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Sule Pagoda Road in Rangoon, capital of British Colonial Burma, before WW2. The Pagoda is in the back- ground, the Fire Brigade Tower on the right and a Trolley Bus at the cross roads - East and West intertwined.

Burma's National Hero, Bogyoke Aung San, founder of his country's army (the Tatmadaw) and the father of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. He fought Britain and Japan in turn in World War 2, only to be assassinated by a political rival on the eve of his country's independence over fifty years ago. This tragic event occurred while he, with others, were drafting a Constitution for the Union of Burma, which was planned to take full account of the apprehensions of ethnic minorities. With his country riven by civil war from the year of its Independence, the work of reconciling all the people in a democratic Union of Burma has been left to his daughter, Suu Kyi.
 

Britain's colonies around the world spawned generations of European settlers who were born, had married and died there, living a life of luxury enjoyed only by the wealthy in their distant homeland. A comparatively recent additon to the British Empire, BURMA  was no exception.

    A cardinal rule of the Governors of Empire in the early twentieth century was that Europeans should not fraternise with natives of the territory they controlled, but live socially segregated in Cantonment and Club. This was deemed vital to maintain the subtle atmosphere of superiority needed to govern and live in peace with millions of subject peoples with a minimum of effort and cost. Those seen to break this rule had vitually no chance of promotion to a senior job, or if they had one, were banned from the exclusive cantonments where Sahib and Memsahib, surrounded by servants, lived sheltered lives in a little Scotland, Wales or England, before going home in disgrace.

    This sterile rule was especially important for settlers calling themselves "domiciled Europeans", who had lived in the colony for many generations. Britain was virtually a foreign country to them. RUBY CAMERON's family was one such.

    In the Thirties, the final decade of global peace for the British Raj, Europe and America reeled with economic depression. Germany spawned Adolf Hitler with his racist Nazis, and Marxism bred Stalin and his gulags in the Soviet Union while Great Britain and the USA endured massive unemployment that tested their democratic political systems to the limit. But British colonies offered pampered lives to expatriate and settler alike, with electric trams, movies with sound and the latest in automobiles. Luxury passenger liners carried cosseted colonials around their vast Empire that  had painted a quarter of the globe pink.

   It is often said that the British Empire survived as long as it did because of the policy of divide and rule. But this ignores the fact that their colonies in the Far East were far more divided, geographically and emotionally, before they came than after they left. Britain may inadvertently have encouraged, but did not create, the ancient rivalry and distrust of  the Muslim for Hindu, the Sinhalese for Tamil, the Malay for Chinese, or the Karen  for Burman, and vice versa. Inept and shortsighted, heavy-handed in dealing with political dissent as they often were, the bloody upheavals that affected India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, the civil war in Burma, the corruption of one-party rule in many African states, arose despite the British and not because of them.

    The stupid and inhuman British legacy of suspicion and distrust of those born with a mixed racial heritage has survived in Burma to this day. It cruelly denies its peoples their freely elected choice seven years ago, of a lady, the daughter of their national hero, Bogyoke Aung San, as leader of their coutntry - because her husband is a foreigner and her children are not of pure Burmese blood.

  There remains, however, a major charge of negligence, if not of deception and disloyalty, that can be laid against the British during negotiations for Burma's independence. The Karen people are suffering heavily to this day for their loyalty to the British during the Japanese invasion and the four years of occupation that followed. They had repeatedly been promised autonomy in the post-war independent State as their just reward. This promise was completely ignored. A half century of civil war has enslaved and impoverised them, fostering a booming trade in heroin that only enriches Drug-Lords and their armed gangs. The cultivation and export of opium to pay for weapons was an unexpected, but inevitable consequence of over half a century of civil war.

 History is best told while there are people still alive to attest to its accuracy from personal experience. Truth may not always be politically correct, but it is the only thing that will stand the test of time.

 One such truth is the legacy of unjustifiable shame that many of the older generation of colonials still carry with them - the shame of their mixed genetic heritage. What was considered a mark of disgrace can now been seen for what it always should have been, as Ruby Cameron, my BURMA RUBY, always saw it, as a source of pride.

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