Civilian Interlude
After his discharge from the Army, Kyaw Zaw contested as an independent candidate for Parliament in the multiparty general election of February 1960 but was unsuccessful. In April 1963 the Revolutionary Council (RC) led by General Ne Win invited the various armed rebel groups for negotiation in peace talks to be held in Rangoon. During "the peace parley" Kyaw Zaw became an active supporter of the People's Peace Committee along with another veteran leader, the venerated elder politician and writer Thakin Kodaw Hmaing (1876–1964). Many armed groups came to Rangoon, under the promise of a safe passage by the RC which it did honor, for the negotiations. The Communist Party of Burma (CPB), also known as the "White Flag" Communists, which went underground on March 28, 1948 and had since been active as an clandestine party led by Thakin Than Tun, sent a delegation though Than Tun himself remained in the jungle. The "Red Flag" Communists, a Trotskyist group that went underground in October 1946 even before independence from Britain was declared on January 4, 1948, and led by Thakin Soe, also joined the peace talks headed by the flamboyant Soe himself. The peace parley with the various armed groups, with the exception of the Karen National Defence Organisation (KNDO, the military wing of the KNU) with whom the RC did sign a cease-fire and an armistice agreement, broke down in June 1963, and the representatives of these rebel groups were allowed a safe passage back to their jungle strongholds.
Though Kyaw Zaw was not arrested after the breakdown of the peace talks, in June 1963 dozens of Burmese politicians and writers who were suspected of having "Communist sympathies" were arrested and jailed without any charge or trial by the RC for several years. Among the detainees in the immediate aftermath of the failed peace parley were Aung Than, older brother of Aung San and a leader of the above-ground political party National United Front (NUF), and the writer Dagon Ta-ya (real name U Htay Myaing, b. 9 May 1919).
Read more about this topic: Kyaw Zaw
Famous quotes containing the word interlude:
“Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspection and interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)