the largest nation in southern Asia to have sur-
vived internal strife as a democracy; Malaysia and
Singapore have done likewise. But Sri Lanka,
despite a parliamentary system, is rent by civil war
which was reaching exhaustion in 2005. Burma,
Pakistan and Bangladesh fell under authoritarian
rule, and the whole of former French Indo-China,
after nearly thirty years of war, had succumbed to
communism.
Despite widespread poverty and its manifold
problems, it is remarkable that the greater part of
south-east Asia has not proved fertile ground for
the Chinese or Soviet communist models. There
are good reasons for this. Tradition still has a firm
hold in the region, which is pervaded by especially
strong religious beliefs opposed to atheistic com-
munism. And the nationalism of south-east Asian
countries had to assert itself first against the
Europeans, then against the Japanese and finally
against the Europeans again. Another disadvan-
tage for communism was that for a time after
1949 the only Asian great power remaining was
Red China. The newly independent states did not
want to fall into the hands of a new Chinese
empire, a threat made all the more real by large
minorities of ‘overseas Chinese’ who might act as
an internally disruptive force. In the continuous
internal struggles for power, furthermore, the
leaders of coups were reluctant to alienate the
most influential sectors of society – the middle
classes and the propertied. Fundamental redistri-
bution of wealth and agrarian reform, let alone
moves towards full-blown communism, would
have stirred up a hornet’s nest of opposition. In
this respect, as well as in many others, Burma was
something of an exception.
No sooner had independence come to Burma in
January 1948 than internal disruption threatened
to plunge the country into chaos. The British had
left behind a democratic constitution modelled
on Westminster, which proved unsuitable for a
country so underdeveloped and so disorganised.
At the time of independence, Burma was led by
U Nu, an outstanding politician who managed to
maintain constitutional democracy intact for ten
years until 1958. It had barely survived the first
four years, during which ethnic minorities and
two communist groups, the Red Flags and the
White Flags, collaborated and took control of
central and most of southern Burma, nearly cap-
turing Rangoon. U Nu and constitutional gov-
ernment were saved by the army and General Ne
Win, and by the disunity of the insurgent groups,
who hated each other as much as the system they
were trying to overthrow. To this day, no gov-
ernment has achieved effective control over all the
remote areas of Burma.
In the wider world Burma was almost un-
known except for two circumstances: U Thant,
the Burmese educator and diplomat (U is an hon-
orific title meaning ‘honourable sir’), was twice
elected United Nations secretary-general, in 1962
and 1966, and served ably until 1971, during a
period of severe conflict in the Third World.
Burma’s more negative contribution has been the
illicit traffic of opium out of the ‘golden triangle’,
a tongue of remote territory spanning Burma,
Laos and Cambodia.
The Burmese military was at first prepared to
support the constitutional government of U Nu,
who was carefully edging Burma away from the
West to a neutralist position. Burma had either to
secure India’s firm backing or to establish good
relations with its most powerful neighbour China,
with which it shared a long frontier. It was the
latter policy which, in the end, proved the only
feasible one, unless Burma were to be caught up
in the Cold War. Potentially a rich country, with
resources of rice that had once made it Asia’s
biggest exporter of the grain, not to mention
timber and minerals, Burma’s development never-
theless languished under U Nu’s regime. One
reason continues to be the protracted ethnic con-
flict; another was the failure of over-ambitious
development plans recommended by American
advisers. In 1958 the state of the country had
become so serious that U Nu handed over power
to his supporter, General Ne Win. Two years later
Ne Win organised a general election from which
U Nu emerged victorious, and Ne Win restored
him to power. But having tasted supreme power,
and seeing the unity of the country once more
threatened, Ne Win in 1962 overthrew U Nu in