January 1948 - January 1950

On 4 January 1948, the Union of Burma became an independent nation. Gaining independence from the United Kingdom was the crowning achievement of the ruling Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League--the culmination of a struggle that had cost countless Burmese lives, destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, and ended the life of the country’s founding father, Bo Aung San. Far from being the end of Burma’s struggles, though, independence was just the beginning of them.

The Rohingya Question

The Aborted Referendum

One of the final stumbling blocks presented by the United Kingdom in the leadup to Burmese independence was the issue of Burma’s Muslim population--a mix of indigenous Muslims and immigrants from British India residing throughout Burma’s Rakhine State, but most heavily concentrated along Rakhine’s border with East Pakistan. On account of their geographic proximity to Pakistan and their ethno-religious ties to the ethnic groups just across the border, many of the Rohingya of Burma desired to be broken off of Burma during decolonization and instead attached to Pakistan. Aung San, for his part, had done an effective job in keeping these separatist opinions muted. Several Burmese Muslims counted themselves among his close compatriots and cabinet members, and numerous Burmese Muslim delegates participated in the constitutional convention of 1947. Despite the protests of a segment of the Burmese Muslim population, it seemed a settled matter that their community would be included in the independent Burmese state.

British policy shifted abruptly towards the end of their tenure in Burma. Around mid-year, they announced that their final act in Burma, taking place in December of 1947 (under a month before the country gained independence) would be to hold a referendum in Arakan State with the goal of determining which localities would remain with Burma, and which would be awarded to Pakistan. The decision was met with outrage by the Burmese political elite, who had up until now been under the impression that all of Burma would be gaining independence together, as had been agreed in all negotiations up until that point. To have Burma’s territorial sovereignty broken apart as some eleventh hour imperialist play was unconscionable to the Burmese.

In announcing this change in policy, the British either overestimated their ability to control the situation in Arakan or underestimated the opposition it would meet among Burma’s political leadership. In either case, holding the referendum as scheduled quickly became untenable. In November of 1947, Burmese security forces conveniently turned a blind eye as ethnic Arakanese, some associated with the AFPFL, moved in to fill the void.. The violence was immediate, with numerous Rohingya villages throughout the state burned to the ground, and their inhabitants displaced or murdered.

Using the violence in Arakan as a pretext, Burmese security forces conveniently re-entered the province in early December and announced that the scheduled referendum was canceled. Diplomatic protests rang out from London, but with the political shakeup in London and the British presence in Burma rapidly drawing to a close, there was not much more that they could do. When Britain granted Burma its independence in January of 1948, it was with the whole of Arakan, Muslim-majority districts and all.

The Mujahideen

Just as the Burmese political leadership had not been pleased to see their country split up by the British, the Muslims of Arakan were outraged to have their desire to join Pakistan acknowledged and then tossed aside. Burma’s harsh crackdown on Muslim communities pushed the bulk of Arakan’s Muslims into opposition against the government in Rangoon. For many Muslims, fighting against the Burmese government wasn’t just about seeking to join Pakistan--it was about protecting their families and their homes.

Drawing on a wealth of guerilla experience--many Muslims had served in the British-trained V Force during the Second World War--many Rohingya took up arms against the government. The insurgency started small--a few hundred Mujahideen launching hit-and-run attacks against the Tatmadaw and Union Police--but grew quickly into the low thousands. Despite these numbers, the Mujahideen are hindered by the lack of organization, consisting of numerous loosely-organized groups more loyal to their local leaders and communities than to any broader political project. Still, they are large enough to pose a persistent thorn in the side of Burmese security forces and to serve as a constant reminder to Burma’s political elite that their borders are not quite as settled as they might hope.

Political Maneuvering - 1948/1949

The Leftists and the Rightists

Burma’s independence struggle had been a broad-tent issue. Attracting folks from all walks of life, the fight for independence was enough of a unifying factor that disagreements were easy enough to paper over. Now that the country was actually independent, that unifying factor disappeared, and the political fractures between the different parts of the Burmese government began to show. The factions within Burmese politics can be broadly divided into two camps: the “Leftists” and the “Rightists.”

