by Amitav Ghosh
In the following decades, the people of Burma learned to live with quotidian violence on a scale unimaginable elsewhere until the global advent of terrorism. The notoriously phlegmatic writer Norman Lewis traveled through Burma in 1951 and found that guerrilla warfare had become so widespread as to be commonplace: bridges were demolished within hours of being rebuilt; railway tracks were repaired and blown up at clockwork intervals; trains and riverboats were fired upon with mechanical regularity. "In the situation of this unfortunate country," he wrote, "there is an element of grim Wellsian prediction come to fulfillment."
General Aung San may indeed have been the only Burmese leader who could have averted the civil war. A few months before his death, he had negotiated a landmark treaty with several minority groups, having been able to persuade them that their rights would be protected in a quasi-federal union. The treaty, known as the Panglong Agreement, laid the groundwork for what could well have been a viable federal union. With General Aung San's assassination, the agreement foundered.
In his death, General Aung San became Burma's most pervasive icon. It is easy to imagine that the people of Rangoon, beset on every side by civil strife, needed a symbol to remind them that Burma was more than a flag and a fantasy—that an eventual Union of Burma was indeed thinkable, even achievable. Aung San became the embodiment of that possibility. Despite the strains of the civil war, Burma clung fast to its parliamentary constitution: through the next decade, elections were held regularly, and the press flourished.
Then, in 1962, General Ne Win, the chief of the army, abruptly took control of the government and suspended the constitution. The new regime met with immediate civilian resistance. Students sealed off Rangoon University and declared it a "fortress of democracy." The police opened fire, killing an unknown number, blew up the student union building, and then closed the university. Many students went underground; many fled to insurgent-controlled areas on the border.
Soon after General Ne Win took power, it was announced that the ideology of the new regime was to be "the Burmese Way to Socialism." The general had a history of peculiar behavior and soon became famous for his tantrums and an obsession with the number nine. He was said by many to be mad and had undergone psychiatric treatment in Vienna. His professed ideology proved to be no ideology at all but a bizarre mix of xenophobia and astrology, with a smattering of Marxism. General Ne Win's one claim to legitimacy was a connection to Aung San, who had once been his comrade in exile, and the general made the most of the link. As the reality of Burma grew ever more distant from Aung San's vision, his image proliferated: on coins and banknotes, on street corners, in marketplaces.
It takes a military dictator to believe that symbols are inert and can be manipulated at will. Forty years after his assassination, Aung San had his revenge. In a strange, secular reincarnation, his daughter, Suu Kyi, came back to haunt those who had sought to make use of his death. In 1988, when Burma's decades of discontent culminated in an antimilitary uprising, Aung San Suu Kyi (pronounced Awng Sahn Soo Chee) emerged from obscurity as one of the country's most powerful voices, the personification of Burma's democratic resistance to military rule.
A Penguin on an Ice Floe
The first time I met Suu Kyi was in 1980, at Oxford, where I was then a graduate student. I had been given a package for her by a mutual friend in New Delhi; Suu Kyi went to high school and college in Delhi before going on to Oxford. She still has many friends in India. Her mother served as Burma's ambassador to India for several years.
In 1980, Suu Kyi was thirty-five and was leading a life of quiet, exiled domesticity on a leafy street in North Oxford, bringing up two sons, then aged seven and three, and writing occasional articles for scholarly journals.
I saw her next in a magazine photograph, eight years later: she was speaking into a microphone. It was August 26, 1988, and she was addressing a vast crowd in the shadow of the great golden spire of the Shwedagon Pagoda, in Rangoon. She was instantly recognizable and yet utterly transformed.
I learned later that her presence in Burma was largely fortuitous. In the course of a peripatetic life, spent in many countries abroad, Suu Kyi had returned regularly to visit her aging mother in Rangoon, and news that her mother had suffered a stroke was what took her back in 1988.
