်မ္း) or  Kamboja  (ကမ္ေဘာဇ) of Burma.{This author's note.We will provide a topic dedicated for  "Siam (သွ်မ္း) or  Kamboja  (ကမ္ေဘာဇ) of Burma", soon}
2.d) After 1948 Independence gained, a Karen national Smith Dunn was appointed Commander in Chief of Burma Armed Forces by U Nu’s cabinet. The reader may find about him on internet, just type Gen Smith Dunn of Burma. But the Karen leaders were not satisfied with it. They demanded; jointly with Mon State Party; U Nu’s government a separate land for Karen and Mon, from Pegu downward include some parts Irrawaddy delta and Mon State, literally all lower part of Burma.(may be about 30% of total area of Burma).

In 1949 Karen rebels fought the central union government. This unwise action forced the then Commander –in –chief Smith Dunn to resign. Smith Dunn was a Karen national. Then U Nu appointed Gen Ne Win to take over him and Gen Ne Win became Commander-in-chief of Burmese Armed Forces. He (Gen Ne Win) had tasks to fight the Karens who were already advance up to Insein, about 8 to 10 miles from central Rangoon.Then the Union Government was called as Rangoon Government.It was Gen Ne Win who led the Army (tat-ma-daw) to drive out the Karen Rebels and saved the people and Union of Burma. It is unfair to single out a person and put all the blame on him.

The coup was also unavoidable due to some circumstances. It can be corroborated by Soe Myat Nwe's work as below.
On the second of March 1962 General. Ne Win stages a coup d’etat before a federal Nationalities’ Seminar in Rangoon, supported by U Nu, came to any conclusion of revisiting the Constitution in favour of federalism and a feared secession of the Shan State. The Shan Leaders, Sao Shwe Theik was arrested, together with many other political leaders, and the old federal Constitution abolished. It is hard to say if the military coup was avoidable. The new democracy had proven unable to provide peace, stability and development. Not all was due to internal factors; proxy armies defending external ideological interests, interference and outright interventions were an essential part of the destabilization. The Burmese
scholar Thant Myint U, grandson of the former Burmese Secretary General of the UN and himself educated in Harvard and Cambridge University, noted that: “There were the repeated foreign interventions-by the Americans, the Thais, and the Chinese Nationalists, by the Soviets and the Chinese Communists-all adding fuel to the fire, making impossible any local solution to Burma’s civil war.” (U, Thant Myint , 2006, p. 289) The military build-up and the broad popularity of the Tatmadaw (Burmese
Army) received in bringing back stability and peace as a ‘care-taker’ for the democratically elected but incapable government, gave the army a strong voice as ‘defender of the Nation’. Even later dissidents were initially won over by a military solution. Venerable Rewata Dhamma, secretary of the International Burmese Buddhist Sangha Organization, quoted by author Martin Smith, observed: “Many people supported Ne Win when he first seized power. Many were fed up with U Nu and the way he had played around with issues like the ethnic minority question. They liked the idea of a strong ruler who promised change and who could solve all their problems. It was rather like Hitler in Germany. The trouble with Ne Win is that, whatever his intentions, power (it was never money) corrupted him. What started with popular support became a disaster over time. {Soe Myat Nwe (2008:pp 16) "Peace for Burma  and Rethinking the Roots of its Conflicts"}
Also see as Soe Myat Nwe inform as
"In their article “Missionaries among the Hill Tribes of Burma”, authors Mi Mi Khaing and Charles S. Brant put it this way as follows: “The missionary effect among the Karens fostered the ideal of Karen nationality and taught this people to feel group pride and dignity... It assured them that under the then prevailing British law they had equal rights with other peoples. But the sequel was that there arose a
group of sectarian Karen zealots who eventually, in 1948, led many of their people into futile armed rebellion against the newly independent government rather than compromise what was, on any showing, a ridiculously exorbitant and unworkable set of demands for a Karen State.”{Soe Myat Nwe (2008:pp 23) "Peace for Burma  and Rethinking the Roots of its Conflicts"}. These are history.

Refer her work below for full information.

Peace of Burma and Rethinking the Roots of Its Conflicts.

