by David Eimer
Khin Kyi, Aung San’s wife and the mother of Aung San Suu Kyi, was an equally strong character. She shed no tears at her husband’s funeral, determined to deny his killers the chance to revel in their deed. Left alone to raise her three children, Khin Kyi was a strict and demanding parent and passed on her unwavering belief in Buddhism to her only daughter.
At the time of the 1988 protests, though, there was no hint that Aung San Suu Kyi would go on to become as uncompromising and self-contained a character as her father, or turn out to be as stubborn and single-minded as her mother. By the time I moved to Yangon, Daw Suu’s unwillingness to brook criticism was already legendary in embassy and NGO circles, as was her disconcerting habit of castigating both local and foreign politicians, diplomats and senior aid organisation figures for their apparent failings.
In 1988, however, Aung San Suu Kyi was still little known in Burma, having only arrived back in the country in March that year to care for her ailing mother after almost three decades away. She had left Yangon in 1960, first for New Delhi when her mother was appointed Burma’s ambassador to India, before studying at Oxford and then working for three years at the United Nations in New York. By 1972 she was back in Oxford and married to Michael Aris, an English academic. They had two sons and for the next sixteen years, Daw Suu was a largely anonymous housewife in north Oxford.
Yet there is no doubt that Aung San Suu Kyi was already an icon in waiting as she stepped on stage at the Shwedagon in August 1988. Her status as Aung San’s daughter tapped into the Asian tradition of political dynasties, where prominent families assume the roles of long-gone feudal overlords. She appeared also to embody the Buddhist archetype of a benevolent, charismatic and enlightened leader. Aung Sang Suu Kyi became the undisputed star of the pro-democracy movement almost overnight, while the black and white photos of the petite and pretty woman with flowers in her hair commanding vast crowds were seen around the world.
A month after her Shwedagon bow Daw Suu co-founded the NLD. But by then the uprising was over, as the junta reincarnated itself with a new leadership, at least in public, and viciously put down the demonstrations. Within a year Aung San Suu Kyi was confined under house arrest in her mother’s home on University Avenue by Inya Lake, with only the odd servant and the superannuated disc jockeys of the BBC World Service for company. She would remain there for much of the next two decades. Two years later, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Min Ko Naing was less lucky. He went on the run after the protests ended, moving nightly between the houses of sympathisers, before being arrested a few months later. Incarcerated in the British-built monstrosities that are Burma’s jails, often kept in solitary confinement and sometimes suffering torture, he spent most of the next twenty-three years in prison.
Tall and vigorous in a white shirt and green longyi, Min Ko Naing proved to be a little grumpy when finally I tracked him down to the run-down hall on the campus where he was attending a reading by 1988 activists turned writers. It was only ten in the morning, but the sky was a high, clear blue and the heat was already taking its toll. By the time I arrived at the meeting my shirt was decorated with sweat stains.
Out of jail for only two months, his release an offering to Washington from the former junta, Min Ko Naing appeared to be in surprisingly good health. But he wasn’t in the mood to talk, at least not when I approached him after waiting almost an hour for a break in the readings. Cagey on the subject of Aung San Suu Kyi, he seemed stoical about the way their lives had diverged since 1988.
Nor did he express surprise at the junta’s conversion to a quasi-civilian government. He was certainly in no rush to hail their decision to allow the NLD to take part in the upcoming by-elections, or to free him after so long in prison. ‘I was arrested for political reasons and I was released for political reasons,’ he told me. ‘I am not an optimist or a pessimist about the present situation. I look always to the reality.’
Life under the generals had transformed Min Ko Naing from a small-town student into a zealot for democracy. It was a journey similar to the one undergone by Aung San in the 1930s. He arrived at Rangoon University in 1933 as the eighteen-year-old son of a provincial lawyer. By the time he left in 1938, without a degree, he was a vehement critic of British rule, increasingly drawn to Marxist theory, and the firebrand organiser of numerous strikes.
Rangoon University in the 1930s was in the grip of a fervent student nationalism noteworthy even by its own subversive standards. The list of Aung San’s contemporaries reads like a Who’s Who of Burmese politics between the 1930s and 1980s. Future junta leader Ne Win was expelled in 1931 after failing his biology exams. U Nu, who became Burma’s prime minister after independence, before being overthrown by Ne Win, was also briefly suspended along with Aung San in 1936 for leading a strike.
Studying alongside them were other men – and they were all male – who would play lesser-known roles in the struggle for independence and in the fierce battles for political power afterwards. Most were from the provinces, and it was only when they reached Rangoon University that they got a first-hand glimpse of how colonial rule had turned the then capital of Burma into an alien city. With the campus sitting on the edge of Golden Valley, the students did not have to look far to see the grand houses that were proof of how the British were benefiting at the expense of the locals.
Those 1930s activists, though, were also following in the footsteps of previous protestors. In December 1920, Rangoon University students organised the first anti-British strike ever held in Burma. It was a shocking event, catalysing political awareness throughout the country. Angered by a new law that all classes be taught in English, the students boycotted lectures. The strike spread to schools across Burma, with pupils ignoring their normal curriculum in favour of self-taught classes on nationalism.
