Case of the Clasped Hands

In torpid, neutralist Burma last week, students of the University of Rangoon applied to police for permission to burn Uncle Sam in effigy in front of the U.S. embassy. Police consented, ordered protective barricades placed around the embassy building, and assigned a detail of cops to march along with the students. It was all meant to be orderly, but then a zealot kicked over a barricade. With that, the biggest anti-U.S. riot in Burmese history was on. Countless embassy windows were shattered, and the embassy walls besmeared with paint. Burmese police and troops fired into the crowd. When the smoke cleared, two demonstrators were dead, 53 injured.

Burmese indignation was only indirectly with the U.S. and mainly with the Nationalist Chinese. For eleven years, the presence of Chiang Kai-shek forces marooned in north Burma after the Communist take-over of the Chinese mainland has angered the Burmese. Last month troops were sent up to clean out these Kuomintang irregulars. Overrunning a Kuomintang headquarters, the Burmese found U.S.-made ammunition and boxes branded with the International Cooperation Administration symbol of two clasped hands. The Burmese press ran pictures of the boxes, and the public took reproachful note.

Reproach turned to anger when a U.S.-built Chinese Nationalist patrol bomber overflew Burma, apparently trying to drop supplies to the fleeing Kuomintang forces. Burmese fighters attacked it, and it crashed over the border in Thailand. But in the course of the battle, one Burmese fighter was shot down, another damaged. The Burmese government brought the body of the dead pilot back to Rangoon for ceremonial burial. Burma sent off a protest to the U.N.

Investigating, U.S. military attaches found the boxes labeled, as claimed, with the clasped-hands symbol but reported that the weapons were mostly non-U.S. At a press conference in Rangoon, Burmese Premier U Nu would not relent. "Where do the arms come from? From Formosa," he declared. "Where does Formosa get her arms? From the U.S. Only one word from America will stop Formosa from supplying arms to the Kuomintang."

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