Burma's communists regroup

by Ben Deramerah

Burma's Communist leadership is regrouping the party in exile to continue 
its decades-long resistance to the military dictatorship in Rangoon. 
Comrade Jacob of the Central Organising Committee of the Communist Party of 
Burma spoke to the Morning Star about how the party sees its 
tasks.

Like the rest of the opposition, the country's Communists do not recognise 
the military regime's change of name from Burma to Myanmar.

"The change was a diversion of the junta. It was a fake attempt to present 
itself as a champion of national identity", Comrade Jacob says.

The military regime has itself undergone all sorts of name changes. 
Currently it refers to itself as the State Peace and Development Council 
(SPDC), but was formerly known as the State Law and Order Restoration 
Council (SLORC). After the 1962 military coup of Ne Win, the regime had 
called itself the Revolutionary Council.

The anti-regime opposition is fragmented, reflecting both ideological and 
ethnic differences. The National Council of the Union of Burma (NCUB) is an 
umbrella group composed of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi's 
National League for Democracy (NLD), the Member of Parliament Union and the 
Democratic Alliance of Burma. The latter group is itself a coalition of 24 
groups.

"The CPB has proposed working together on common issues with the NCUB. Just 
having a common enemy is not enough, we should have a common programme 
among the anti-regime forces," Comrade Jacob says.

He dismisses recent dialogue between some opposition leaders and the regime 
as "fruitless". Using a Burmese saying, he compares it to "an ox cart stuck 
in the mud. It is going nowhere."

Many of the ethnically based opposition groups, such as those among the 
Shan, who speak a Thai dialect, and the Karen are mostly conservative in 
outlook and separatist in practice, undermining efforts to create an 
effective broad-based opposition that is truly national and democratic.

In 1988 a popular uprising rocked the junta, forcing it to agree to 
elections in 1990, which Aung San Suu Kyi 's NLD won by a landslide. Aung 
San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Aung San, Burma's great national hero of the 
independence struggle, who was assassinated by right-wing political rivals 
in 1947.

"Although the assassins were of Burmese nationality, the plan was worked 
out and supported by the British imperialists," Comrade Jacob points out.

While today, Aung San Su Kyi plays down her family's radical past, Aung San 
was in fact the first general secretary of the CPB at its foundation 
congress in 1939. An uncle on her mother's side was a later general 
secretary of the CPB.

Both had been an integral part of a movement of young independence 
activists in the 1930s known collectively as the Thakins, a Burmese word 
for "Master" often used by locals to address the British' colonialists. By 
appropriating the word for themselves, these young Burmese were sending 
notice that the Burmese people intended to become masters of their own 
country.

In 1940, before the main Asia Pacific theatre of the Second World War 
opened, Aung San was sent to China to contact Mao Zedong's Chinese Red Army 
for training and guidance on an armed liberation struggle.

However, the ship he and his companion were on docked in a Chinese port 
controlled by the Japanese and Aung San was arrested.

It was then that Aung San broke with the CPB, reluctantly accepting the 
Offer to establish a Burmese Independence Army, under Japanese tutelage.

The uneasy alliance between Aung San, who remained genuinely committed to 
both national liberation and anti-fascism, and the Japanese who had their 
own designs on Burma, came to an end around 1943, when Aung San switched 
the BIA to the Allied side.

By this time, the CPB had reorganised its leadership and expanded its 
positions, building up its own guerrilla force. The party had avoided Aung 
San's mistakes by resolutely opposing the simple switch of British 
oppressors for Japanese ones

The CPB's strategy was first to defeat the Japanese and build the momentum 
for an independent and democratic Burma.

The decisive defeat of Japanese imperialism would not necessarily result in 
the restoration of the pre-war colonial status quo, the CPB argued, if the 
democratic forces remained united. Victory in the anti-fascist war would 
have a strong anti-colonial impulse it believed.

The CPB emerged as a powerful player in post-war Burma. Its prestige was 
drawn both from the membership of many well-known Thakins in the party as 
well as the party's substantial contribution — the anti-Japanese guerrilla 
resistance. The party's Communist Daily was widely read. The party led both 
the national trade union and peasant federations.

However, almost immediately after the war the CPB found itself under attack 
from the Burmese right, a process encouraged by the departing British 
colonialists. Following Aung San's killing, this rift deepened. Communist 
newspapers were closed down, CPB cadres arrested and trade-union activity 
repressed.

