A Request for Establishment of an Arakan State Made by Arakanese Buddhist MP in the 1950s

The purpose of this paper is to examine U Kyaw Min ' s speech in the Burmese Parliament on 12 March 1957 and the pohtical situation in which it was received There were severai m ' vements in the name of Arakan and most of them were fought by local guerrillas The reason why UKyaw Min ' s speech is worth considering is that he requested a State for the Arakan in the Burmese Parliament He regarded himself as representillg the majority of the Arakan and demanded that the AFPFL Government to make effort to galn the confidence of the Arakanese In fact U Kyaw Min was a politician who used the Arakanese posilion in seeking power in the Burmese Politics But his speech does reflect the politlcal situation of Burma Since the independence of the Union of Bur na not much attention was paid to the people and regions in the modern history of Burma which were distant from the politics f the central Burma U Kyaw Min ' s speech allows us to reconsider the distance shown a er nine years of independence of the Union of Burma and a year before the first Amly takeover 1