3 Review(s)

A nation’s ordeal with violence. The Burmese civil war began twelve weeks after Britain granted Burma independence in 1948 and has continued ever since. Shelby Tucker defines the war’s core causes for readers new to the subject or baffled by its complexities and shows how a well-disciplined army of a wealthy colony was transformed into a ruthless instrument of an impoverished autocracy. Underpinning Burma’s troubles, he argues, are unresolved ethnic divisions, Japanese conquest exacerbating these divisions, Burma’s Herrenvolk pretensions, political rivalry among Burmese nationalists preventing an orderly transfer of power, Aung San’s assassination, the drugs trade, and the personal greed of Burma’s military rulers. Tucker draws on his experience as a trial lawyer to appraise afresh the murder of Aung San, and argues that the military government is the leading player in the country’s flourishing drugs trade. Media emphasis on the junta’s record of human rights abuse, he suggests, tends to obscure a strategic interest in ending the trade shared by all major powers. Tucker surveys various scholars’ assessments of the prospect of the peaceful devolution of power to civilian rule and concludes by proposing measures for assisting change in Burma.