BURMA: The Army Takes Care

Troops in full battle dress moved into Rangoon police and government buildings one night last week. They mounted 2-in. guns around the capital's airfield, stopped all cars in the city and on major roads and searched them for hidden firearms. Then Premier U Nu, the dexterous little Buddhist who has presided over Burma's turbulent fortunes for almost all of its ten years of independence, went on the air and announced that he was resigning and had invited General Ne Win, chief of the armed forces, to head a nonparty government which would dissolve Parliament and "make arrangements essential for holding free and fair elections."

The necessity for new elections has been obvious since April, when the ruling Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League split and Nu accepted Communist support to avoid parliamentary defeat. That split, and the concessions it caused Nu to make to Burma's Communists, also threatened to open the way for the Communists to achieve more at the polls than they had ever won in years of fitful jungle revolt.

With General Ne Win (whose name means "General Bright Sun") as a caretaker Premier, the army forces would have a free hand to root out the Communist rebels from the jungle and roll back Communist undercover infiltration into political life in time to permit orderly settlement of Burma's parliamentary deadlock at the polls next spring. Some, noting that the switch deprived Nu of control over electoral machinery, held that Nu is now on his way out as a political leader. "If the initiative for turning over the government really did come from Nu, he must be rated a statesman," said one observer in Rangoon. "If not, he would still rate as a diplomatist for succeeding in keeping the word 'coup' out of announcements of this week's events."