The Day of the Tiger

In nearly 20 years of political life, Burma's smiling, round-faced U Nu has never lost the conviction that he is primarily "a dreamer, a writer." He is even convinced that, given a chance to concentrate, he might have become the Burmese Bernard Shaw. Circumstances have never given U Nu the opportunity to test his theory. In 1947, when terrorists murdered General Aung San and wiped out six other leaders of the Burmese independence movement, Burma's last British Governor called on U Nu as the only Burmese with sufficient national stature to take over the country that Britain was preparing to leave. One year later, with U Nu barely installed as the first Premier of independent Burma, his nation was seized by a spate of rebellions.

For a self-proclaimed dreamer and devout Buddhist, U Nu turned in a remarkable job as a man of action. Starting off with a shaky combat force of only 12,000 men, his government in eight years of intermittent fighting has succeeded in reducing to dispersed guerrillaism five major rebellious factions, including two varieties of Communists (White Flag Communists and Red Flag Trotskyites). Simultaneously, U Nu and his Socialists pushed through a land-reform program and began to lay the groundwork for industrialization.

No Time to Meditate. All the while, U Nu plaintively talked of retiring to a Buddhist monastery to meditate and write, and for two years his written resignation has been in the hands of Burma's ruling coalition, the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League.

Last week 49-year-old U Nu finally got his resignation accepted. But his destination was not the monastery. Though the coalition won a comfortable majority of 170 out of 250 seats in Burma's Chamber of Deputies in last April's elections, government leaders were disturbed by the fact that the Chamber now includes 47 Communists, a gain of about 40 seats. Determined not to let the Reds gain by political means what they failed to win by force, U Nu's colleagues agreed to let him leave the premiership "for a year" to devote all his time to political reorganization of the Anti-Fascist League.

No Change in Plan. To replace U Nu as Premier, the league named 40-year-old Defense Minister U Ba Swe (rhymes with hay), known to his friends as Kyagi--"The Big Tiger." (The nickname, according to a wifely indiscretion, derives not only from the fact that he was born on Monday, "the day of the tiger," but also from "his temper.") A colleague of U Nu since the '30s, when both were leaders in the anti-British activities of Rangoon University students, U Ba Swe narrowly escaped execution during World War II when the Japanese discovered that he had been using his position as chief of their puppet "civil defense unit" in Rangoon to cover up his activities as a leader of Burma's anti-Japanese resistance movement. Released from a Japanese prison at the intercession of U Nu. U Ba Swe promptly became boss of Burma's Socialists, and has long been the biggest political power in Burma.

An incessant cigarette smoker and dedicated billiards player, aloof, handsome U Ba Swe is a tougher, less gracious man than U Nu. Unlike his predecessor, he avoids unnecessary contact with Westerners and, while arguing that "there is a sea of difference between being a Marxist and being a Communist," flatly calls himself a

Marxist. Last week, however, as he took office in Rangoon, the Big Tiger made it clear that he planned few changes in Burmese domestic policy and none in U Nu's neutralist foreign policy. "This," said U Ba Swe, "is only a change of personalities."

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