Free Aung San Suu Kyi by Jesper Bengtsson Page B

resistance movement and to increase the pressure on the British administration. He as well as the other leaders of We Burmese traveled across the country meeting workers’ leaders, students, and monks to coordinate the protests. After several months’ hard work, We Burmese had become established as the hub of the anticolonial resistance.
    The tempo and energy suited Aung San. As general secretary for the organization, he worked around the clock, organizing meetings and writing articles all day long. At night he slept on a blanket on the floor in the organization’s office on Yegyaw Street in Rangoon. He still did not bother about his hygiene, and his clothes hung like filthy rags on his thin body. Despite being one of the most talked-about nationalist leaders, he was only twenty-four years old, and several of the older nationalists who came to the office on Yegyaw Street thought he was a servant boy who was there to clean or serve tea.
    The British had not been completely insensitive to the political developments. During the 1930s they had given the Burmese greater symbolic influence over their own affairs. The Burmese elected their own parliament now and their own government. For several years in the 1930s, the nationalist Ba Maw was prime minister. However, political power was in practice subjected to severe limitations, and all decisions were submitted to the British governor, the administration in Calcutta, or the government in London.
    The protests and the violence in the streets resulted in the resignation of Ba Maw’s government, but the only effect was that a new puppet government was appointed.
    The nationalist movement had good contacts with India and was for a long time influenced by Gandhi’s and Nehru’s nonviolent methods. Aung San too perceived the Indian nationalists as role models: well-educated academics, often politically radical, who chose to enter the system in order to reform it from within. But for Aung San, methods were always negotiable. The way to the goal was a question of strategy, neither more nor less. Nearing the end of the 1930s, he started to tire of the sluggishness of the system and he leaned more and more toward the viewpoint that it was time to take up armed resistance. He wanted to acquire weapons and build up a guerrilla army. In the book
Aung San and the Struggle for Burmese Independence
there is a quotation in which Aung San explains the plan he had crudely sketched during the social unrest in the years prior to World War II:
    A countrywide mass resistance movement against British imperialism on a progressive scale . . . series of local and partial strikes of industrial and rural workers leading to the general and rent strike; and finally all forms of militant propaganda such as mass demonstrations and people’s marches leading to mass civil disobedience. Also, an economic campaign against British imperialism in the form of a boycott of British goods leading to the mass non-payment of taxes, to be supported by developing guerrilla actions against military and civil and police outposts, lines of communication, etc., leading to the complete paralysis of the British administration in Burma.
    At the end of December 1939, Aung San was in Mandalay to speak at a meeting of the nationalist movement. He then very briefly met the British Labour politician Stafford Cribbs. When the latter asked how the nationalists planned to free Burma, Aung San answered with an example. If Stafford Cribbs took a pen from him, he would first ask politely if he could have his pen back. If that did not help, then he would demand to have his pen back, and if that did not work, there would be no other course of action open tohim than to take the pen back by force. After having said this, Aung San reached toward the pen in Cribbs’s shirt pocket and jerked it out with such force that the shirt was ripped. The Burmese present thought that Aung San was embarrassing, but Cribbs was