Burmese dictator sets out to woo Peking

Press, 24 May 1977, Page 18

Burmese dictator sets out to woo Peking

By

BRIAN EADS in Rangoon

After an eventful 18 months during which his secret police thwarted a feeble assassination plot, and his Burmese Socialist Programme Party thwarted moves to halt the country's backward march towards economic ruin, President Ne Win of Burma visited Peking recently in an attempt to become the first foreign leader to benefit from the demise of the "Gang of Four.” If he succeeds, it couid signal a remarkable change in the fortunes of a nation of 31 million people which straddles the strategic crossroads between communist and non-communist Asia, and whose mineral and agricultural resources make it potentially the richest country in the region. The idea is a simple one: to convince Chairman Hua Kuo-feng that Burma’s ideological balance of MarxistBuddhism and military dictatorship with a human face is not the sort of system the Chinese ought to be subverting. The campaign began in earnest two months ago when 50,000 people lined the route from Mingaldon Airport to Rangoon’s State guesthouse and gave a boisterous welcome to Madam

Teng Ying-chao — vicechairman of the standing committee of the Chinese National People’s Congress — and widow of Chou Enlai. Ne Win is also pinning some hopes on the wiles of another woman — June Rose, or Yadana Nat Mai, the 46-year-old Eurasian beauty who became his sixth wife on Christmas Eve last year. There is some scepticism about whether the Chinese will be any more taken by her engaging vivacity and low golf handicap than they are by the notion that the question of relations between fraternal communist parties should be considered in the same context as relations between national governments. The Burmese Communist Party has been around for a long time, and before General Ne Win seized power in 196. it was several times offered a role in government. But its take-off as a guerrilla insurgent force dates from the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the late 1960 s and the unassailable sanctuary it enjoys in China’s southern province of Yunnan. How Peking views the B.C.P’s growing tole in the opium-heroin traffic out of

Asia's “Golden Triangle” into Thailand is not on record, but it continues to supply arms and equipment, political and military cadres, and allows the B.C.P. to regulate commercial exchange across the ChinaBurma border. At 66 Ne Win is the dean of Asian military dictators. Frequent visits to a string of expensive European doctors keep him healthy. Oldstyle political wheelerdealing enables him to keep Burma’s economy just about afloat while holding on to the quasi-mystical and seemingly unworkable tenets of the party philosophy. Personal loyalty from the generals .-.nd gifts for the troops keep the army firmly at his fingertips, and an interest in the State-owned Gem Emporium in Switzerland allows him the annual gesture of refusing to accept his Presidential salary. The final insurance has been the removal of all potential successors:

By all accounts the "old man,” as he is universally known, still has nightmares. The most vivid and horrifying is that he might live to see the disintegration of Burma’s fragile unity. Last month, 300 of B.C.P’s 8000 strong forces launched an attack on a Government position just 90 miles northeast of Mandalay. For more than a year they have controlled one third of Shan state to the east of the Salween River.

No one expects the B.C.P. to come marching into Rangoon in the foreseeable future. But every unit committed against them is one less to deploy against the 13 minority insurgent groups fighting for degrees of independence and autonomy. Assurances from the Chinese are the most attractive yet perhaps the least likely of the alternatives. Liberalising the economy, opening the country to Western investors, legitimising the black market or making concessions to the aspirations of the minorities are others. The reason President Ne Win still has the support of the party, the army, and the Burman’elite is that he will not countenance any of these solutions. 0.F.N.5., Copyright.