U Nu
U Nu was the first prime minister of independent Burma, a devout Buddhist novelist who inherited the office from a murdered friend, governed a country at war with itself for fourteen years, and handed the army the argument it used to take the state. He was born at Wakema in the delta in 1907, the son of a merchant, and at Rangoon University was president of the student union in the strike of 1936 in which Aung San was secretary; he took the title Thakin with the rest, wrote plays and translated Dale Carnegie, and was jailed by the British in 1940 for sedition. The Japanese freed him and made him Ba Maw's foreign minister, an office he held with visible reluctance. When the assassins killed Aung San and six ministers on 19 July 1947 the governor asked U Nu, the vice-president of the league, to form the government that took independence on 4 January 1948, at a time chosen by astrologers. Within months the communists, the Karen and the army's own mutineers held most of the country, and for two years his government was called the Rangoon government because that was where its writ ran. He held it together with the army under Ne Win, with British and Indian help, and with a neutralism that took Burma into the Bandung conference and kept it out of every pact. He built pagodas, convened the Sixth Buddhist Council from 1954 to 1956, and in 1961 made Buddhism the state religion, which the Christian Kachin took as the breaking of Panglong. When his league split in 1958 he invited Ne Win to govern as caretaker for eighteen months, won the election of 1960 by a landslide, and on 2 March 1962 was arrested in his bed by the same general, who did not give the state back. He was held until 1966, went into exile in 1969 to raise a rebellion from Thailand that never happened, was allowed home in 1980, and in the rising of August 1988 declared at eighty-one that he was still the lawful prime minister. The junta put him under house arrest. He died in Rangoon in February 1995.
- Lived: 1907 CE – 1995 CE
- Nationality: Burmese
- Roles: prime_minister, politician, writer
