Today is the 40th anniversary of the Rangoon funeral of former UN Secretary-General U Thant. It was by no means an ordinary occasion. Neither was it distinctive in ways that might be expected for the most illustrious Burmese of his generation. Rather, it constituted an act of rebellion led by students and supported by monks – the largest mass dissent in the quarter-century between 1962, the year of Ne Win’s coup, and 1988, the year of the nationwide uprising that brought an end to his catastrophic rule. The story is best told by Andrew Selth in Death of a Hero: The U Thant Disturbances in Burma, December 1974, a brief monograph published by Griffith University in April 1989. At the time of the events he describes, Andrew was working as an Australian diplomat in Rangoon.

The backdrop to the revolt was the generally appalling condition to which the Burmese people had been reduced by more than a decade of bleak dictatorship. The trigger was Ne Win’s refusal to extend even minimal diplomatic respect to the returning remains of his long-standing political rival. No honour guard or Burmese official met the casket flown from New York to Rangoon on December 1 and, although the body was then allowed to lie in state and mourners were able to visit, other diplomatic niceties were also visibly absent. The result was that students began to march in protest on December 5, the scheduled date of Thant’s funeral, and monks quickly joined them. That afternoon, they abducted the casket and drove it through vociferous crowds to a makeshift dais constructed in Convocation Hall, Rangoon Arts and Science University (the renamed Rangoon University). It was from there that a funeral procession set out on Sunday, December 8. Its destination was a brick mausoleum built in great haste on the site of the Rangoon University Student Union building notoriously blown up by Ne Win in July 1962.

Such open defiance meant that this was not the end of the matter. In the early hours of December 11, troops were sent onto the campus and within an hour had established complete control. Nearly 3000 people were arrested. In parallel, Thant’s casket was disinterred and soon after dawn quietly reburied in an official tomb below Shwedagon Pagoda only recently prepared by a government forced to make some concession to a hostile public. Armed guards then secured the site to enable workers to construct a full concrete mausoleum. Riots flared across Rangoon on both December 11 and December 12, and only on December 15 was a tense peace imposed. Markets were allowed to reopen on December 17.

Andrew’s closing assessment includes these two points (on pages 21-22): first, the U Thant disturbances “demonstrated that, outside the armed forces, the regime could not claim the allegiance of any significant social group”; second, they “revealed, however, that there was no viable alternative leadership able to replace Ne Win and his supporters”. Both parts of this evaluation remained essentially true in the far greater revolt launched more than a decade later, in 1988.