Burma- a Nation at the Crossroads

by Benedict Rogers

  Another former Western ambassador was similarly entranced. ‘Suu is many things – a very sophisticated, highly educated person who operates easily across cultural boundaries, with a very good sense of humour, which you need. She is a devout Buddhist, and the great wheel of being, karma, is an important concept for her.’

  A close family friend says that Suu Kyi’s mother was a perfectionist, and that had rubbed off on her. ‘She was very intelligent, very influenced by her father and mother, a brilliant cook, kept the family going, helped the kids with homework, shopped economically, learned to drive, did embroidery and learned to ride a horse. She was a paragon – but a nice one, with a lovely sense of humour. There was a core of steel underneath that beautiful exterior.’

  This is borne out in an amusing account of how even the military intelligence assigned to follow her were sometimes nervous. Although she maintained good relations with them, on one occasion while touring a town, NLD workers asked the military intelligence to clear up the litter that had piled up during large public meetings. Warned that if they did not, Aung San Suu Kyi would ‘get mad’, the intelligence officers meekly went to work cleaning up the rubbish.

  One of her former bodyguards confirms this. Phone Myint Tun joined the youth organisation known as ‘Tri-color’, using the yellow, green and red colours used by Aung San. The group, consisting of about twenty students, provided security for Aung San Suu Kyi in the first few years after 1988. ‘One-to-one, Daw Suu was very kind and nice, but when we were working she could be very stern and strict. She left us with the impression that we had to take the job very seriously.’

  Phone Myint Tun accompanied Aung San Suu Kyi on some of her travels outside Rangoon. He recalls one visit to Pathein, when the Tatmadaw divisional commander Nyi Aung sent a message warning her that if she went into the Irrawaddy Division, his troops would ‘crush’ her. ‘She replied saying “Let’s work together.” When we went to Pathein, we were staying in a house and the military placed blockades in front of it so that no one could go in or leave,’ Phone Myint Tun recounts. ‘She went to speak to the soldier who was guarding us, and he told her that he was ordered not to allow us out. She ignored him, and just left. The soldiers did not shoot, but the commander came later and reprimanded them, asking why they let Aung San Suu Kyi leave!’ Phone Myint Tun was jailed in 1991 for four years, but after his release he worked for Aung San Suu Kyi again for a year, serving as a contact point between her and political prisoners.

  Another of Aung San Suu Kyi’s security guards, Tri-color member Moe Myat Thu, recalls another occasion in 1989 where her steely determination was again on display. Students had gathered to commemorate the first anniversary of the massacre at Myaynigone, when many high school students had been shot dead by riot police during the 1988 protests. Aung San Suu Kyi spoke to the crowds outside the Sanchaung Township offices, and then went on to the NLD headquarters. Meanwhile, students had lined the streets in Myaynigone to present her with flowers. ‘When we reached the Myaynigone junction, some students were waiting for us with flowers. But the area was surrounded by soldiers, and soon after her car had passed, soldiers began to arrest students. They then opened fire into the crowd,’ says Moe Myat Thu. Aung San Suu Kyi’s car was stopped at the traffic lights, but by the time the lights turned green and the car crossed the junction, the students had dispersed.

  She had not heard the shooting, and so she asked where the students with the flowers had gone. We explained to her that the soldiers had fired two or three times. By this time we had driven past, and so she told the driver to turn around and go back. There were many soldiers, but she ordered the driver to stop and she got out for a short ceremony to honour the students. Many people were watching from afar, and a senior officer came over to her. ‘Daw Suu,’ he said, ‘don’t do like that.’ After that two of our colleagues were arrested and taken away and after we drove away, the army fired into the crowd many times. When we stopped our car, soldiers shot over our car into the crowd, and she heard the gunshots very clearly.

