Daw Suu's Letter From Burma No. 18

[carol@xxxxxxx]

Monday, March 25, 1996

EX-ARMY OFFICERS SERVE THE DEMOCRATIC CAUSE

"A Few Introductions" (1)

Letter from Burma (No. 18) by Aung San Suu Kyi

	In writing about the activities of the National League for Democracy it
will be necessary to mention the names of some of our key personnel from
time to time, so I would like to introduce a quartet of retired army
officers who are leading members of the executive committee of the party.
	The chairman of the NLD is U Aung Shwe.  He joined the Burma Independence
Army in 1942, one of the educated young men (he had graduated from Rangoon
University two years previously) who felt they had a duty to serve the
country in any way they could during the war years.  After Burma became an
independent nation in 1948, he continued to serve in the armed forces and by
the end of the 1950s, he had become a brigadier, a rank achieved by few in
those days.  In 1962, while serving as the Commander of the Southern
Command, he was asked to retire from the army and sent as Burmese ambassador
to Australia and New Zealand.  No official explanation of any kind was given
for the transfer at the time.  However as part of the campaign to try to
discredit the leaders of the NLD in the eyes of the people, it has been
written in government publications of recent years that U Aung Shwe had been
allowed to retire from the army because he had displayed partisanship during
the elections of 1960.  It must therefore be assumed that he was a casualty
of an attempt by the armed forces to defend themselves from accusations that
they had tried to engineer the victory of the socialists in the said elections.
	Subsequent to his posting in Australia, U Aung Shwe served in Egypt and
then in Paris until his retirement from government service in 1975.  He
settled in Rangoon, where in 1988 public demonstrations erupted that
eventually spread across the country.  The people of Burma were tired of the
authoritarian rule of the Burma Socialist Programmed Party (SPP..) that had
turned their country, once seen as the fastest-developing nation in
Southeast Asia, into one of the poorest in the world.
	The predictable reaction to the collapse of the one-party system was the
mushrooming of parties at a rate which would be familiar to those who knew
Japan in the immediate postwar period.  Among the parties that sprang up
were the NLD, of which U Aung Shwe was an executive committee member, and
its close official ally, the Patriotic Old Comrades League formed by retired
members of the armed forces, of which he was the chairman.  Although there
were over 200 political parties, including the SPP. under its new name of
National Union Party, it soon became evident that it was the NLD which had
the support of the vast majority of the people of Burma.  Even as the
popularity and the organizational capacity of the party rose, persecution of
its members and restrictions on its activities increased.  In June 1989 U
Win Tin, one of the two secretaries of the NLD, was imprisoned and in July U
Tin U, the chairman, and I, the general secretary, were placed under house
arrest.  In spite of such setbacks, the NLD was victorious in an
overwhelming 82 percent of the constituencies during the elections of May
1990.  This led not to a transfer to democratic government as the people had
expected, but to a series of intensive measures aimed at debilitating the
party.  In September U Kyi Maung, who was in effect the acting chairman of
the NLD, was arrested, leaving U Aung Shwe with the unenviable task of
piloting the party through a period of burgeoning difficulties.
	The only original member of the executive committee, who was left after
1990 to help U Aung Shwe in his struggle to keep the NLD intact through the
years that threatened its viability as a political party, was U Lwin, the
treasurer.  U Lwin had joined the Burmese Independence Army as an
18-year-old boy at the outbreak of the war.  In August 1943 he was among a
batch of Burmese cadets chosen to go to Japan for training at the Rikugun
Shikan Gakko (army academy).  By the time the young Burmese officers had
completed their training in April 1945, the anti-fascist resistance movement
had started and U Lwin and his fellow graduates of the military academy
remained in Hakone until October 1945, making charcoal which they sold to
buy food.
	U Lwin continued with his career in the army after independence and was
sent on training courses to England and West Germany.  In 1959 he was sent
to Washington as military attache.  On his return from the United States he
spent some years as deputy commander of Central Command, then commander of
South Eastern Command before he was asked to come back to Rangoon to become
a deputy minister.  As the military government that assumed power in 1962
took on a civilian garb under the Burmese Socialist Programme Party, U Lwin
served successively as minister of finance, deputy prime minister and a
member of the state council.  It was as a member of the state council that
he resigned in 1980.
	U Lwin joined the NLD in 1988 and was appointed treasurer because of his
experience in finances and his unquestioned integrity.  In 1992, when the
NLD was forced to reorganize its executive committee, U Lwin took on the
post of secretary, while U Aung Shwe became chairman.

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This article is one of a yearlong series of letters, the Japanese
translation of which appears in the Mainichi Shimbun the same day, or the
previous day in some areas.