The Rightists, broadly speaking, are most common in the Tatmadaw’s officer corps, with a much smaller footprint in broader Burmese politics. This faction draws the bulk of its strength from colonial-era British Indian Army officers from Burma and from war-time graduates of the Army in Burma Reserve of Officers (ABRO), though a minority of its members come from the right-wing of the AFPFL. Owing to the British policy of divide-and-rule, the British Indian Army and ABRO drew most of their recruits from the non-Bamar minorities of Burma--especially the Chin, the Kachin, and the Karen--which meant that the Rightists were disproportionately made up of members of these minority groups. While the Bamar had inserted themselves into the army’s civilian leadership (the Minister of Defense, Kyaw Zaw, was Bamar), the actual top army brass was decidedly non-Bamar--the Chief of Staff (Smith Dun), Chief of Army Staff (Saw Kyar Doe), and Chief of Air Staff (Saw Shi Sho) were all Karen, as well as the officers in charge of requisitions and purchasing foreign equipment.

The Leftists, on the other hand, dominate Burma’s civilian government. Drawn almost exclusively from Burma’s Bamar majority, most of the AFPFL’s Leftists got their start in student organizing at the University of Rangoon, in trade union organizing in Rangoon in Mandalay, or through the nationalist organization Dobama Asiayone. Where the Rightists were broadly made of old colonial forces, the Leftists had, by and large, actively fought against the British, either through strike actions in Rangoon, as leaders of the Japanese-aligned State of Burma, or as guerrillas in the Japanese-trained Burma Independence Army. Deliberate British policies of favoring Rightists in the construction of the Tatmadaw mean that only about a quarter of Tatmadaw fighters can be considered loyal to the AFPFL.

There was no love lost between the Leftists and the Rightists. To the Leftists, the Rightists were British collaborators who, if given control of the country, would make the country into a colony in all but name. To the Rightists, the Leftists are a mixture of Bamar chauvinists seeking absolute control of the country’s politics, and a first step on the path to communist rule in Burma. Some of this distrust between the two factions has a legitimate basis--several Rightist figures have made no secret of their disdain for the left-wing politics of the AFPFL, and the Leftists have likewise made little effort to hide their desire to wrest control of the Tatmadaw from all right-wing elements--but much of it is rumors and paranoia spinning out of control in the tense political environment of post-war Burma. 1948 was spent with both factions jockeying for influence in the independent government, each growing increasingly frustrated with the other along the way.

Things Fall Apart

Anarchy in Northern Burma

One of the AFPFL’s great anxieties in the three years between the end of the Second World War and independence of Burma was that the United Kingdom might renege on its commitments and decide to retain Burma as a colony. As a result, the AFPFL had historically been very wary of participation in the Tatmadaw, and were deeply anxious that if the minority-dominated Tatmadaw was allowed to be the only (or even largest) armed group in Burma, the British might be emboldened enough to attempt to depose the AFPFL and install a friendlier, more colonially-minded government. The British also had a vested interest in integrating as little as possible of the Japanese-trained collaborators into the Tatmadaw, deliberately retiring vast swathes of the former Burma Independence Army from the Tatmadaw in the period between 1945 and 1947. With only two months salary paid as severance and no real economic prospects in the country (the war had devastated the country’s infrastructure), these men turned to the only thing they knew: violence.

From 1946 to 1948, local “pocket armies” sprung up all throughout Burma. The largest and best organized of these was the People’s Volunteer Organization (PVO), a roughly 100,000 strong political militia led by a mixture of communists and Burma Independence Army leaders loyal to the AFPFL that was intended to counter the Tatmadaw by existing outside of its chain of command, but the PVO was by no means the only militia in Burma--nor even the only AFPFL militia in Burma. Everyone--from British businesses looking to protect their property, to bandits looking to eke out a living, to local communities looking to protect themselves, to parliamentarians looking to secure their power base--was making their own armed groups of some sort or another.

The tense political environment between the Leftists and the Rightists, exacerbated by the proliferation of armed groups throughout the countryside, made political violence inevitable. Skirmishes between armed groups were common in the countryside, and even spilled into the major cities on occasion, and flaring passions on both sides imbued these small clashes with far greater gravity than they otherwise warranted. This state of anarchy earned U Nu’s government the mocking moniker “the Six Mile Government”--so called because its authority extended only six miles from the capital of Rangoon. It was an exaggeration, of course… but maybe not as much of an exaggeration as one might think.

The Karen Insurgency

The ethnic group most unsettled by the state of affairs in Burma were the Karen. Long the favored ethnic group of the British administration in Burma, the Karen were, broadly speaking, not enthused by the prospect of their inclusion in a united Burmese state, and spent much of the period between 1945 and 1948 pressuring the British to create an independent Karen state during the decolonization of Burma. The largest Karen group, the Karen National Union, explicitly boycotted the Panglong Agreement and other attempts to draft a national constitution, seeking to extract concessions from the AFPFL government guaranteeing a much stronger form of federal government (at least) or outright independence (at most).

