Sorting the Tamadaw After Ne Win

Sorting the Tamadaw After Ne Win

With Ne Win’s death, some say the personality-driven succession arrangements among leaders of the armed forces will go too.

If history is any guide, the current military leaders will find it tougher to manage succession arrangements within the Tatmadaw (armed forces) in the wake of Ne Win’s death and the collapse of his personal dictatorship.

A new style of personality power was institutionalized when Ne Win, sensing the important role the military would play in determining Burma’s post-colonial fate, gained control of the Tatmadaw in 1949. Only his most trusted proteges rose among the ranks while he demoted other officers whimsically. He personally handpicked former Gen Saw Maung and the current Number One, Sr-Gen Than Shwe.

British advisors put ethnic Karen officers in charge of the armed forces after World War II, much to the indignity of the majority Burman soldiers, who felt that they were being undermined by minority representation. Instead the Burmans dubbed Ne Win their "undisputed leader", and in the 1949 Karen National Union (KNU) uprising they purged Karen soldiers and officers. While scholars like Mary P Callahan say that the purge created the institutional basis for the enduring military rule that followed the 1962 coup, U Lwin, who was then a colonel, simply put it down to Ne Win’s luck.

But Ne Win had more than luck; he had brains. When he replaced Gen Smith Dun as commander-in-chief of defense services in 1949, he had only 2,000 troops under his command. Back then, the Tatmadaw was just an institutional infant, but with Ne Win at the helm, it expanded rapidly. Activist-cum-scholar Chao-Tzang Yawnghwe noted: "By the late-1950s and early-1960s, the army under Ne Win, ably assisted by Maung Maung, Aung Gyi, and Tin Pe, had become a center within a center."

Ne Win never failed to exercise his personal power. And soon he himself became an institution within the institution. He retained enormous personal power by purging rivals, betraying friends, and keeping followers constantly fearful, on-guard, and off-balance.

The most noted of Ne Win’s fall guys was Brig-Gen Aung Gyi, who was vice-chief of staff of defense services and the junta’s second most powerful man at the time of his dismissal in 1963. "Ne Win knew the value of timing very well," Aung Gyi told The Irrawaddy.