Word: rangoons
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...priority list for supplies and troop replacements, Slim's 800,000-man force often went to battle as lightly armed as guerrillas. The struggle went on for more than three years until May 1945, when the polyglot army of Indians, Nepalese, Africans and Britons captured the port of Rangoon, virtually ending the Burma campaign...
...voice from Mae Sot had not been heard in Burma for eight long years. It was unmistakably that of U Nu, the ascetic, still popular ex-Premier who was ousted in 1962 by General Ne Win, the Burmese army strongman, and imprisoned in a military "rest camp" near Rangoon for the next four years. For the past 18 months, U Nu has been plotting his comeback. "I cannot tell you exactly at what time and in what month we will celebrate victory," he said in his broadcast. Less inclined to generalize, his lieutenants flatly predict "final victory" some time...
Eight years later, as Ne Win himself once admitted in a rare moment of candor, Burma is "in a mess." The economy, almost totally nationalized, has virtually ceased to function. Last spring the state-owned distribution system collapsed altogether, and Rangoon shoppers who queue up before dawn are lucky if the shelves are not totally bare a few minutes after the People's Stores open. Prices have risen fivefold since 1962, but rice exports, once the largest in the world, are down to less than a third of their precoup levels...
...countryside, Burma has a whole series of wars in progress. Private armies led by hill-tribe warlords wage a running battle for autonomy with the despised lowlanders from Rangoon. Rangoon and Peking recently agreed to exchange ambassadors once again (they were recalled during the Cultural Revolution in 1967); yet the Chinese have been quietly supporting a new group of Communist insurgents who have frequently bloodied Ne Win's 150,000-man army in clashes in Burma's sparsely populated northeast. Something less than half of the country (pop. 27 million) is really under Rangoon's control...
...General U Thant. A Burmese youth is taught to show respect for parents and elders by prostrating himself when he leaves their presence. And a son is never too old or too important to kowtow to his mother, as the 61-year-old statesman demonstrated last week at the Rangoon home of Daw Nan Thaung...