As the security situation in Burma continued to deteriorate in the months after independence, the Karen took up arms themselves, creating the Karen National Defense Organization (KNDO). At first, this group existed mostly to protect Karen communities from banditry and competing militias. The AFPFL government, though, viewed the Karen as a natural extension of the Rightists (many of whom were Karen) and saw frightening similarities between the Karen armed groups and their own PVO militia. The AFPFL dedicated further security forces to the region in hopes of curtailing this expansion of the Rightist power base, raising new militias of their own from Bamar who lived adjacent to Karen communities.

The increased presence of more armed Bamar near Karen communities did not calm Karen anxieties. Clashes between left-aligned Burmese security forces and the Karen became increasingly common, and only grew worse as the political demands of the Karen National Union grew more outrageous to the AFPFL. Gradually, entire units of On 13 November 1948, the KNU demanded the creation of an independent Karen-Mon state, insisting on maximalist borders that would even surround the capital of Rangoon. When this demand reached the Burmese press, the backlash was visceral. On Christmas Eve, an AFPFL-aligned militia threw grenades into a Karen church near Palaw, killing eighty.

Eventually, these massacres grew to be too much to bear for many Karen in the Tatmadaw. In January of 1949, Karen units in the Tatmadaw defected en masse to the KNDO, throwing open several Tatmadaw armories to be pilfered. With their numbers dramatically expanded by a combination of Tatmadaw units and freshly-equipped militia, the Karen launched an offensive against Rangoon, seeking to depose the Union Government in one fell swoop and dictate the terms of their independence from a position of strength.

All in all, the KNDO came frighteningly close to doing just that. By the end of January, the KNDO and Karen Tatmadaw units had taken control of Toungoo and Pyu (both important towns controlling the Rangoon-Mandalay railway), as well as Bassein (the largest city in the Irrawaddy Delta) and Insein (a suburb on the northern end of Rangoon).

Shockwaves in the Army

The KNDO offensive against Rangoon was a crisis unlike any the AFPFL had faced so far and left the government scrambling to respond. Almost immediately, Minister of Defense Kyaw Zaw, with U Nu’s blessing, set about a massive purge of the Tatmadaw’s top brass, placing every Karen officer in the army, including the Commander-in-Chief Smith Dun on “permanent leave.” He then appointed Bo Zeya, the senior-most member of the Thirty Comrades still in the Tatmadaw, as “Supreme Commander of All Defense Forces and Police Forces,” who promptly interned all Karen enlisted personnel who had not already defected into “Armed Forces Rest Camps” for “R&R.”

The defection and purge of the Tatmadaw’s Karen components decimated an already small force and made the already precarious security situation in Burma even more desperate. As Bo Zeya pulled in former BIA and PBF officers alike to staff the now-vacant positions in the Tatmadaw, the appointees usually arrived to find their depots empty and their supplies gone. Field commanders made due with whatever they could find, slapping together patchworks of barely trained soldiers, police units, trade unionists, local thugs, armed students, and village levies to fight poorly-organized counterinsurgency efforts. All leave requests and military discharges (except for those done for discipline or for security purposes) were suspended. This hastily organized defense was enough to hold Rangoon, but just barely. It took until May, when the Tatmadaw successfully reclaimed Insein and Bassein, for the security situation around the capital to truly stabilize.

During this period of crisis, the Communist Party of Burma dramatically, but quietly, expanded their footprint within the Tatmadaw. Having rejoined the AFPFL on the urging of Aung San before his death, the Communist Party had been a key constituent of the Leftist AFPFL in post-war Burma. On paper, the party’s influence seemed small: the party’s General Secretary, Thakin Than Tun, was the only member of the Cabinet who was openly affiliated with the communist party. The reality was that the party's influence ran deep through the government. Defense Minister Kyaw Zaw, unbeknownst to most, had become a Communist Party member in 1944. Bo Zeya and Bo Ye Htut, respectively the new Supreme Commander and Deputy Chief of Staff of the Tatmadaw, were also committed communists. With much of the army’s right-wing leadership suddenly out of the picture, and the new leadership firmly communist, there was an opportunity to stack the ranks of the army with communists and Fellow Travelers among the left-wing of the AFPFL that the CPB eagerly seized.

