Road to Mandalay

Anxiously eying Southeast Asia's vulnerable frontiers, the Pentagon has begun to fear that the next trouble spot may be, not Indo-China, but Burma. A rich prize and weakly held, Burma, which declared its independence from the British Empire in 1947, has a common frontier with Red China which its ill-trained, ill-equipped 50,000-man army shows no capacity to defend. Last week at the Paris meeting of U.N., Burma, as well as Indo-China, was in mind when representatives of the U.S., Britain and France, one by one, got up to warn that any "Communist aggression in Southeast Asia would . . . require the most urgent and earnest consideration of the U.N."

Burma's ineffectual government, unable to control rebel Karen tribes and armed bands of local Communists, was also disturbed last week by the presence in Burma of remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's troops, led by General Li Mi. Defeated by the Communists in 1949, the Nationalist soldiers fled into Burma, last year made an unsuccessful foray into China's Yunnan Province. They now number about 10,000 men. Said Burma's U.N. Delegate U Myint Thein: "We are doing all we can to get them out of the country, but every time our troops go into action they disappear over friendly borders or into the thick jungles and mountains . . . The People's Republic of China is alive to the . . . continued presence of what might be imagined to be the nucleus of an army for World War III."

Russia's U.N. Delegate Jacob Malik was quick to see and seize an opportunity. He charged that the Chinese Nationalist army in Burma is composed of six fully equipped divisions, "with an air supply line from Chengmai in Thailand, where a U.S. staff headquarters, comprising two major generals, seven colonels and 27 majors, is in charge of training."

The State Department denounced the charge for the nonsense that it is. The U.S. has no soldiers with Li Mi's army, has twice asked Formosa to quit supplying it with arms. Chiang Kai-shek's government insists that Li Mi is independent of them, and "we have no intention of making Burma a military base of any kind." Yet last week Li Mi himself was reported in Formosa, where he had flown on Christmas Eve.

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