A Shooting Incident at Insein Prison, Burma, in 1947

Abstract

On 9 February 1947, a detachment of armed police was called into the Insein Central Gaol in the northern suburbs of Rangoon to quell a serious disturbance. The police fired into the rioting prison wards, killing four inmates—a further prisoner died of heart failure—and wounding three others. The inspector-general of prisons, Burma, the superintendent of the Insein Gaol, and the district superintendent of police were subsequently suspended from duty. This paper examines the background to the Insein Gaol shootings, the incident itself, the government-ordered enquiry into the shootings, the government's response to the enquiry's report, and the final fate of the three senior prison and police officials. The paper sets the Insein prison shootings, in all their aspects, in the context of the fierce struggle between the Burmese nationalists and a weakening British administration in the final months of colonial rule.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Dr Sanchari Dutta in the London research for this paper and the financial support of the British Academy and of the Nuffield Foundation that made her appointment as a research assistant in 2008–9 possible. Research in Yangon was supported by the ASEASUK Research Committee on South East Asian Studies, for which again I am extremely grateful. Sincere thanks are also due to the two anonymous referees of this journal for their excellent comments on an earlier version of this paper. I remain responsible for all errors.

Notes

There are aspects of this account, details of the events themselves but more particularly the characterisation of the motivations of the individuals involved, that would become the focus of dispute in the months following the shootings. Those differences in perception and construction will be brought out in the main, analytical, part of this paper. The sources on which this opening account has drawn will be cited in that later discussion. Those sources, it will be noted, are almost exclusively British official sources. Apart from a few contemporary Burmese newspaper reports on the shootings, Burmese colleagues whose help I sought were unable to locate relevant Burmese-language materials.

‘The list of the dead and injured during the Sunday riot in Insein Central Jail on the 9th February 1947’, National Archives Department, Yangon (henceforth NAD) 10/1, 478; India Office Library and Records, London (henceforth IOLR) M/4/2019.

Among those listed as receiving treatment for injuries caused by ‘blunt weapons’ was one Myo Kin, presumably the Myo Khin who had been pulled out of the meeting with U Hla Maung by the Inspector-General of Prisons.

H. B. MacEvoy and R. Round to Sir Ba U (chairman of the Insein Jail Shooting Incident Enquiry Committee), 10 March 1947, IOLR M/4/2019.

Governor of Burma to Secretary of State for Burma, Telegram, 20 Feb. 1947, IOLR M/4/2019.

Government of Burma, Judicial Department, Memorandum for the Executive Council: ‘Insein Jail shooting incident’, 17 Feb. 1947, NAD 10/1, 478; IOLR M/4/2019.

Burma Gazette, 1 March 1947.

H. B. MacEvoy and R. Round to Sir Ba U, 10 March 1947, IOLR M/4/2019.

Report of the Insein Jail Shooting Incident Enquiry Committee (henceforth RIJSIEC). Rangoon: Government Printing and Stationery, 1947, 1–2.

Government of Burma, Judicial Department, Memorandum for the Executive Council: ‘Recommendations of the Judicial Department on the Report of the Insein Jail Shooting Incident Enquiry Committee’, 9 July 1947, IOLR M/4/2019.

Ibid.

In May 1946, police fired into a crowd at Tantabin in Insein District, killing five and wounding many others. See Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 234–35.

This and the following paragraph draw on passages in Brown, ‘South East Asia’.

Such figures might appear to underpin the assertion frequently made by British officials that ‘Burma … is by far the most criminal nation of the Eastern Empire [British India]’. But in fact the reasons for the strikingly high level of imprisonment in colonial Burma are almost certain to have been complex, too complex to be explored here.

This paragraph draws on Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 302–07, and Cady, A History of Modern Burma, 541–43.

H. B. MacEvoy to Lt.-General R. Hay (director general of Indian Medical Services, New Delhi), 1 March 1947, IOLR M/4/2019.

RIJSIEC, p. 14.

Executive Committee, Prisoners' Union, Tharrawaddy, ‘Resolutions’, (20 Jan. 1947), NAD 10/1, 477.

Cady, A History of Modern Burma, 537.

Sir Hubert Rance to Lord Pethick-Lawrence (secretary of state for India and Burma), Telegram, 14 Dec. 1946, in Tinker, ed., Burma, 191.

Memorandum: ‘Question of prosecuting hunger strikers’: Secretary to the Government of Burma, Judicial Department to the Inspector-General of Prisons, Burma, 17 Dec. 1946, NAD 10/1, 477.

Prison Department Circular No. 3/(Jan.) 1947: ‘Strikes in Jails’: Inspector-General of Prisons, Burma to all Superintendents and Officers-in-Charge of Jails, NAD 10/1, 477.

Government of Burma, Judicial Department, Memorandum: ‘Instructions for dealing with strikes in Jails’, 28 Jan. 1947, NAD 10/1, 477.

Major H. B. MacEvoy to U Paing, 4 Feb. 1947, NAD 10/1, 478.

Ibid.

H. Ah Kway (on behalf of the secretary to the Judicial Department) to the Inspector-General of Prisons, Burma (copied to the Superintendent of Jail, Insein and to U Hla Maung), 7 Feb. 1947, NAD 10/1, 478. One action proposed by Major MacEvoy in his letter to U Paing on 4 Feb.—that the Insein prisoners be firmly told that the government would not recognise a prisoners' union—did not appear in the instructions sent out by the Judicial Department on 7 Feb. Major MacEvoy later reported (H.B. MacEvoy to Lt.-General R. Hay, 1 March 1947, IOLR M/4/2019) that at a meeting he had had with U Paing and two members of the Executive Council on 7 February, ‘Government contended that they had never acknowledged the existence of a “Prisoners Union”’, implying, presumably, that no statement of that position was therefore necessary. An alternative explanation might be that, as the government had been discussing with prisoners' leaders the grievances of inmates for several weeks, and indeed had been making concessions, it had in effect already recognised the union.