Reactions in Burmese politics to this expansion of communist influence ranged from apathy to full-throated endorsement. The Socialists in the AFPFL and the Communists did not see eye-to-eye on many things, but there were both committed to the project of a free, independent, and united Burma--something that was under major threat. The U Nu government couldn’t afford to be picky.

The crisis expanded not only the CPB’s influence over the Tatmadaw, but the influence of the Tatmadaw more generally. The anarchy in Burma meant that Rangoon was forced to extend a significant amount of leeway to Tatmadaw field commanders, who were granted broad authority to forcibly integrate other units (such as police, government militias, and local village levies) into their command structure in order to better coordinate their operations. Now that the Tatmadaw was out of the hands of the Rightists and back under government control, maintaining parallel command structures was viewed as less important than ensuring maximum operational efficiency.

Red Wave

China Spills Over

A bad year turned worse in October. Fleeing the rapidly-approaching forces of the Communist Party of China, a few hundred Kuomintang deserters crossed from Yunnan Province into Burma’s Shan State in early September. Since the Tatmadaw was busy fighting various insurgencies in the country’s south, they met no meaningful resistance. When word passed back across the border that there was no resistance to encounter, they were quickly followed by several thousand trained KMT regulars. With the Mainland falling, these KMT remnants hoped to take a page out of the CPC’s book and set up a revolutionary base area of their own in Burma’s border areas, funneling men and materiel through Thailand or French Indochina to launch raids up into Yunnan Province.

The People’s Liberation Army, fresh off their victories throughout China, was not keen on giving them space to recover. The first PLA units crossed into Burma in mid-November and engaged in fierce fighting against the KMT opponents throughout the mountains of Shan State. Not expecting their opponents to chase them across the border into a sovereign nation, the KMT remnants in Burma were caught unawares, and were swiftly routed in a series of defeats not dissimilar from those suffered in the Mainland. By the end of the year, any organized Kuomintang remnants in Burma had been wiped out, with the remaining soldiers turning towards banditry, joining militias, and otherwise adding to the chaos throughout northern Burma. Half of Shan State, including stretches of the Burmese border with Thailand, fell under occupation by the PLA as a result.

Crisis in Rangoon

The entrance of the Kuomintang into Shan State was more an annoyance than anything for the government in Rangoon. It was sort of a problem for a different day; the Tatmadaw did not have the men to spare to fight the Kuomintang as well, and that was likely to be the case for a while longer.

The entrance of the PLA into Shan State was a full-blown political crisis. In order to survive the Karen offensive against Rangoon earlier in the year, U Nu and the AFPFL had been forced to deepen their relationship with the Communist Party of Burma. Now, not even a year later, a neighboring communist country had violated Burma’s territorial sovereignty and was occupying somewhere near an eighth of its territory. U Nu found himself with two equally unappealing options: he could eject the CPB from the AFPFL, which would probably result in a general strike that would paralyze Rangoon and lead to the mass defection of communist field commanders; or he could keep the CPB in the AFPFL and hope that their loyalty to Burma superseded any allegiance to the global communist movement.

U Nu, always one to fret over difficult decisions, prevaricated for about a week, seeking the counsel of Buddhist monks and the peace of meditation. That week proved to be his downfall.

La Lutte Finale

Through Fellow Travelers in the AFPFL, General Secretary Thakin Than Tun learned that U Nu was considering kicking the CPB out of the governing coalition and arresting its leadership. Not wanting to be caught flat-footed, the CPB determined that it was in their best interest to strike now, before their opposition had a chance to strike first.

On 13 December 1949, the Communist Party of Burma declared a general strike, stating that the strike would persist until the governing coalition agreed to nationalize the British businesses in Burma. Throughout Rangoon, Mandalay, and other major cities, all business, especially those owned by British firms and the Anglo-Burmese, ground to a halt. Critically, adherence to the strike was not limited to the private sector. The Burmese civil service, who had been considering a strike action for the better part of the year in response to unpaid wages (the government was extremely short on cash), declared their own strike in solidarity a day later.

With no hopes of breaking the strike through negotiation, U Nu instead turned to violence, ordering Kyaw Zaw and Bo Zeya to shuffle Tatmadaw units fighting the Karen near Moulmein back to Rangoon to break the strike. On 17 December, just four days after the beginning of the strike, the troops were in position. U Nu gave the order.

