As you may have heard, nonprofit muckraking group Wikileaks published on Wednesday more than 500,000 diplomatic cables from 1978, a year of geopolitical turmoil. Burma, as Myanmar was then known, was also included in the trove, even if many related documents were already unclassified. This was a time of shifting alliances, which made for strange bedfellows, which made for even stranger diplomatic cables. Some of them are very funny (like the North Korean dance troupe visit), and some are very pathetic (like the attempt to use Burma to get the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to stop being so violent. Hint, it didn’t work). Here are three of those cables from 1978 listed in chronological order.
Note: Rangoon and Burma are used throughout, instead of Yangon and Myanmar, since the former pair were official names in 1978.
1) Visit of North Korean entertainment
A North Korean song and dance troupe, or “mansudae,” visited Rangoon in January of 1978. The 760-member entourage stayed for a few weeks and gave 11 performances at an open-air theater as part of a cultural exchange. However, as this cable reveals, South Korea had an informant in attendance who told the US that “there was nothing objectionable in the show, and the political content was surprisingly light.”
The chorus opened, naturally, with “The General Kim Il Sung Song” [the current leader’s grandfather] and segued to a rendition of the Burma Socialist Program Party Program. In a wry aside, the writer of the cable says that the songs must be “downright soul-stirring.” After the ditties, there were depictions of Korean folk and fairy tales, acrobatics, juggling acts, pantomimes and dances. Oh to be a fly on the wall of that open-air theater.
2) Ne Win “acknowledges” his wife
The marital status of military junta leader Ne Win, who led the charge to overthrow the government in 1962, was apparently the subject of close scrutiny. In a July cable, the ambassador writes that President Ne Win has resumed living with his former wife Daw Ni Ni Myint, citing reports in state media that he took her on an official tour. The Burmese newspapers referred to her as his ‘wife.’
This information is followed by a comment:
“The fact of his resumption of connubial relations with Ni Ni Myint has been common knowledge in Burma for several weeks. There has been no public announcement of his divorcing Ni Ni Myint prior to his 1976 marriage to June Rose Bellamy, which lasted only a few months. Burmese laws and traditions are quite flexible in such marital matters, and a potentially embarrassing re-marriage ceremony was apparently not considered necessary.”
Whatever laws existed were decidedly flexible, at least to Ne Win, who was said to have married some five times.
3) US tried to get Burma to tell the Khmer Rouge to stop being so violent
In September of 1978, several officials (it’s unclear if all from the US or other embassies in Rangoon) called on U Ohn Kyaw from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The topic? Burma was about to send an ambassador to Phnom Penh, which was ruled at the time by the Khmer Rouge, the murderous Maoists whose three-year reign had already led to the deaths of about 1 million people (Vietnam would push them out a few months later). This was a rare opportunity, as Cambodia only had a handful of embassies in operation. The proposal to U Ohn Kyaw was to have Burma’s new ambassador “counsel the GDK [Government of Democratic Kampuchea] to moderate its policies.”
It was a nice idea, but U Ohn Kyaw quickly dismissed it based on appeals to bilateral relations and a rather cynical approach to what was going on in Cambodia.
“Although he acknowledged that the xtent [sic] of the carnage in Kampuchea [Cambodia] appeared to be without recent equal, he commented that much blood is spilled in peoples revolutions.”
U Ohn Kyaw also said that the Khmer Rouge had no plans for the moment to open an embassy in Rangoon because, well, “they have no money.”
Photo: WikiLeaks/Facebook
