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The Turmoil of Burma' in 1949: The Constant Conflict of Myanmar
Lily Rothman,Liz Ronk
Oct 24, 2017
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As Rohingya Muslim refugees continue to stream toward Bangladesh, fleeing persecution in Myanmar, tens of thousands of people have now been uprooted in the face of the latest wave of what the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has called ethnic cleansing by the forces of the Buddhist-majority nation. The shocking images and stories that have emerged from the crisis have drawn international attention to Myanmar, and to its leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was formerly hailed as a human rights champion.
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The current crisis is unfolding seven decades after Myanmar gained its independence, a period during which the nation has been regularly swept by ethnic and religious strife.
LIFE correspondent Roy Rowan (left) and photographer Jack Birns in Burma.LIFE correspondent Roy Rowan (left) and photographer Jack Birns in Burma. Jack Birns—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
It was in 1949 that LIFE Magazine sent photographer Jack Birns and correspondent Roy Rowan to the nation, then known as Burma (as it was until the late 1980s), to document one such conflict. Some of the images from that story, as well as photographs from the trip that were never published by the magazine, can be seen in the gallery above.
After Japan and the U.K., of which Burma had been a colony, fought over the territory during World War II, the founders of an independent Burma rejected a place in the British Commonwealth and became their own nation early in 1948, its many factions unified largely by the Buddhist religion. But 33-year-old leader Aung San — father of Aung San Suu Kyi — was assassinated, along with many of his advisors, in July of 1947, prior to independence. That violence was perhaps a harbinger of what was to come next, what LIFE called simply "the turmoil of Burma."

A new round of violence began in the late 1940s, at least as LIFE presented it to American readers in 1949, as "one more Communist uprising in Asia." But as civil war broke out, a group from the Karen minority — Baptists by religion, thanks to the work of American missionaries — entered the fray. Both the Communists and the Karens opposed the new largely Buddhist regime. The uprising by the Karens would be the start of a conflict that continued, in one form or another, for decades.