Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 22

— AUNG SAN —

DID BRITAIN’S PLOTTING LEAD TO BURMA’S AGONY?

On the morning of 19 July 1947, three gunmen burst into the Secretariat Building in Rangoon and unleashed a hail of automatic fire, slaughtering the Burmese leader, Aung San, and six of his cabinet colleagues.

In the previous six months, Aung San had been busy. He had won a promise from the British prime minister, Clement Attlee, that Burma would be independent within a year. He had also brought his country’s peoples and tribes together in a drive for a united Burma and won a landslide majority in the national elections.

In his role as Deputy Chairman of the Executive Council, he was effectively prime minister. He was a national hero, a war leader and the man who’d brought Burma to the brink of independence. And he was still only 32.

These days, the outside world mostly knows Aung San because of his daughter, the charismatic Nobel Peace Prize winner and democratic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

But in Burma itself, despite all the brutality and corruption and rewriting of history under a string of murderous military dictators, Aung San is almost universally revered and honoured by all sides.

His name is magic. The 19th of July is known as Martyrs’ Day, and the monks and marchers in Burma’s 2007 ‘Saffron Revolution’ firmly believed no soldier would shoot at them if they marched carrying pictures of Aung San. They were wrong, and many died in the streets to prove it.

Yet still the generals who rule the country wish to be seen as his successors. Statues and pictures of Aung San are everywhere and his presence is there in every twist of his country’s modern history.

But the man – rather than the legend – had his bitter enemies, too. And there is good reason to suspect that a conspiracy of Burmese rivals and British colonialists played a part in his bloody assassination.

After the shooting, the three gunmen were seen leaving the Secretariat Building and going to the house of U Saw, the man who had been Burma’s puppet prime minister under the British colonial administration in 1940–42.

U Saw was an obvious political rival and a sworn enemy of Aung San. He had been a friend and ally of the former Governor General of Burma, Colonel Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith (the man behind Britain’s wartime Dig for Victory campaign). There had been an assassination attempt on U Saw himself a few months earlier, in which he had been injured and blinded in one eye. Though the attackers were not identified, U Saw blamed followers of Aung San.

When U Saw’s home was searched, the gunmen who had attacked the Secretariat Building were captured and hundreds of British-made Bren guns and other weapons were found, hidden in the lake beside his house. It was widely believed that U Saw was planning to seize power by force or else that he had been led to expect a phone call from the British after the shooting to invite him to step in and form the new government.

The assassination was an open and shut case and U Saw and his men were hanged for the crime, after being refused leave to appeal to the Privy Council in London. But most Burmese have always believed the British also had blood on their hands.

There was clear evidence that at least two mid-ranking British Army officers – Captain David Vivian and Major Henry Young – were involved in stealing army weapons and selling them to U Saw. It was even proved that the guns used in the attack were provided by Major Young. Young and Vivian were both jailed for their part in the plot, but there was a strong suspicion that the conspiracy reached a lot higher on the British side.

And there was one other startling conspiracy theory that only emerged many years later.

A Burmese gunman called Yebaw Mya Hlaing was said to have confessed to his doctor that he and a colleague had carried out the earlier attack on U Saw, but under strict orders to wound him but not kill him. The two were dressed in the uniform of Aung San’s supporters, he said, so that U Saw would be certain Aung San had tried to have him murdered. Predictably, U Saw then sought revenge for his injuries by arranging for Aung San to be shot.

In this scenario, both Aung San and U Saw would be conveniently removed from the scene. But who would have benefited? And who would have had the cold-blooded ruthlessness to dream up such a cruelly cynical plot? The gunman accused the vicious and corrupt General Ne Win, the man who went on to become the first of Burma’s military dictators and who effectively ruled the country by fear for most of the next 40 years.

REASONS TO DOUBT

The fact that Aung San was killed by three assassins sent by a bitter personal and political enemy, U Saw, is not in doubt. But the involvement of some insignificant British Army officers is no proof of a wider conspiracy. And the fact that Britain went ahead and signed the promised independence treaty in October 1947 seems to show that the assassination was not part of a wider British scheme to change the course of history.