The Tatmadaw had other ideas. Rather than turning their rifles on the strikers, they turned them against the government. On the night of 17-18 December, Tatmadaw units took control of key facilities throughout the city including the houses of parliament, the Prime Minister’s residence, the government broadcasting station, and more. Resistance was light and disorganized: the war effort meant that the Tatmadaw, under leadership that had until this moment appeared politically reliable, had subsumed most of the parallel security forces that previously operated in Rangoon, and ensured that the “strikebreakers” now couping the city were composed of politically reliable (for the CPB) units.

Even among Tatmadaw officers who were not aligned with the Communists, the most hostile reaction to the coup was apathy. U Nu’s government had made few friends among the military elite during his time in office, owing largely to his perceived mismanagement of the economy and of the war effort (U Nu had a particularly unpopular habit of assigning impossible objectives to the Tatmadaw and then publicly lambasting commanders when they failed to achieve them). What resistance did exist came from a few CIA-trained Korantaw units under Interior Minister Ne Win that had still remained relatively independent command structures, but this resistance was sporadic and snuffed out relatively quickly.

When the dust settled in Rangoon, most of the AFPFL government outside of the CPB was in the custody of CPB-aligned Tatmadaw units. General Secretary Thakin Than Tun took to the airwaves to announce that the “collaborationist” AFPFL government had been deposed, that Burma had joined China and Free Indochina in “resisting Anglo-American imperial domination,” , and that the national revolution of Burma was at last progressing into its next stage.

The Government

With most potential opposition leaders captured during the coup in Rangoon, the Communist Party of Burma started consolidating their control over Burma’s political apparatus.

First, they announced the dissolution of the AFPFL and the creation of a new political umbrella organization, the National United Front (NUF), in which the Communist Party of Burma, as the vanguard of Burma’s national people’s revolution, would hold the “leading role.” Though the NUF contains a few other political organizations--several left-leaning political parties that sprung out of the PVO have joined, as well as the Burma Workers and Peasants Party, which consists of about half of the membership of the former Burma Socialist Party--the organization is for all intents and purposes dominated by the CPB and its leadership.

Second, the remaining members of the legislature (all CPB and friendly AFPFL members) suspended the 1947 Constitution (including the legislature), declaring that that a new constitution would be drafted by an NUF-led “Burmese People’s Political Consultative Conference” (based off of the similar body formed in China earlier in the year. in early January, it published a provisional interim constitution declaring the creation of a new state, the People’s Republic of Burma, in which the National United Front would lead the country under the guidance of the Communist Party of Burma.

Third, the government swiftly destroyed the parallel unions affiliated with the AFPFL and the Socialist Party in favor of their CPB-controlled rivals. The Trade Union Congress (Burma)--originally a BSP-controlled union, but it had recently fallen under the leadership of communist Thakin Lwin--was forcibly merged back into the CPB-controlled All Burma Trade Union Congress. Similarly, they concentrated power in unions that hadn’t split. Socialist Party leaders in the All Burma Peasants Organization and All Burma Students’ Union who had not defected from the BSP with the Burma Workers and Peasants Party were expelled.

Fourth, the government moved to shore up the support of the Burmese people (and minimize the potential for “imperialist wreckers” to further damage the Burmese economy) by nationalizing all British-owned assets in the country. This was an expansion of the targeted nationalizations pursued by the AFPFL government beginning in 1948 (when U Nu’s government had nationalized the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, Rangoon Telephone Co, and the numerous teak concessions owned by British firms). The largest firms impacted included Steel Brothers & Co Ltd, Burma (a large trading conglomerate), Burmah Oil Commpany, Burma Cement Co Ltd, and Indo-Burma Petroleum Co. They also announced the abolition of all debt owed by peasants--a policy meant to free the peasantry from the massive debts owed to Indian moneylenders (there are shockingly few moneylenders among the ethnic Bamar)--and the beginning of a new policy of delivering land to the tiller.

The Opposition

The CPB’s coup was extremely successful at rounding up most of their potential political opponents in Rangoon. Almost every key government figure was captured by the Tatmadaw. A list of key government figures and their fates during the December Coup is included below:

• U NU, Prime Minister of Burma and Leader of the AFPFL - Captured

• BO LET YA, Deputy Prime Minister - Captured moments before his plane took off

• KYAW NYEIN, Finance Minister - Captured

• SAO SHWE THAIK, Speaker of the Chamber of Nationalities and Saopha of Yawnghwe - Captured

