The Rise and Fall of U Nu

T O DISCUSS THE RISE AND FALL of U Nu, a man to whom history afforded a unique opportunity to lead his country to independence, democracy, peace, modernity and welfare, a man who in fact brought his country closer to achievement of these objectives than anyone had the right to expect of him, only to find that in the end he was not quite great enough, or perhaps too good-this, for a friend of democratic Burma, is a melancholy assignment. Since March i962, U Nu, the duly elected Prime Minister of Burma, has been confined without hearing or trial in a military detention camp, completely isolated from contact with the outside world. He is the prisoner of an illegal military government which seized power by force, abrogated the Constitution, dissolved the Parliament, liquidated the courts and has since ruled by fiat and terror in such a way as to convert the entire country increasingly into a military detention camp. During all this time, so far as I know, no single responsible voice in the entire Western world has been raised on U Nu's behalf, or on behalf of the other leaders of democratic Burma who have similarly been imprisoned, or on behalf of the Burmese democracy itself. This, when one thinks on it, is both melancholy and start, ling. It leads one to ask whether this man's fall was so deeply rooted in his character that, like the spectator who views a classic tragedy in the theater, we accept it as inevitable, and are thus purged without the inner necessity for protest? It is something of this sense of the tragic which impels me to consider the rise and fall of U Nu not primarily in historical terms-although some brief historical background is obviously necessary-but rather in terms of the man himself, his qualities, his hopes and drives, his strengths, his weaknesses, his inconsistencies. I shall suggest some of the ways in which, it seems to me, these qualities acted upon, and were in turn acted upon by, the men and milieu around him, how they contributed to his rise and ultimately to his personal tragedy. The facts concerning U Nu's political rise need only brief recapitulation. He first came to national political prominence during the famed University Strike of i936. The then President of the Student Union, he had just been expelled from the University of Rangoon because of provocative speeches he had made in the nationalist cause. The explusion of Aung San, then editor of the student newspaper, shortly followed that of U Nu. The second expulsion sparked the strike, which quickly enlisted nationwide enthusiasm

Political science · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Cambodian History and Society · History