By early 1948, violent attacks by the Burmese Socialist Party, at best a 
right-wing social-democratic party, against the Communists forced the CPB 
underground. It regrouped into rural CPB base areas, where a guerrilla army 
was formed and a decades-long armed resistance to the regime begun.

Like many other southeast Asian communist parties, the CPB had sided with 
the Chinese CP during the Sino-Soviet split in the world communist 
movement. While this gave the CPB some valuable experience to draw on in 
conducting the armed struggle and establishing liberated zones, as the 
Chinese had done in the 1930s and '40s, the CPB took over negative 
experiences too.

The party had its own version of the ultra-leftist excesses of the Cultural 
Revolution. Veteran leading communists were denounced, many expelled and in 
some cases even executed as traitors. This caused enormous damage to the 
CPB, comrade Jacob says.

"Our party had failed to become properly self-reliant even when this was 
repeatedly urged on us by our foreign comrades." Nonetheless, Comrade Jacob 
says: "It was not a case of foreign interference, the faults were our own."

The CPB's position was also hardened by the Soviet Union's rapprochement 
with the Rangoon regime through the 1960s and 1970s. The ruling Burma 
Socialist Programme Party was often presented as a revolutionary 
organisation in Soviet literature and the regime's "Burmese Road to 
Socialism" accepted as genuine.

However, Comrade Jacob insists, the Rangoon regime never created anything 
more than a "sham socialism" and points out that throughout its history the 
BSP/BSSP in all its various incarnations was always an anti-communist 
group.

Another negative factor that had a huge impact on the CPB was the local 
drugs trade. Burma is part of the opium Golden Triangle. A large part of 
Southeast Asia running through Laos, Thailand and Burma historically 
produced a large proportion of the world's opium.

The British colonialists controlled and taxed the opium trade during the 
first quarter of the 20th century, even paying some local troops in the 
drug.

During the Vietnam War, the CIA engaged in clandestine trade in the drug in 
Thailand and Laos to fund various intrigues that could not be seen to be 
officially financed by the US Government.

The difficulty for the CPB was to provide concrete alternatives that could 
meet the material needs of the impoverished inhabitants of the hill areas.

The CPB made two major efforts to eradicate the drugs trade. In the 1970s, 
wheat planting programmes were established to provide local hill farmers 
with alternative crops to opium but the local tribes were unused to wheat 
production, the hilly terrain was unsuitable and the crops vulnerable to 
attack by pests, which finally wiped out the programme in 1976.

The local farmers returned to the easier and more lucrative growth of 
opium.

At the party's 3rd congress in 1985, harsh measures against party members 
dealing in drugs were announced including execution for possession of large 
quantities. Yet the drugs trade, which was actively encouraged in areas 
controlled by the regime in Rangoon, inevitably had a corrupting effect. 
Some local commanders in units allied to the CPB saw a more promising 
future in the heroin trade than in political struggle and they conspired to 
overthrow the CPB leadership in the liberated zone.

CPB efforts to provide alternatives to local farmers had been well 
intentioned but proved unable to match the easy money of opium.

Anti-drugs policies also heightened tensions between the party and the 
peasantry belonging to various ethnic minority groups which dominated the 
trade.

These factors added to the party's crisis and in March-April 1989, these 
anti-CPB groups rebelled and forced the CPB out.

Comrade Jacob is blunt about the cause of the 1989 setbacks, which resulted 
in the loss of its last liberated territories and forced the central party 
leadership to flee into exile. This was our own fault. We had become 
isolated from the mass of people. We mechanically copied the paths taken by 
others."

While the current situation is unfavourable, the CPB believes that a mass 
popular rising is the only way of dislodging the regime. The party believes 
that armed struggle will be a necessary part of that struggle but does not 
organise its own armed units at present.

"The CPB will try to overthrow the regime by mass uprisings. However, the 
oppressed people, especially from the backward nations, have little choice 
in the forms of struggle.

Nobody wants to demonstrate in the streets, shouting slogans and facing 
police oppression if they do not need to. In the same way, nobody would go 
into the jungle and take up arms at the risk of their own lives, if they 
can find other means.

Unfortunately, it has always been the ruling classes that compelled 
oppressed people to resort to armed struggle.

Therefore, the CPB always maintains that it is just to resort to arms when 
one is compelled and there is no other choice.

"The goal", argues Comrade Jacob, " is to achieve a peaceful and democratic 
Burma. This means constructing a strong and effective anti-dictatorship 
alliance. The CPB is determined to do everything it can to ensure that task 
is fulfilled."

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First published in the Morning Star, Britain's daily socialist 
paper