• SAO HKUN HKIO, Foreign Minister and Saopha of Möngmit - Escaped to Britain

• BA SWE, General Secretary of the Burma Socialist Party - Escaped to Singapore

• KO KO GYI, Chairman of the Burma Socialist Party - Escaped to Singapore

• Brigadier NE WIN, Home Minister - Escaped into countryside

• Brigadier SMITH DUN, former Commander-in-Chief of the Tatmadaw - Captured

• Colonel SAW SHI SHO, former Chief of Air Staff - Escaped to Singapore

• Major TOMMY CLIFT, current Chief of Air Staff - Captured

The national opposition consists of two main groups. The first is the armed opposition still present in the country, the Burma Patriotic Liberation Army (BPLA), organized around former Interior Minister and Commander of the Third Burma Rifles Bo Ne Win and fellow Thirty Comrades member Bo Hmu Aung. The BPLA is made up of army defectors, anti-communist militias, and pretty much anyone who they can drum up to fight. With a claimed force somewhere in the thousands, the BPLA primarily operates in Central Burma. The NUF has declared through its party newspapers that Ne Win is a “counterrevolutionary working with Anglo-American imperialists to shackle the Burmese people,” citing government documents from before the December Coup that indicated his paramilitary, the Korantaw, was receiving training from American intelligence. Ne Win has denied the allegations.

Separate from the BPLA is the civilian opposition, consisting of former AFPFL politicians who managed to avoid arrest during the coup. Organized around Ba Swe and the remnants of the Burma Socialist Party, with support from the few members of the U Nu cabinet who escaped the coup, this civilian opposition has branded itself as the Parliamentary Democracy Party (PDP). The PDP, which is currently organized in Singapore while looking to attract the attention of a larger patron, claims to be the “leading organization in the opposition against the illegal communist takeover of Burma.” Their actual level of influence in the country--especially after the government cracked down on the mass organizations aligned to the party--is less clear.

In addition to the national opposition, the Mujahideen and the KNU continue their separatist campaigns against the new government. Unrest among Burma’s other ethnic groups, insofar as it exists, has yet to manifest into organized insurgencies. There is no real coordination between them and the national opposition, who remain committed to the territorial integrity of Burma.

There is also the matter of the Communist Party splinter group, the Red Flag Communist Party. After splitting from the Communist Party of Burma (who the Red Flags call the “White Flags”--a moniker that the CPB leadership has not adopted) in 1946, the Red Flags began a campaign of armed insurgency against the government of Burma. In true leftist fashion, even though the CPB now controls the country, the Red Flags have so far refused overtures to integrate into the National United Front, and continue their small insurgency throughout the Delta and Arakan Mountains.

SUMMARY - MAP

After Burma gained its independence, tensions between the left-wing parts of the government (mostly ethnic Bamar) and the right-wing parts of the government (mostly ethnic minorities), as well as a general weakness of the central government, led to the emergence of “pocket armies” throughout much of the country, leading to political violence throughout the countryside. This violence eventually escalated into a full-fledged insurgency in the form of the Karen National Union (KNU) and their armed wing, the Karen National Defense Organization (KNDO).

In response to the beginning of the Karen insurgency, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) government purged all Karen personnel from the Burmese military, the Tatmadaw. Among those purged were the entire general staff, who were replaced by the (secretly) communist Minister of Defense Kyaw Zaw with other left-aligned figures. The Communist Party of Burma (CPB) used this opportunity to massively expand its influence in the Tatmadaw.

Late in 1949, the Kuomintang crossed into Burma and were pursued by the People’s Liberation Army, who occupied parts of northeastern Burma. U Nu was planning to remove the CPB from the AFPFL in response, but was preempted by a general strike. When U Nu ordered the Tatmadaw (which he believed to be loyal) to crush the strike, they instead overthrew the government. The CPB declared the formation of the People’s Republic of Burma a month later.

Anti-communist resistance consists of four main groups. The first, the Burmese Patriotic Liberation Army (BPLA) is led by Bo Ne Win and Bo Hmu Aung. It operates in Central Burma. The CPB claims that the BPLA leadership has previously received training and assistance from the American CIA. The second, the Parliamentary Democracy Party (PDP) is led by former Burma Socialist Party politicians and cabinet ministers who escaped the December Coup. They are currently based in Singapore. The third group is the separatist movements, which currently includes the Mujahideen (an Islamic insurgency in northwestern Arakan State attempting to join Pakistan) and the Karen National Union (a Karen separatist insurgency fighting for the formation of an independent “Kawthoolei” consisting of most of coastal Burma). The fourth group is the Red Flag Communist Party, which maintains a small insurgent presence in the Irrawaddy Delta and the Arakan Mountains.