  What happened next is an example of her courage and determination. ‘After fifty metres she ordered the driver to turn around and go back. He didn’t want to, and she got very angry, tapping his seat and saying “Go back, go back.” He went back, and we were surrounded by many police and soldiers who pointed their rifles at our car.’ Aung San Suu Kyi and her close aides were taken to the Sanchaung Township SLORC office. ‘Half an hour later a senior officer arrived. Aung San Suu Kyi and he talked politely, and she asked “What action do you plan to take?” They decided not to take any action, and we returned to the NLD headquarters.’

  Moe Myat Thu lived in Aung San Suu Kyi’s compound in Rangoon from 26 August 1988 until his arrest on 20 July 1989. He helped provide security at her Shwedagon pagoda speech and organised the NLD youth wing, and served two terms in jail as a result, during 1989–1992 and 1995–2001. ‘After her speech at Shwedagon, on 26 August 1988 all around Rangoon there was unrest at night,’ he recalls. ‘We decided to stay at her compound to protect her. She thanked us very much.’ He says her courage came not from an absence of fear but an ability to overcome fear. ‘In some of her speeches she said that everybody has fear, but we have to do the right thing. She is a human being, and she has fear, but she decided that there were things that she had to do, she must do.’

  Her critics say this core of steel has meant she has been too stubborn and principled, and should have compromised early on. A former Western ambassador who knew her, however, profoundly disagrees. ‘She is very tough-minded, but that doesn’t mean she can’t compromise,’ he says. ‘I am not sure that much was being offered. What compromises was she asked to make? All politics ultimately is about choices, but you only make a choice when you have to. She was always in a position of weakness, because she was under house arrest of some sort. If you’re under house arrest, it’s a bit hard to be called upon to compromise.’ In fact, dialogue has been her principal demand all along – it is the Generals who failed to compromise.

  By the summer of 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo had come to be regarded by the SLORC as too much trouble. On 20 July, they were placed under house arrest. Soon afterwards, Suu Kyi began a hunger strike, demanding to be moved to Insein Prison along with several thousand of her detained party colleagues. Min Ko Naing had been arrested in March 1989, and Moe Thee Zun had escaped to the Thailand–Burma border.

  The regime began to use virtually every conceivable tactic to ensure that it won a mandate in the elections in 1990. According to Dominic Faulder writing in the Wall Street Journal Asia, entire areas of key cities such as Rangoon, Mandalay, Prome and Taunggyi, deemed to be hostile to the regime, were simply levelled and inhabitants resettled to new ‘satellite’ towns. ‘Western diplomats believe that up to 500,000 people may have been transplanted,’ Faulder wrote. The country was closed off to foreign reporters, and draconian restrictions were imposed on those participating in the election. Faulder describes ‘the usual tools of tyrants to thwart any real campaign’, including a ban on any gathering of more than five people, censoring of campaign speeches in the media and no publication of a full list of candidates. In addition, ‘candidates may not criticize the SLORC’.43

  Despite the detention of key leaders, and severe harassment and restriction in the period leading to the election, polling day itself on 27 May 1990 was widely acknowledged to be free and fair. And even though key leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi were unable to take part, the NLD won an extraordinary victory, gaining 82 per cent of the parliamentary seats. ‘The SLORC was probably as taken aback as almost everybody else,’ writes Lintner. ‘It was utterly unprepared for an NLD victory of this magnitude.’44 The regime had done all it could, bar rigging the ballot itself, to ensure victory for itself, and yet still it failed. It had massively underestimated the scale of support that Aung San Suu Kyi’s party could command, even when handicapped, and had dramatically overlooked the depth of anger and hatred the people felt towards the militar
y.

  To the world’s astonishment, the regime reneged on all its pre-election promises to honour the result. On Armed Forces Day the previous year, Saw Maung pledged that ‘after the election, the … representatives elected by the people will form a government…. We, the Tatmadaw personnel, will go back to barracks.’45 Just a few months later, he promised to ‘transfer the power … If a government could be formed with a majority of votes, I will hand over. I agree with it.’46 As far back as 22 September 1988 the military intelligence chief, Khin Nyunt, told foreign military attachés that ‘the Tatmadaw would systematically transfer power to the party which comes into power after successfully holding the general elections.’47 Yet in May 1990, when the result was not the one they intended, those promises were conveniently forgotten. The regime began using delaying tactics, claiming that first a National Convention would have to be held to draw up ground rules for a new constitution, and then the elected representatives could meet to draft the constitution. After that, the constitution would have to be put to the people in a referendum. Military rule would continue until that process was complete.

