Karen-Burmese Riots

During the sudden British retreat from Burma in late 1941 many hundreds of loyal Karen soldiers serving in the units of rapidly withdrawing British Burma Rifles and Burma Military Police deserted with arms and ammunition to mainly stay behind and defend their home villages in the Delta and other Karen regions like Tenasserim. Bassein and Myaungmya the two biggest towns in the Delta were basically left in the Karens’ hands by the leaving British administration.

When local Thakhins (members of staunchly anti-British Doh Bamar Asiayone) formed temporary administrations in the delta towns and tried to disarm them the Kraens had simply refused to cooperate. As BIA troops together with Japanese army units marched into the Delta and established the BIA administration the simmering conflicts between two races became riotous and the race riots spread all over Delta. This translated extract is from the autobiography “Saturday Born” by the former Prime Minister of Burma U Nu.

U Nu (1907-1995).

“Burmese are born-combative, loud-mouth people (Lu-Zwa) and the Karens are naturally passive, quiet people (Lu-Aye) so there are no real reasons for them to get into serious conflicts as they get along very well throughout our history. If we look at the crime statistics of pre-war Burma the perpetrators of most serious crimes like rapes, assaults, murders, robberies, and thefts were mainly Burmese. Almost no Karen could be found as a serious criminal.  

During the lawless period between the British retreat and the Japanese occupation of whole Burma many Burmese formed armed units as part of BIA. These irregular BIA units unlawfully confiscated (robbed) the valuables such as guns, money, cars, and jewelry from the public in many places.

In Myaung Mya District they tried to take guns away from the Karens. And Karens refused to surrender their arms as the country was basically in a lawless state. So there were fights between them and BIA in some places and finally spread to wherever Karen and Burmese live together in close vicinities. Burmese got hurt in places where Karens were stronger and Karens got hurt in where Burmese had numerical supremacy.”

U Nu a Mon-Burmese who was forced to fight KNDO eventually was born and raised in Delta among Karens and thus he didn’t have a drop of Karen-hating blood in him. This translated extract is from the book “The Insurgency - Volume I” published by the Myanmar Ministry of Information in 1990.

“In Myaung Mya, Bo Thein Swe and Thakhins took over the town administration even before the arrival of BIA and Japanese army. In February 1942 BIA entered Bassein and asked   Karens to leave town but the Karens had refused and instead asked BIA to leave the town. Bo Thein Swe negotiated with Karen leader Saw Ba Oo Gyi and achieved temporary peace between the Karens and BIA.

But the mutual distrust and suspicions between the BIA troops and armed Karens became increasingly widespread. The English spies among the Karen deserters were telling Karen public that Burmese would wipe-out the whole Karen race, while the narrow-minded BIA officers and troops hastily recruited during the emergency also believed that they had to attack Karens the British collaborators.

Accordingly the Karen villages armed themselves, heavily fenced the perimeters, posted armed guards at the gates, and stopped the contacts with neighboring Burmese villages as the local BIA units tried to forcefully disarm the Karen villages. Thakhin Than Lay was killed when the Karen deserters attacked the Bo La Yaung led BIA troops in Myaung Mya District. There were many deadly skirmishes between Karens and BIA as the Karens refused to surrender their arms.

And the skirmishes quickly turned into serious race riots between Karens and Burmese. Armed Karens raided Burmese villages and killed the whole village and the Burmese burnt and slaughtered the whole Karen villages in retaliation. Many villages were burnt down and thousands of lives lost.”

Irrawaddy Division.

The deadly race riots escalated into a full scale war when the British tried to establish anti-Japanese guerrilla forces with the loyal Karen soldiers left behind in the Delta. This translated extract is from Bragadier Kyaw Zaw’s Autobiography from the CPB’s website. Aung San and main force of BIA together with the Japanese Army were then chasing the retreating British army in Upper Burma and only Kya Zaw’s battalion was left in Rangoon as in-charge of Lower Burma.

“When the Karen problems started Bo Moe Gyo (Commander-in-Chief of BIA Colonel Suzuki) decided to handle the problem himself and sent Colonel Ijima with one of my BIA platoons to Myaung Mya. Then one night in early May 1942 two Japanese from Bo Moe Gyo’s HQ woke me up to tell me that the Radio New Delhi had just announced that one Japanese Colonel was killed in the ambush by a British-sponsored Karen guerilla unit in the Myaung Mya district.

They also let me know that Tokyo had known the death of Colonel Ijima and already ordered Bo Moe Gyo to retaliate. So next day I took three BIA companies and went to Myaung Mya together with Bo Moe Gyo. We retrieved Colonel Ijima’s corpse and spent two weeks attacking the Karen villages known to support the Karen guerillas.

Bo Moe Gyo directly ordered my officers to kill everyone in the villages if they resisted and sometimes he issued the kill orders through me. I ordered my officers only to attack resisting villages, for other villages my order was just to disarm them. I didn’t think many were killed then. Only when I got back Rangoon and after some months I realized that too many Karen villagers were killed.

The massacre was mainly because of Bo Moe Gyo’s order, and the outcome became so severe also because of the language difficulties with most of my raw BIA troops (as almost all of my troops were either Thai-Shans or Thai-Burmese from the Thai border and so couldn’t speak Burmese well at all).

Bo Moe Gyo was the commanding officer then, and as an inexperienced 23 year old soldier I was just following his orders. But I was responsible for what happened and if I had some political experience back then I could have avoided the whole massacre. Instead of killing all the villagers resisted I should handle the situation better by just burning only few Karen villages.”

Both Karen and Burmese leaders tried to stop the riots and killings. General Aung San issued directives to his BIA troops not to behave wantonly and Japanese also replaced BIA administration with Dr Ba Maw’s government administration. Finally BIA was reformed and withdrawn from all local administration as most Karen deserters also fled to Arakan Ranges towards British India.

Even Bo Moe Gyo issued a seven-point peace declaration and announced a general amnesty for the Burmese and Karen villages heavily involved in the riots. Eventually the cultivating season arrived and the villages went back to their normal routine and the riots died down.

But the mutual distrust between Karens and Burmese still simmered beneath the surface and reignited again in 1949. Especially when the Karens had the control of British re-formed Burma Regular Army after the independence, and the KNDO (Karen National Defense Organization) the armed wing of the KNU (Karen National Union) had a huge stockpile of arms and ammunitions courtesy of the leaving British army.