Aung San

Aung San (1914 or 1916–1947) Burmese collaborator with the Japanese Aung San was the leader of the Dobama Asi-ayone ("We Burmans") Society, popularly known as the Thakin Society, a pre–World War II Burmese nationalist group made up of communist-leaning students mostly from Rangoon University. Thakin is the Burmese word for "master," commonly used 134 Auchinleck, Claude John Ayre by colonial Burmans in addressing Europeans; applying it to a nationalist society was a proclamation of the members' equality with the European "masters." As leader of the Thakin Society, Aung Sang was anti-British, focused exclusively on securing Burmese independence from Great Britain. He saw collaboration with the Japanese in World War II as a means of breaking free from colonial domination. However, late in the war, Aung San broke with the Japanese and aligned himself and his followers with the Allies. Aung San was born into a family that had long been involved in the Burmese resistance against British rule. At Rangoon University, Aung San was secretary of the students' union and, with U Nu, led a mass students' strike in February 1936. Following Burma's separation from India in 1937 and his own graduation in 1938, Aung San joined the Thakin Society, becoming its secretary general— leader—in 1939. The following year, having temporarily fled Burma, he was in China, seeking international support for the independence movement. There he was approached by Japanese agents, through whom he concluded an alliance whereby the Japanese government assisted him in forming a Burmese military force, dubbed the Burma Independence Army, which fought alongside the Japanese in their 1942 invasion of Burma. From August 1942 to August 1943, Aung San led the Burma Independence Army with the rank of Japanese major general. Under him, the force steadily expanded and assumed administration of each occupied area. In 1943, the Japanese set up a puppet government under Ba Maw, in which Aung San was appointed minister of defense. However, Aung San became increasingly wary of the Japanese and began to doubt their promises of ultimate Burmese independence. More urgently, it became apparent to Aung San that the Japanese were destined to lose the war, and he saw that as they became increasingly desperate, Japanese officers treated Burmese forces with harsh contempt. In August 1944, therefore, he secretly formed the Anti-Fascist Organization (which later became the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League), an organizing base for guerilla resistance against the Japanese occupiers. In March 1945, Aung San made the break with Japan open by renaming his military forces the Burma National Army and formally declaring for the Allied cause. Following the surrender of Japan in August 1945, British administrators sought to co-opt the Burma National Army by absorbing it into the regular army, but Aung San, a canny political leader, held back the most important leaders of the force and, with them, created the People's Volunteer Organization. To all appearances a veterans' association committed to social service, this group was actually a closely held political army, which was intended to displace the Burma National Army and to lead a renewed struggle for independence. In the meantime, Aung San became deputy chairman of Burma's Executive Council in 1946, effectively the Burmese prime minister, although still subject to the veto of a British governor. But this was the era of Clement Attlee and the Labour Party, not Winston Churchill and the Conservative- dominated coalition. Negotiations with Attlee produced an agreement on January 27, 1947, granting Burma independence within a year. Aung San's party swept the elections for a constitutional assembly in April 1947, but the hardline Burmese communists had denounced him as a dupe and tool of British imperialism. Nevertheless, he assumed the office of prime minister, only to be assassinated in the Executive Council chamber by agents of his political rival, U Saw, on July 19, 1947. Six colleagues, including his brother, were also killed. U Saw was subsequently tried and executed.