Rebellion at Rangoon University didn’t end after independence. The student body fractured into factions, mirroring the fight for political control between various communist groups and the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, the coalition led first by Aung San until his death and then by U Nu. Ethnic minority students began to agitate for self-rule, too. Former Rangoon University students from Shan State organised the first armed Shan opposition to the government in 1958.
Around the same time, Kachin students formed the Seven Stars group, regarded as the forerunner of the Kachin Independence Organisation, which is still campaigning for autonomy for Kachin State. And in the days before the Rohingya Muslim minority became Burma’s favourite public enemies, first marginalised and then persecuted, Rangoon University’s Rohingya students had their own association.
So synonymous was the university with protest that one of Ne Win’s first acts after seizing power in 1962 was to order the student union to be dynamited as revenge for protests against the coup, thus setting a repressive, vindictive tone for his regime from the beginning. Around one hundred students died in the ensuing rioting. More were killed in December 1974, when soldiers broke up demonstrations on the campus. Ne Win justified the deaths years later by using the language of the 1930s student rebels, saying it was his duty as a ‘revolutionary leader’ to crush dissent.
That continuity of resistance, whether against the British or the junta, informed the 1988 generation of student protestors, like my friend Tim. ‘At some level, we were trying to connect with the past,’ he told me. ‘We knew the history: Aung San, the strikes and student movements of the 1920s and 1930s. We talked about the 1962 and 1974 protests in our speeches on campus. I knew about the 1974 protests because my uncle had been involved in them. I learned later that some of the 1988 student leaders were in touch with some of the 1974 people.’
Forced into exile, Tim never graduated from RASU but is still proud of his time there. ‘We were the last generation of real RASU students. After 1988, the junta began moving most of the faculties off the main campus to the outskirts of Yangon, so the students couldn’t gather in the city proper to cause trouble. They’re letting some
undergraduates back now, but it’s not the same,’ he said.
Scattering the students to the four winds of Yangon had a profound effect on the quality of their education, too. Many people were forced to study remotely, rarely meeting their lecturers. And that was when the universities were open. From 1962 onwards, colleges were periodically shut by the generals, sometimes for years at a time, as retribution for protests. Those who can afford it now attend universities overseas, but for everyone else a broken higher education system is just another unwelcome legacy of military rule.
Tim had hardly been a model student even when classes were being held. He chuckled as he recalled his misspent youth at one of our meetings in a coffee shop near People’s Park, an expanse of green west of the Shwedagon. ‘I was a fourth-year geography student in 1988. I didn’t go to many lectures. I thought I was destined for the army anyway, like a lot of my family. Back then, I was a member of the elite. I grew up living next door to senior junta people, I had money and my friends were the same. Nineteen eighty-eight was a real wake-up call for someone like me.’
Sporadic protests had been going on for months, but the death of a Rangoon Institute of Technology (RIT) student in a confrontation with riot police on 12 March 1988 sharply escalated tensions between the students and the government. Four days later, Tim was one of a group milling around the recreation centre on the RASU campus. ‘The crowd got bigger and bigger and people got up on the roof of the centre to give speeches, telling people how the police had raided the RIT campus the day before and fought with the students there.’
Spontaneously, as he remembers it, Tim decided to join the speakers on the roof. ‘I talked about Ne Win and what he’d done over the years; rumours and stories I’d heard from my family and other people with connections to the government,’ he recalled. ‘Then everyone started to leave the campus. The idea was that we were going to join up with students from RIT and other universities.’
Under a sweltering sun, close on four thousand students marched along Pyay Road on the western edge of Inya Lake, until they were forced to come to a halt at a spot known as White Bridge. ‘We ran into an army roadblock: barbed wire, two armoured cars at each end and soldiers behind the wire pointing guns at us,’ said Tim. ‘We had no banners or anything, the protest wasn’t really planned. We wrote down our demands with a pencil on a piece of paper and handed them over to one of the officers.’
Their terms were simple: an inquiry into the death of the RIT student, an official apology to his family and the right to form a student union. ‘We weren’t asking for anything political really,’ said Tim. ‘But I was freaking out by now. There was the army in front and the crowd of students behind and I thought, “If they shoot, there’s no cover.” We all raised our arms to show that we weren’t carrying weapons and we sang the national anthem, to tell the soldiers that we were Burmese too. Then we sat down on the road.’
Whether the students’ demands were ever communicated to the generals is unknown. But after thirty minutes of waiting for a response, Tim noticed that people towards the back of the protest were starting to push their way out. ‘That chaos got closer and closer, until I saw the police charging the crowd. They were riot police and they were hitting people with batons. Then we started to run away from the police towards Inya Lake. Some people jumped in the water, but the police dragged them out to beat them.’
Escaping in the other direction, Tim and other protestors leapt over the fences guarding the houses on Pyay Road and ran through their gardens. ‘We were very angry, screaming, “The police are killing the students.” People just looked at us as if we were mad,’ said Tim. ‘I ended up jumping on a bus and going home.’
