Greymouth Evening Star. MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1949. The Burma Crisis

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 March 1949, Page 4

Greymouth Evening Star. MONDAY, MARCH 14, 1949. The Burma Crisis

’J’HE informal New Delhi conference of British, Australian, and Indian representatives to discuss the situation in Burma, a country that has contracted out of the British Commonwealth, was a development of considerable significance in South-east Asian affairs. The scale of the insurrectionary movements in Burma, the extent of Communist participation, and the threat to the Burmese rice export trade are of most immediate concern to India. This Dominion not only has a Communist problem of its own, the gravity of which has been shown by the wholesale arrests in the past few weeks and by the warning given by the Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, against the aims of the revolutionaries. India is also heavily dependent on imports of rice from Burma to withstand the threat of famine which is almost chronic among her teeming population. India, and to a lesser extent, Pakistan, which unfortunately was not represented at the New Delhi talks, have thus a very good economic as well as political reason 'for desiring an early restoration of stable authority at Rangoon. The situation, however, has an. urgent interest for countries other than Burma’s western neighbours. Malaya, for whose welfare the British Government has the basic responsibility, might suffer disastrously from the import of economic and political chaos in Burma. Nor is it difficult to envisage a chain of causation that would carry the ill effects through the whole Malayan archipelago to the very shores of Australia. In that case also New Zealand would be directly involved. It was wholly justifiable in these circumstances that both Britain and Australia .should have participated in the New Delhi talks. This was not a conference designed, as was the recent “Asiatic” meeting on Indonesia, in which Australia unwisely joined, to bring pressure on a European country 1o abandon its legitimate and long-established interests in the East Indies. It was, on the contrary, a discussion to explore means of assisting an existing Government to combat anarchy or v,-or.se —a discussion that completely lacked the element of unauthorised interference so conspicuous in the earlier conference. The only complaint can be the paucity of information on the outcome. Considered in an even wider context than the political future of South-east A s i a —the Burmese Government has stated that any move to rejoin the British Commonwealth is unlikely—the latest New Delhi talks may be regarded as one more step towards the closer association of democratic nations to defend themselves against Communism. The pattern of such a step is already set in Western I’nion and the impending Atlantic Pad. Under the shadow of revolutionary Communism in Asia, it may yet have to be reproduced ■among the free peoples on the margins of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.