  The NLD responded to the regime’s delaying tactics by holding a special meeting at the Mahatma Gandhi Hall in Rangoon in July. The resulting statement, known as the Gandhi Hall Declaration, called for the convening of Parliament by 30 September. Elected MPs then began secret discussions about the formation of a parallel government. Such an idea alarmed the regime. The NLD Central Executive received a letter warning them not to proceed with forming a government. ‘U Kyi Maung, the NLD Chairman, gave me a copy of the letter and asked me to translate it into English,’ recalls Nita May. ‘He said “If something happens to me”, spread this news. It was a confidential letter, so if anyone searched my house I would be caught red-handed. I was so scared I could not sleep for the whole night.’ Nita took the document to the embassy the next day, translated it, made copies and returned the original to U Kyi Maung. Soon afterwards, he and other elected MPs were arrested. Aung San Suu Kyi’s cousin Dr Sein Win and a few other MPs escaped just in time, and fled to the Thailand–Burma border. There they formed a government in exile, known as the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB).

  Lian Uk, an elected MP and Vice-President of the Chin National League for Democracy (CNLD), escaped arrest three times. In one incident he went into an empty house and hid in the bedroom. When the owner returned, however, and found a strange man in her bedroom, she called the police, and Lian Uk went on the run again. In January 1991, the regime published his photograph in the newspapers, with a notice for his arrest. ‘People came to me and said “This is you, isn’t it?”,’ he recalls. ‘“No, no,” I told them. “It’s just someone who looks a bit like me.”’ After months in hiding, he escaped across the border to India.

  Dr Thaung Htun, a medical doctor, was a democracy leader in Kyaunggon, in the Delta, who had to flee to escape arrest after the 1988 uprising. In December 1988 he arrived on the Thailand–Burma border, and immediately set to work treating students suffering from malaria. He was then elected to the ABSDF’s Central Committee, and assigned to establish a foreign affairs office for ABSDF in Bangkok. In 1990, at the age of thirty-one and with ‘no foreign experience at all’, he was sent to Geneva to brief the UN Human Rights Commission, and has been the democracy movement’s UN specialist ever since. After the elections, he helped the NCGUB begin international advocacy from Bangkok, but at the end of a lobbying visit to New York in 1993 Thailand’s National Security Council banned him, Dr Sein Win and three others from returning to Thailand. Since then, the NCGUB has established itself in the United States, starting with funding from the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. In 1994, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for dialogue between the regime, the democracy movement and the ethnic nationalities, and two years later the NCGUB opened a New York office.

  Frustrated at the lack of international action following the regime’s refusal to accept the election results, a small group of students decided to take extreme action. On 10 November 1990 Soe Myint and a few other ABSDF members hijacked a plane from Bangkok to Rangoon, and diverted it to Kolkata. ‘After the election, media attention was gone. We decided to do something dramatic, to highlight the situation in Burma,’ Soe Myint explains. It was, however, one of the most peaceful hijackings ever. ‘We decided to do it without arms. Instead, we just used a “Laughing Buddha” statue. We put some soap and wire in it, and said it was a bomb. Later, we explained that we were Burmese student activists and that we would not harm the passengers.’ On arrival in India, the hijackers were met with a surprisingly warm welcome. They were allowed to hold a press conference in the airport, to explain their action, before being arrested. At court the next day, they were covered in garlands, and after three months in jail they were released and granted asylum. Soe Myint transformed himself from student activist, soldier and hijacker into a journalist, working for the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) and Radio Free Asia (RFA), and then founding Mizzima News.

