Ne win

Ne Win with David Ben-Gurion (1959)

General Ne Win ( နေဝင် ; * May 24, 1911 in Paungdale ( Bago Division ), British India ; † December 5, 2002 in Rangoon ) was a Burmese officer and politician . He contributed to the country's independence and ruled as Prime Minister from 1958 to 1960 , before he deposed his competitor U Nu in a coup d'état in 1962 as Commander in Chief of the armed forces and permanently abolished the democratic system. From 1962 to 1974, as chairman of the Union's Revolutionary Council, he was head of state and prime minister; after the introduction of a new constitution, he became president from 1974 to 1981.

Between 1962 and 1988 Ne Win was considered the “strong man” of the country, was chairman of the Burma Socialist Program Party , which he founded, and pursued the “Burmese path to socialism ” as his program. Under his rule, Burma embarked on a strictly isolationist course. In the course of the violent 8888 uprising , he resigned as party chairman in July 1988, but at the same time announced bloody countermeasures by the military.

After Maung Maung, a civilian from the ranks of the BSPP, had entered the presidency in August 1988 , the military under Saw Maung seized power again in a coup staged by Ne Win in September 1988 . In the process, however, the BSPP and the socialist system built up by Ne Win were dissolved, and the State Council for the Restoration of Law and Order and the Party of National Unity , which ruled until 2011 without a constitution, were replaced. In 1998 at the latest, Ne Win's influence on the military government waned, and in 2002 he finally died under house arrest, unnoticed by the public.

The colonial era

Ne Win was born as Shu Maung (eyeball) into an educated, middle-class Chinese family in Paungdale, Pyay (Prome) District, some 320 km north of Rangoon. In 1929 he began studying medicine at the University of Rangoon with the aim of becoming a doctor. However, he failed the exams, then left the university in 1931 and then worked as a postal worker. In the 1930s he joined the Dobama Asiayone (We Burmans Association) movement through his uncle Thakin Nyi, which included Aung San , Burma's founder of independence from Great Britain, and U Nu , Burma's first prime minister after independence , belonged. In 1941 he was one of the Thirty Comrades who were sent to Japan for military training. During his training on the Chinese island of Hainan , which was occupied by Japan , he adopted the code name Bo (Commander) Ne Win (Shining as the Sun) . He became a senior member of the Burma Independence Army , which invaded Burma with the Japanese in early 1942 while the British forces fell back.

The actions of the Japanese in Burma resulted in nationalists like Burmese falling more and more from the invading power, and as World War II neared the end, they rose up against the Japanese on March 27, 1945 after the re-invasion of the British.

Ne Win quickly established contacts with the British and in the Ceylonese city ​​of Kandy reached an agreement with Louis Mountbatten , the commander of the Allies in Southeast Asia, which brought about the merger of the Burma Independence Army with the army of the minority Burmese recruited by the British . After communist separatist groups began operating underground against the government in 1946 and again in 1948, Ne Win coordinated the countermeasures from the city of Pyinmana in the south of the Mandalay Division.

After gaining independence from Great Britain on January 4, 1948, uprisings by the ethnic minorities and within the army rocked the country. After General Aung San was assassinated in 1947, Ne Win became Chief of Staff of the armed forces in early 1949 and began restructuring them. However, the country remained divided and Prime Minister U Nu's government remained ineffective.

The dictatorship

After U Nu's Anti Fascist People's Freedom League broke up and a vote of no confidence in his government narrowly failed, he entrusted Ne Win with provisional governance on October 27, 1958. Ne Win kept order, and observers noted the country was doing well during its "caring government" period. After the elections in February 1960, Ne Win returned power to U Nu on April 4 of that year.

Less than two years later, on March 2, 1962, Ne Win undertook a military coup and sent U Nu to prison for five years. To counter the impending collapse of the Union due to the ongoing tensions between the ethnic minorities and the central government, he established a system of extreme nationalism , Marxism and Buddhism and almost completely isolated the country from the rest of the world. For almost ten years, foreigners could stay in the country for a maximum of 24 hours up to three days - in the early 1970s, visas were extended to one week. The isolation from abroad went so far that Burma left the movement of the non-aligned states in 1978 .