U Hla Maung, ‘Report on the incident in Insein Jail which occurred on 9th February 1947, by U Hla Maung, Political Private Secretary to H.M.A. & R.E., deputed by the Hon'ble Home Member to visit the Insein Jail’, 11 Feb. 1947, NAD 10/1, 478; IOLR M/4/2019.

This paragraph draws on RIJSIEC, 14–15.

RIJSIEC, 8.

This paragraph and its quotations draw on RIJSIEC, 8–12.

This paragraph draws on RIJSIEC, 12–13.

This and the following paragraph, and their quotations, draw on RIJSIEC, 15–18.

This paragraph and its quotations draw on RIJSIEC, 18–23.

RIJSIEC, 23.

It was at the meeting of the Executive Council exactly one week later, on 19 July 1947, that Aung San and six council colleagues were assassinated.

Government of Burma, Judicial Department, Memorandum for the Executive Council: ‘Recommendations of the Judicial Department on the Report of the Insein Jail Shooting Incident Enquiry Committee’, 9 July 1947, IOLR M/4/2019.

Minutes of the 77th meeting of the Executive Council, the Council Chamber, the Secretariat, 12 July 1947, IOLR M/4/2019; and reproduced in Tinker, ed., Burma, 657–59.

Ibid.

This is a central theme of a fine study by Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille.

And many of those were Indian nationalists serving their sentence in a Burma gaol. Although there was a wave of arrests in the wake of the Hsaya San rebellion at the beginning of the 1930s, there were few ‘professional revolutionaries’ among the hundreds sent to prison—in contrast to Vietnam—but overwhelmingly the rural dispossessed who had been caught up in the rising.

The riot that took place in the Rangoon Central Gaol in 1930—in fact the most serious prison disturbance in Burma under British administration—appears to have had no political ambitions. The riot was apparently precipitated by the determination of the new superintendent at Rangoon, an Indian, to clamp down on the poor discipline, corruption, and brutality then said to be rife in the gaol. See Warren, ‘The Rangoon Jail Riot of 1930 and the Prison Administration of British Burma’.

Published as the Resolution on the Report of the Insein Jail Shooting Incident Enquiry Committee.

Governor of Burma to Secretary of State for Burma, Telegram, 15 July 1947, and attached Burma Office minute, 18 July 1947; Secretary of State for Burma to Governor of Burma, Telegram, 2 Aug. 1947, despatched 12.20, IOLR M/4/2019.

Secretary of State for Burma to Governor of Burma, Telegram, 2 Aug. 1947, despatched 13.30, IOLR M/4/2019.

Burma Office note, 28 Aug. 1947, IOLR M/4/2019.

Governor of Burma to Secretary of State for Burma, Telegram, 15 Sept. 1947, IOLR M/4/2294.

B. L. D. Rae to Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 3 June 1950, IOLR M/4/2294.

James Bowker (British Embassy, Rangoon) to Sao Hkun Hkio, acting Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1 Sept. 1948, IOLR M/4/2294.

A. Dibdin (Commonwealth Relations Office) to G. E. Crombie (British Embassy, Rangoon), 13 April 1948; James Bowker to Sao Hkun Hkio, 1 Sept. 1948; Aide memoire left with Thakin Nu, in his capacity as Home Minister, by British Ambassador, 7 Jan. 1949, each in IOLR M/4/2294. From August 1947, when he was first suspended, Rae's pay and allowances were reduced to half but later to a quarter, with retrospective effect. He was prevented from applying for another post, anywhere, under the British government or from starting up in private business because he was still, technically, a Burma civil servant; neither could he apply for the compensation provided for British officials for loss of career at the end of British rule or draw on the pension due to him from the government of Burma.

Bertram Langford Denis Rae was an Anglo-Karen, educated and domiciled in England, from where he had been recruited for the Burma service in the mid-1920s. He was twice married, both wives being European, and had four children. C. B. Orr, ‘Case of Mr. B. L. D. Rae’, enclosed in P. C. Bamford, Indian Police (U.K.) Association, to A. Dibdin (Commonwealth Relations Office), 18 September 1948; J. Barrington (Foreign Ministry, Rangoon) to G. E. Crombie (British Embassy, Rangoon), 21 May 1948, both in IOLR M/4/2294.

Union of Burma, Ministry of Home Affairs, Order, 15 Feb. 1949, IOLR M/4/2294.

B. L. D. Rae to Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 3 June 1950, IOLR M/4/2294.

G. Iddon (Commonwealth Relations Office) to B. L. D. Rae, 20 June 1950, IOLR M/4/2294.

C. B. Orr, ‘Case of Mr. B. L. D. Rae’, enclosed in P. C. Bamford, Indian Police (U.K.) Association, to A. Dibdin (Commonwealth Relations Office), 18 Sept. 1948, IOLR M/4/2294.

P. C. Bamford to A. Dibdin, 18 Sept. 1948, IOLR M/4/2294.

Earlier the Commonwealth Relations Office had itself argued that the ‘enquiry committee's report appeared to be considerably coloured by political feeling and it is far from clear whether he [Rae] was really to blame’. It further noted that one possible reason for the delay in completing the proceedings against Rae was that it would be easier for the Burmese authorities ‘to take vindictive action the longer the period that has elapsed since’ the transfer of power. Commonwealth Relations Office to British Embassy, Rangoon, Telegram, 13 May 1948, IOLR M/4/2294.