Violence was part of the background to Burmese politics in the mid-20th century and Aung San himself had told the then Governor, Reginald Dorman-Smith, in early 1946 that he did not believe he would be around for long.

‘How long do national heroes last?’ he asked prophetically. ‘Not long in this country. They have too many enemies. I do not give myself more than another 18 months of life.’

The allegation that Ne Win set up U Saw in order to get rid of two key rivals at once is certainly plausible, as this was a man capable of any kind of evil. This theory has been much discussed in Burma in more recent times. But the fact that this explanation was apparently never suggested for many years, even in the explosive atmosphere of suspicion surrounding the assassination, makes it unlikely, as well as extremely hard to verify.

REASONS TO BELIEVE

The Chairman of Burma’s Executive Council was the new Governor, Sir Hubert Rance. Council meetings were normally held at Government House and Rance would usually have been present. But, on this day, he had to miss the meeting and it was switched to the Secretariat Building.

So it was just Aung San and a handful of cabinet colleagues, including his brother, Ba Win, who were in the upstairs chamber when three men dressed in army uniforms shot the single sentry outside and came crashing in with guns blazing. The only council member who was absent was Aung San’s old friend U Nu. A hit squad apparently went gunning for him at his house but he was out and therefore escaped.

The Governor asked U Nu to step in and form a new council, which was sworn in the next day. The country was in turmoil. There were rumours that the British government had killed Burma’s hero, that there would be a military coup, that the Communists would lead an uprising, even that Burma’s scheduled independence would be put on hold.

But, as it became clear that U Saw was behind the assassination and that London was not going to backtrack on independence, official British government involvement in the killings looked less likely.

What was clear was that the two maverick army officers, Young and Vivian, were not U Saw’s only co-conspirators. While awaiting execution, U Saw tried desperately to make contact with a representative of the British Council in Rangoon, John Stewart Bingley, who left Burma in a hurry after being questioned and is thought to have had a hand in the plot. In a secret letter to Bingley from prison, intercepted by the police, U Saw threatened to reveal secrets that would ‘have international repercussions’, but this threat was never carried out.

The disgraced Captain David Vivian eventually escaped from prison and fought with the Karen rebels in the east of Burma. Despite a report in The Times saying he had been killed in a Burmese army ambush in 1950, he suddenly reappeared five years later in London, travelling under a false name and with false papers supplied by the British security services.

And a secret telegram from the British Ambassador in Rangoon, dated the day of U Saw’s hanging and only declassified in the 1990s, quotes the Chief of Police as saying he was ‘virtually convinced’ there was British connivance in Aung San’s murder. The police chief named Dorman-Smith as a suspect and said he believed Bingley, ‘the tall gentleman’ from the British Council, was the secret go-between.

Dorman-Smith, David Vivian, Bingley and a group of other British soldiers, spies and diplomats had had close ties with the Karen people and believed Aung San was anti-Karen. They were linked to a secretive group called the Friends of the Burma Hill Peoples, which was, according to declassified British intelligence files, ‘actively engaged’ in subversive activity against the Burmese government after independence. Surviving members of the group simply laugh off the idea that this ‘talking shop’ could have been involved in the murder plot.

While in jail in Burma, though, David Vivian had said, ‘Someone in England is interested in seeing me put away and not allowed to talk. If I could tell the facts, there would be a big rumpus between the British and the Burmese.’

The Foreign Office file on Captain Vivian has not been completely declassified, and the papers that have been released have had parts edited out that are still seen as sensitive, leaving suspicious souls to wonder if there are not more revelations to come.

No one has ever been able to join up all the dots and prove what really happened in Rangoon in July 1947. But many people in Britain never forgave Aung San for siding with Japan during the early part of the war in his efforts to achieve independence for his country.

Clement Attlee had been impressed by what he saw at the London constitutional talks and his Labour government had pragmatically agreed to Aung San’s insistence on complete independence (see bit.ly/aungsandemands) for Burma. But some powerful politicians, especially in the Conservative opposition, did not bother to disguise the fear and hatred they felt for Aung San. Even months after his death, Winston Churchill referred back to the nationalist leader’s temporary alliance with the Japanese and shocked many MPs by vilifying the man revered by so many Burmese – then and now – as ‘that traitor rebel leader of a Quisling army’.