He called the radical measures in the political and economic field, which the Revolutionary Council presided over by Ne Win, the "Burmese Road to Socialism". The economy was nationalized, foreigners were expelled from the country, political activists were imprisoned, and insurrections by ethnic minorities were fought with massive military force. Since independence, most of the problems with the Karen people have arisen in the southeast of the country. Even before Burma became independent, the British had made promises to them with regard to a state of their own, or at least extensive autonomy.

Protest against Ne Win's government was met effectively and with great severity. Student uprisings on July 7, 1962 resulted in the shooting of dozens of students and the demolition of the building of the historic student union of Rangoon University the following day. The student union had been the center of resistance against colonial power before independence, and many student leaders, including Aung San and U Nu, had used the union as a forum for discussion, protest and political activity.

The socialist republic

After a new constitution was drawn up, the Revolutionary Council dissolved. On January 4, 1974, the Socialist Federal Republic of Burma was proclaimed. Ne Win became president.

Ne Win's policies led many educated members of the working class to leave the country. The effects of this are still troubling Burma today. The policy of foreclosure from abroad ruined the economy. The needs of the population were met by the black market and rampant smuggling, while the central government slowly slipped into bankruptcy.

On September 5, 1987, Ne Win issued new banknotes of 45 and 90 Kyat and devalued the current values ​​of 25, 35 and 75 Kyat without compensation in order to curb the black market. 60 to 80 percent of the population's wealth had suddenly become worthless. This led to riots that were finally bloodily suppressed in 1988.

On July 23, 1988, at the height of the unrest against one-party rule , Ne Win resigned the presidency of the Burma Socialist Program Party , which had been the only legal party since March 23, 1964. He had already given up the office of president on November 9, 1981 to U San Yu . Once dubbed the "rice bowl of Southeast Asia", Burma was at that time one of the poorest countries in the world. As early as 1987 the country was the United Nations to the list of least developed countries (English least developed countries have been classified).

The uprising against the government began in March 1988 and culminated in its violent crackdown under Ne Win's successor, Sein Lwin, on August 8, 1988. When civilian Dr. Maung Maung , who was also a party member and who had worked on the drafting of the constitution, was elected president by parliament, and hopes for a democratization of the country briefly sprang up.

The puller

However, on September 18, 1988, a military junta under General Saw Maung again seized power and brutally ended the popular uprising. It is believed that Ne Win pulled the strings in this coup from "retirement".

For more than 10 years Ne Win, although officially retired from politics, remained the “gray eminence in the background”, in which the members of the State Law and Order Restoration Council , as the junta called themselves To get advice. As of 1998, the Junta ruled, now called the State Peace and Development Council (State Peace and Development Council) , began Ne Win's influence to wane. In the spring of 2002, the junta accused Aye Zaw Win, the husband of Ne Win's daughter Sandar Win and her three sons, of plotting to overthrow the military government and placed Ne Win and Sandar Win under house arrest on March 7th that year . While Ne Win died in house arrest, his daughter was released on December 12, 2008 after the custody period expired. The alleged subversives were sentenced to death in September 2002. However, the death penalty has not yet been carried out.

With the final cold position of Ne Win, the fall of the future Prime Minister Khin Nyunt , who - since 1988 member of the junta - is considered to be his pupil , finally began .

Private

Ne Win was officially married five times and had at least five children from those marriages. The death of his favorite wife Khin May Than alias Kitty Ba Than in 1972 was a severe blow. Sandar Win comes from this marriage.

As is common today in the highest echelons of military government, Ne Win was interested in fortune telling. He made many of his decisions according to astrological prophecies. He had a keen interest in numerology . His lucky number is said to have been 9, which is why the unusual banknote values ​​of 45 and 90 kyat arose in 1987, both divisible by 9.

Ne Win died at the age of 91 on December 5, 2002 in his home on Inya Lake in Rangoon. His death received no worldwide attention, he was not given a state funeral, and not even a representative of the military junta attended the funeral service. Only about 30 people attended the ceremony, which took place on the day of his death, including his daughter Sandar Win, whose house arrest was put on hold. They later scattered Ne Win's ashes into the Rangoon River.

Web links

• René Hingst: Challenges of Political Change in Burma / Myanmar . Published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation .
  • Overview / Abstract (November 2008)
  • Full text of the study (2007, 97 pp., Pdf; 939 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Taiwan News: Daughter of Myanmar ex-dictator released
2. ↑ AFP: Former Myanmar dictator's daughter released from house arrest ( Memento from January 24, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )