Aung San Suu Kyi by Jesper Bengtsson Page B

trained on Hainan, agents from Minami Kikan, and a few hundred Burmese and Thai who had been recruited voluntarily in Bangkok. Keiji Suzuki was appointed general and commanding officer; Aung San became the chief of staff and BIA’s highestranking Burmese.
    When plans for the Japanese support had been drawn up, Colonel Suzuki was suitably vague as to the role of the Japanese army. One interpretation was that the BIA would constitute the nucleus, get into Burma, and recruit a larger guerrilla army along the road to Rangoon. The Japanese would occupy parts of southern Burma and the Shan states in order to block the Burma Road to China, but they would leave the rest of the country to the Burmese troops. In practice that was not at all how things turned out. It soon became clear that the Japanese were using the Burmese nationalists as a kind of moral excuse for the invasion that they themselves had been planning for a long time. The BIA was marching side by side with the Japanese Fifteenth Army when the attack was initiated at the end of 1941, and the Japanese Air Force had already spent weeks bombing strategic targets inside the country. The British, who had planned poorly for the war and who did not have the resources to respond to the attack, fled north to the province of Assam in India.
    Aung San hoped that the nationalists who still remained in Burma would have built up guerrilla cells that would be activated when the BIA initiated itsattack. However, no such underground organization existed. The recruitment of new soldiers had to be carried out haphazardly along the way instead, a method that was to have disastrous consequences when undisciplined units indiscriminately turned on the Karen population in southern Burma.
    Colonel Suzuki’s own organization in Burma worked better.
    The Japanese propaganda had boiled down to representing the Japanese troops as liberators, and when the first bombers swept over the countryside in southern Burma, many Burmese did not take cover but instead went out of their houses and into the streets to wave at them.
    In the beginning, the new occupiers were also sincere in their ambition to allow the Burmese to govern on their own, and a government led by Tun Ok was installed in Rangoon. However, even at that point in time, Burmese independence was vastly limited. All the vital decisions were in practice made by the Japanese military command. Tun Ok resigned after only a few months and his government was replaced by a long line of short-lived puppet regimes. One of them was led by Ba Maw, who had once been prime minister under the British. He was known for his contempt for democratic principles; as head of the government, he had as his slogan “One blood, one voice, one command.”
    â€œThe soldiers from Nippon, whom many had welcomed as liberators, turned out to be worse oppressors than the unpopular British,” wrote Aung San Suu Kyi in
Aung San of Burma
. “Ugly incidents multiplied daily.
Kempei
(the Japanese military police) became a dreaded word, and people had to learn to live in a world where disappearances, torture, and forced labour conscription were part of everyday existence.”
    The Japanese army despised the Burmese in the same racist way they despised most Asians. Many officers considered that a people who let themselves be colonized did not deserve to be treated as human beings, and so the Burmese nationalists and dissidents soon filled the prisons that had been emptied immediately after the British had fled. Interrogations were as a rule conducted with the aid of torture. Among other methods used were hanging victims upside down from the roof and pouring boiling water over their sexual organs and into their nostrils.
    In every town the Japanese demanded free access to Burmese women. Brothels had always been part of the structure of the towns, but never onthe same industrial scale as now. Young women were forced to sell themselves for a couple of rupees,