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Amongst Insurgents—Walking Through Burma by Shelby Tucker : |
General Wingate and senior officers who had fought with him said that when the war was over they would work with the Karen to help them gain their independence and a country of their own.
We wanted an independent country.
We asked for it.
We sent our leaders to Britain and petitioned for our independence, but they refused to give it to us.
Instead they granted independence to the Burmese.
If the British had divided the country it would have ended there.
They betrayed us.
The late Gen. Bo Mya, then Chairman of the KNU, who served in the British-led Karen Guerrillas during the Second World War
Those paratroopers who came back in said that according to The Atlantic Charter if the Karen asked for their independence, they would be given it.
They'd fought with the British against the Japanese fascists, risked their lives.
Gen. Tamlabaw, former C-in-C of the KNLA, who had also served during the Burma Campaign with the Karen Guerrillas.
We were ordered to tell the Karen chiefs that if they would fight for us and get rid of the Japanese we guaranteed their independence.
They just told me a bloody big lie.
They wanted the Karens to come in and they promised them everything, because they knew that what the Karens wanted above everything was to be free of the Burmese.
Capt. Alex Campbell, M.C., Croix de Guerre, who served as an S.O.E. officer with the French Resistance and with the Karen Guerrillas. With Col. Tulloch and others he attempted to assist the Karen in their uprising, but the efforts failed when the British Government, informed by M.I.5, denounced him to the Burmese authorities.
Early in 1945, when I was OC Tac headquarters Force 136 at 14th Army headquarters (then in Meiktila), Force 136 had some 15,000 Karens fighting for them in the Karen Hills as guerrillas under British officers.
At this time, the Japanese were making a big effort to stamp out these guerrillas and were destroying crops and villages and slaughtering the women, children and old men wherever they could.
The Karens said that they were prepared to put up with all their sacrifice and would continue to fight for the British as loyally as ever; but what was going to happen to them after the war was over ?...
I was in no position to answer the Karens, so I referred the question to the headquarters of Force 136 in Calcutta, who referred it, in their turn, to the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia (Admiral Lord Mountbatten).
The reply was as clear as daylight—that under no circumstances would the Karens be handed over to the Burmese after the war.
I passed that on to the Karens, who continued to fight with us as courageously as ever until the war ended.
And then the British handed them over to the Burmese.
Col. Ronald Kaulback of S.O.E.
What we really see in Mountbatten's deal with Aung San is the British changing sides and cutting their links with their most loyal and formidable wartime allies, the Karen, and they are now backing the central Burmese State in search of a centralised constitution under Aung San.
This is a really significant shift in terms of British policy.
And so the Karen have become an embarrassment.
What the British want is a constitutional settlement which will give them a strong centralised state quickly, and taking account of the Karen would simply have slowed this down.
Senior officials in the Foreign Office know, and write, that Aung San will deal with the Karen using Japanese methods.
But this is not a problem for the British.
Dr Richard Aldrich, historian, Nottingham University
KNU: Karen National Union. Political body seeking to defend Karen culture and interests. For long sought independence from Burma, but now calls for a federal democratic government of Burma offering adequate safeguards for the different ethnic nations. One of the few pro-democracy movements still actively resisting in the field, through its military arm, the KNLA
The terrorist Burmese military regime has repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to make the label "terrorist" stick to the KNU, as to other pro-democracy organisations. The regime has not hesitated—why would it?—to kill innocent people including Thai school-children (the evidence points that way) to support its bogus claims.
KNLA: Karen National Liberation Army. Since the loss in 1995 of both Manerplaw—its headquarters and centre of the post-1988 Burman democratic resistance—and of Kawmoora, it has had to rely upon purely guerrilla tactics, without attempting to hold fixed positions.
Excepting the excerpt from a letter written by Ronald Kaulback to Shelby Tucker (in Amongst Insurgents—Walking Through Burma), the above quotations come from interviews recorded in the 1997 BBC documentary Forgotten Allies, which formed part of the Timewatch series.