Estimates of the number of students who died are as high as two hundred. Many more were arrested. The attack by the riot police and the soldiers on a peaceful crowd who were sitting placidly lasted an hour and left large pools of blood congealing on the road. Some people were simply bludgeoned to death, others drowned in Inya Lake. A few were shot. Women who were caught were gang-raped in police vans.
Even by the junta’s brutal standards, the level of violence employed was excessive and unnecessary. An inquiry was launched into the death of the RIT student, but Ne Win never acknowledged what happened at the White Bridge. For Tim and many of his contemporaries it was the end of their university careers, although they didn’t know it then.
‘We went back to the campus the next morning and that’s when I heard about the number of deaths and that female students had been raped,’ said Tim. ‘The rector asked us to stay on the campus. He said if we didn’t leave we would be OK. So we stayed. But over the next couple of days people started to disappear. They had been arrested. And then the campus was shut down. I went back briefly in June when it reopened, but I was kind of lost with so many people I knew gone. But then they shut it down again and I never went back.’
For the next six months people took to the streets in cities and towns across Burma calling for the introduction of multi-party democracy. The protests peaked in August with the general strike and the rally of half a million people at the Shwedagon. An evening curfew was imposed in Yangon and groups of five or more people were banned from gathering. Ten thousand felons were released from jail, an attempt by the junta to smear the demonstrators as mere criminals. And the death toll continued to mount.
By the time what is known in Burma as the ‘8888 uprising’ came to an end in late September, with the army machine-gunning its opponents on Yangon’s streets, up to ten thousand people are believed to have been killed. Most perished in clashes with the police and soldiers. But some died at the hands of the protestors. ‘It was a crazy time,’ said Tim quietly. ‘There were so many informers among the students and the professors. At meetings, someone would shout “He’s a spy” and then everyone would set on him. People were being beheaded – literally.’
There is no doubt that the six months from March to September 1988 was the most violent period in urban Burma since the Second World War. It was the closest the junta came to being forced from power. The response of the generals was to recruit more soldiers; over the next ten years the Tatmadaw would double in size. Only the army could guarantee the nation’s security, even if it meant killing its own people to do so.
Protestors were arrested in their thousands. Others fled to the jungle along the border with Thailand, where they found refuge in the camps of ethnic minority militias. Tim was already gone by then. ‘They came to arrest me at my parents’ house in early July, but they missed me because I was staying in a nearby temple,’ he remembered. ‘The next day I caught the overnight train to Mandalay and stayed with my aunt. She knew I was in trouble and after one night she took me to a monastery in Bagan.’
Sporting a shaven head, Tim posed as a novice monk while plotting his escape from Burma. ‘It was abroad or the jungle. There was no other choice. The monks were planning a meditation retreat in the US. They asked for my help preparing their documents. I went with them to Yangon and the American embassy and spoke to one of the staff there. She said, “Don’t you want to come to the States too?” I had a passport, so they gave me a visa and the monks got a disciple in the US to pay for my air ticket.’
Landing in Los Angeles as a counterfeit holy man, Tim stayed with the monks initially, before striking out on his own. ‘I got a job pumping gas in Pomona, where there was a Burmese community. My first ever job for $4.25 an hour,’ he grinned. ‘I ended up going to college in San Diego and staying in the States for twenty-six years.’
Coming back in 2014 offered the chance to reconnect with his RASU classmates. ‘I see a few of the 1988 crew. We have to make allowances for each other after so long apart. A few are bitter. They resent me for leaving while they were struggling or in prison. There are some disappointed people and some jealous people. I try not to impose my views on them, try to talk to them in a way they understand.’
Tim’s time in exile has left him with his own scars. He is a gregarious man,
but also unmarried and solitary, a self-made loner. ‘My parents never really knew much about what I did in 1988,’ said Tim. ‘It was safer that way. Not talking was a way to protect the ones you love. Now, it’s kind of second nature not to share stuff. All my girlfriends have complained that I won’t talk about things. They think it’s a trust issue. But it’s not, it’s just the way I am now.’
Totalitarian regimes survive on terror, on scaring people into self-censoring their thoughts and actions, forcing them to withdraw into themselves so that they present no external threat. Everyone who experienced the half-century of the junta suffered that repression of feeling at one stage or another. Learning to live again without the fear of knowing you can be arrested at any time is no easy task.
Returning to Yangon and working for an NGO is Tim’s way of purging the past. ‘It’s a very different life to the one I had here before 1988,’ he said. ‘I’m working at ground level now. It’s been liberating, actually. There’s a lot to reflect on when you sit in a bamboo hut that is falling apart and home to seven people. You see what life is for them and it affects you. Coming back has been a very profound and emotional experience.’
4
Shanty Town
Thida and I were on our way to Hlaing Tharyar, Yangon’s most notorious township. We had been crawling through the rush-hour traffic from Min Ma Naing for over an hour, following the Yangon River as it slides west past downtown and then turns north. Now, we were opposite Yangon’s largest fish market and almost at the bridge that would take us across the water, sometimes known in this part of town as the Hlaing River, to the far west of the city.