Exit & Entrance

"I am sick and weary of bloodshed and violence," said U Nu, the gentle but by no means simple Premier of Burma for the past eleven years, as he too last week finally resigned office in favor of a general with emergency powers. Calling on Parliament to give full support to General Ne Win, U Nu warned that failure "would probably mean the death of democracy and a return to the days when naked force represented the only means of winning political power." Then U Nu handed over to newspaper editors two trunks containing his personal effects, and poured an oblation of fresh water in the Buddhist ritual that accompanies an act of charity. He was departing public life, U Nu observed, with only three shirts to his back --and several longyis (Burmese sarongs) to wrap around him.

General Ne Win, 48, the new boss of Burma, is a stocky, jaunty soldier with some Chinese blood, who was a post-office clerk in the 1930s when nationalist ferment against the British was stirring Burma. Joining the revolutionary Thakin group, Ne Win was one of the famed "30 comrades" who were smuggled to Japan in 1941 for military training. When the Japanese occupied Burma, Ne Win came with them, but, like the other Thakins, soon discovered that the Japanese occupiers were more cruel than the British, and began fighting them. He has been fighting ever since: against the rebellious Karen tribesmen, against 9,000 Chinese Nationalists along the China border, against the insurgent Communists in the jungles, swamps and paddies where some 4,000 of his soldiers have died.

After picking a Cabinet of nonpolitical civil servants, Ne Win put his troops to work, shoveling garbage from Rangoon's filthy streets, cleaning the boulevards, repairing water pipes, filling in potholed roads. Old residents were amazed that suddenly the streets were no longer filled with prowling packs of wild dogs and the usual flocks of scavenger birds. To help bring down the soaring cost of living, General Ne Win ordered Burma's navy to divert its patrol boats from their coastal duties and send them out as a fishing fleet.

Summoning the top officers of the armed forces, General Ne Win defined his main tasks as 1) providing free and fair elections within six months, and 2) bringing peace to war-torn Burma. He ordered his officers to take "stern measures" against the Red insurgents in the countryside and their fifth columns in the towns and cities. He charged his officers to be "umpires" between the competing political parties girding for the spring elections, and cautioned them "to take very good care that no one will be able to accuse you of showing favor to this one or suppressing that one." His gloomy reading of his own chances to put things right: "Six months is a short time."

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