Letters from Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi.

A Few Introductions (1)

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.