  Inside Burma the struggle has continued in various forms. In 1992 Than Shwe replaced Saw Maung as head of the junta. In 1996, student protests broke out again, and as before were met with brutality. Like many previous protests, the 1996 uprising was sparked by a minor incident: an argument between three students and the owner of a food stall. ‘Police reportedly interceded and manhandled the students,’ Time magazine reported. ‘Frustrated friends, unable to protest the beatings or even learn exactly what happened, started small rallies against the police.’48 These culminated in a gathering of 2,000 students protesting against police brutality, demanding the right to form student unions, and demonstrating for democracy.

  John Jackson, one of the founders of Burma Campaign UK, was in Rangoon at the time. Caught up in a protest by several thousand students at a junction in northern Rangoon late at night, he witnessed the brutal crackdown, an experience which was instrumental in his decision to focus on Burma full-time. ‘Troops came down the streets with water cannons and charged the students,’ he recalls. Jackson’s family were Anglo-Burmese who had left Burma in 1957 due to the deteriorating political situation, and here, forty years on, he was seeing it for himself. In an article for the Irrawaddy, he describes what happened next:

  I was lucky to get past the roadblocks which prevent most people from seeing what happens to peaceful demonstrators in Burma. I hailed a taxi driver who understood the importance of bearing witness to such events who took me on a special route around the blockades. My enduring image of that night was a lone student who stood up just as a water cannon was pointed at him and his sitting friends. He stood up to hold a student flag firm, while his body was blasted with a high-powered jet – it reminded me of the man who stood in front of a tank during the Tiananmen Square protests. At that point a rock was hurled at me by a riot policeman, missing my head by an inch. I ran for cover and had to spend that night with a group of other frightened ‘visitors’ to Burma, in an old tenement block, hiding from the riot police and military intelligence officers. From a fifth floor balcony, I laid low and heard the shouts and screams of the ‘mopping up’ operation.49

  A few months before the 1996 protests, Aung San Suu Kyi and the democracy movement lost one of their closest friends. Leo Nichols, born in Rangoon in 1931 as the son of a Greek shipping family, had been Honorary Consul-General for Norway, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland. Arrested in April 1996 for possession of an unlicensed fax machine, he was sentenced to three years in jail. He used to visit Aung San Suu Kyi for breakfast every Friday after her release the previous year; consequently Michael Aris believed Nichols was jailed ‘solely because of his loyal and courageous friendship for the leader of the movement for democracy and human rights in Burma, my wife Suu.’50 He died after just two months in prison, reportedly after suffering a stroke and being denied proper medical treatment. As the obituary in the Independent put it, ‘he was not a political man, but becomes another martyr for the c
ause of democracy in Burma’.51

  In the midst of continuing brutality and thuggishness, the junta attempted an image re-make. In November 1996, it launched Visit Myanmar Year, a campaign designed to attract hundreds of thousands of tourists. Aung San Suu Kyi was clear what she thought. ‘Our opinion is that this whole Visit Myanmar Year is intended solely to build up SLORC’s image, and we cannot support it,’ she told Asiaweek. ‘The preparation of tourist sites and the beautifying of certain places for the benefit of tourists have resulted in the suffering of a lot of people.’52 It was also predicted to bring in 100 million dollars for the regime.

  The following year, in another purely cosmetic change made on the advice of a public relations firm, the SLORC abandoned its Orwellian name and renamed itself the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).

  Aung San Suu Kyi has never given up, despite spending most of the years since 1989 under house arrest. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but being under house arrest could not receive the award in person, so her sons accepted it on her behalf. The following year, Michael Aris issued a public statement expressing concern about his wife’s well-being. ‘I have reason to believe that the circumstances under which she is held now pose a grave threat to her life. The meagre personal funds she has used to maintain herself while her solitary detention continues are now almost exhausted … I am now very concerned that soon she will have no means at all of sustaining life … In a situation so dark and remote I fear it will be impossible to follow the course of events in the days ahead.’53