Ludu Daw Amar - Military Era

Military Era

The Ludu Daily was closed down by the military government on July 7, 1967. The paper had openly championed for peace and a socialist society, and came out very strongly in support of the peace parley in 1963 between the Revolutionary Council government of Ne Win and various insurgent groups, both Communist and ethnic, just as they had done before in the early years of the civil war in the 1950s. When the peace talks broke down, Amar's oldest son Soe Win (b. 1941), aged 22 and a student leader at Rangoon University, went underground with a few others to join the Communist Party of Burma. He was killed in a bloody purge in 1967 in the jungles of Bago Yoma mountains when the CPB carried out its own cultural revolution. The Ludu couple, true to Burmese Buddhist attitude to death, declined an invitation from the authorities to visit their first born's jungle grave. Their second son Po Than Gyaung (b. 1945) was also arrested for alleged clandestine student political activities at Mandalay University in July 1966, aged 21, and detained without charge or trial until May 1972. He spent part of his imprisonment in Mandalay Prison and later on Cocos Island Penal Colony in the Andaman Sea.

They were personally known to Ne Win from the early days, and the latter often called at their place whenever he visited Mandalay. They carried on with writing, researching, organising literary seminars, giving talks and publishing material other than domestic politics, and remained active in social and community affairs. In 1975 they accepted the government's invitation to give talks to university students from both Mandalay and Rangoon taking part in the reconstruction of the temples in Bagan damaged by the great earthquake of the same year. Amar was given the epithet 'tough by name, tough by nature' by some people (amar means 'tough/hardy' in Burmese).