See the following to understand the situation Burma during Nu's Parliamentary Government era.
U Nu of Burma

Refer also what U Kyaw Nyein wrote (Contributed) in The Atlantic , which appear on Feb 1, 1958.
Burma, An Introduction

2.e) Referring to “LEGAL ISSUES ON BURMA JOURNAL No. 5, APRIL 2000 
BURMA LAWYERS' COUNCIL ;   PART ONE - THE FOURTH BURMAN EMPIRE by Aung Htoo.”and regarding the following words and phrase we would comment as below. စကားတလုံး (a word) စကားလုံးစု (phrase) ကုိေသခ်ာစြာ ေလ့လာရေပမည္။ထုိ စကားတလုံး၊စကားလုံးစု တစု တုိ့ကေန ဝါးစည္းေျပသလုိ ျပည္ေထာင္စုႀကီး တခုလုံး ျပိဳကဲြသြားနုိင္တာကုိ သတိျပဳပါ။ It is agreeable to say “ethnic races, ethnic tribal people” but not agreeable to “ethnic nationalities”. Please take note that the states or Desa (now တုိင္းေဒသ) such as Rakhine, Chin, Kachin, Karen, Kayah ,Mon and etc were existed and are existing. But these are not the nations. Only Burma or Brahma was a nation since two thousand over years ago and still existing till present day.

2.f)The following is what Mary P. Callahan put it , in her work in “Gangsters, Democracy, and the State in Southeast Asia” [Update on 1st March 2014. by this author]

    “{The impetus for these developments can be traced to the presence of a foreign invader, the Kuomintang (KMT), on Burmese soil from 1950 onward. No longer fighting only small bands of anti-government guerrillas (many of whom were their former comrades-at-rams during the resistance), the armed forces were faced with not only a US-backed foreign intruder in the KMT, but also the threat that the People’s Republic of China might enter Burma in pursuit of the KMT. Internal army debates over whether to maintain the army as highly mobile, decentralized guerrilla force or as a more centralized, standing army were resolved with finality in favor of centralization when the army came up against the US-backed KMT.

   The implications of this structural reorganization and consolidation within the army were two-fold. First, the reorganization of the army provided a handful of well-placed Socialist majors and colonels in the War Office with the opportunity to weed out those officers who had had some sort of ties to the British,  removing them from all important positions, and replace them with officers with more acceptable nationalist or Socialist credentials—i.e., participants or followers of participants in student politics in the late 1930s and in the underground resistance against both the British before 1942 and against the Japanese after 1942. Starting with the Kandy Conference (in which British and Burmese leaders sketched out the future of the army in Burma) in September 1945, these more politicized officers had distrusted their counterparts who either had served in the British Burma Army before 1942, had fled with the British to India when the Japanese arrived in Burma, had been trained by the British. After the war, when the British appointed Karen officers, Gen. Smith-Dun and Brig. Saw Kya Doe, to the top two army posts, Socialists both inside and outside the military reacted by planning and raising paramilitary organizations under Socialist control. The problem was in part alleviated when all the Karen officers including Smith-Dun and Saw Kya Doe were placed on “indefinite leave” and sent to “rest camps” after the outbreak of the Karen rebellion in January 1949; at this point, Gen. Ne Win was elevated to the Supreme Commander position and soon after also became Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister for Defense and Home Affairs. Karens who rejoined the army were institutionally isolated from this point forward.[27]

    However, the problem was not completely resolved, as a handful of conservative, pro-British officers continued to occupy key War Office positions and were perceived by the more politicized field commanders as blocking their efforts to defeat the insurgents, particularly the Karens.[28]. At the same time the British Services Mission refused to provide any further arms to the Burmese army to fight against British allies, the Karens. The tensions between the more political field commanders and the predominantly conservative War Office staff did not abate, and in late 1951 the Military Planning Staff (MPS) was inaugurated to provide a longer term solution to these problems Under Col. Aung Gyi and Col. Maung Maung, MPS not only oversaw the above-noted structural reforms and reorganization of the armed forces, but also in the course of making these reforms was able to eliminate systematically officers from the War Office whose political credentials and loyalty were suspect. The British Services Mission was also given notice in 1953, and closed up shop in 1954. Thus the War Office had been purged, and Socialist-leaning officers were at the helm.}”

{This author note: The above-mentioned is excerpt from Mary P. Callahan’s work. We just want to highlight the situation of post independent Burma and the roll of Burma Armed Forces (Tatmadaw). }

“Gangsters, Democracy, and the State in Southeast Asia” edited by Carl A. Trocki

Please also understand that the message here is clear to prevent sovereignty Burma to protect from becoming second Thailand. Remember Burma Army's tough effort driving out of foreign intruders. Now all peoples of Burma have responsibility to protect the integrity and sovereignty of Burma.
ျမန္မာ့ ေဝဟင္ကို ကာကြယ္ေနသည့္ တပ္မေတာ္(ေလ) အပိုင္း(၂)

We are for the change which is inevitable. However we want the systematic changes and control and manage the change force. It is not desirable for the short term solutions but rather these should be for long term peace and security. Thus far all parties should discuss and should be plural and inclusive for all ethnic races and minorities.
Commented by Min Nyo.



To be continued