“Sham Independence”: Decolonization and the Cold War as a Singular Struggle in Burma

In 1948, the Union of Burma became an independent state, but it came into being already embroiled in a civil war with two Communist Parties – Thakin Than Tun’s Communist Party of Burma (CPB) and Thakin Soe’s Communist Party, Burma (BCP) – and a number of ethnic separatist insurgencies. The state’s resulting reliance on the Burmese military, the Tatmadaw, ultimately resulted in the civil government being overthrown by a military junta in 1962. This junta has been in power – with only a brief democratic interlude – until the present day. It was the split of the Communist Parties from the mainstream political party, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), that had been instrumental in driving the AFPFL to be ever more reliant on the military and on Western aid. Correspondingly, the Communist Parties became ever more reliant on aid from the Communist Bloc. In this paper, I argue that it was no coincidence that the ruling AFPFL and the insurgent Communists ultimately came to fit so neatly into the global Cold War, even though Burma remained peripheral in superpower considerations. Indeed, the split of the Communists from the AFPFL had originally occurred due the refusal of the Communists to compromise over continued British influence in Burma. As the civil war escalated upon independence, the Communist struggle increasingly became about the global fight against the capitalist West, and the AFPFL, while nominally socialist-leaning, increasingly turned to the West for support. Therefore, this struggle reveals, on a local level, how the projects of decolonization and the Cold War were – with reference to the endurance of Western imperialism – united. The Cold War ignited in Burma because of the Communist Parties’ resistance to post-colonial neocolonialism, and the AFPFL’s embrace of it.