Mass protests against military rule had started a couple of weeks before Suu Kyi arrived in Rangoon. In March a brawl in a tea shop provoked a clash between university students and riot police, and forty-one students died of suffocation while being detained in a police van. The other students responded by taking to the streets in protest against the regime. The demonstrations continued over several weeks. Three months later, in June, student protests erupted again, eventually forcing the resignation of General Ne Win. The scale of the protests increased after the dictator's departure, culminating in a nationwide general strike on August 8. In commemoration of this day, many Burmese still refer to the democracy agitation as the Four Eights Movement, because of the date—8/8/88. Thousands of people—not just students but teachers, monks, children, doctors, and workers of all kinds—joined the demonstrations. That day the army made its first determined attempt to crush the movement, and hundreds of unarmed demonstrators were shot dead. The killings went on for a week, but demonstrators continued to flood the streets.
Pictures of General Aung San were a prominent feature of the student-led demonstrations. He had himself begun his political career as a student leader, and the generation that formed the nucleus of the democracy movement was quick to lay claim to his legacy. Suu Kyi's family house, on University Avenue, became a center of political activity, and on August 26, in her speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda, she announced that she was joining the movement. "I could not, as my father's daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on," she told the hundreds of thousands of people who had gathered to listen to her. "This national crisis could, in fact, be called the second struggle for national independence."
A bloody denouement was a few weeks away. On September 18, a group of senior military officers took over the government. The junta called itself the State Law and Order Restoration Council; it rules under that name to this day, although some of its senior members have changed. In Burma, the regime is universally referred to by the almost comically sinister acronym SLORC. The word is pronounced with an appropriately slurping, swallowing sound—"like Ian Fleming's SMERSH," as a diplomat once observed.
The junta's first move was to eliminate the democracy movement. Army units took control of the streets, machine-gunning any large gatherings, and arrested hundreds of activists. A mass exodus resulted: as many as six thousand students fled to insurgentheld areas on the border. Many joined the insurgents; some are still fighting.
Once SLORC had secured power, it announced that it would hold elections. In response, Suu Kyi and her associates formed a political party, the National League for Democracy. Over the next several months, Suu Kyi toured the country, campaigning. She drew vast crowds at every appearance, and her popularity became a matter of increasing concern for the new regime. On July 20, 1989, the day after the forty-second anniversary of her father's death, she was put under house arrest and barred from taking part in the elections. Her disenfranchisement did not have the effect the junta had hoped for. When elections were eventually held, the following year, her party won more than 80 percent of the seats. Faced with the prospect of being ousted from power, SLORC ignored the result. Suu Kyi was offered safe passage out of the country on the condition that she never return. She chose to remain in Rangoon under house arrest and became the living symbol of Burma's predicament. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but she was unable to collect it: she was still under detention.
Suu Kyi's house arrest ended on July 11, 1995. Within hours of the announcement, a crowd gathered outside her house. She made a brief appearance, but the crowd wanted more. A larger crowd gathered the next day and a still larger one the day after that, waiting in silent vigil until she appeared
at the gates. After making such impromptu appearances for several days, Suu Kyi decided that her daily addresses were taking too much of her time, so she resolved to hold regular meetings on weekend afternoons instead. Thus was invented a unique political institution: Suu Kyi's gateside meetings in Rangoon.
Before traveling to Burma, I had often wondered how SLORC had succeeded in keeping its hold on power for the past eight years, despite the overwhelming popular support for Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. The answers became evident once I was there. Military rulers in impoverished countries are frequently brutal, but they are rarely able to muster either the resources or the expertise required to operate complex systems of social control. Burma is an exception. Despite the country's meager resources, its successive military regimes have succeeded in creating systems of surveillance that are unsurpassed in the scope of their intrusiveness.
To take just one example: every household in Burma must register its members with the local authority; no one may spend the night at another household without obtaining permission from the local ward chairman. Members of ethnic minorities frequently have difficulty registering changes in their "guest lists." In Rangoon, I met a woman who, after three years of wedlock, still had to queue for weekly permission to stay at her husband's apartment.
References in the press to poverty are automatically censored, and so are references to corruption, bribery, and even disease. "The censors live in a world of illusion," a well-known writer told me. "On the one hand, they know everything; they have informers everywhere. They know how much people earn, how much they spend. But in an authoritarian culture people lead two-track lives."
At the end of our harrowing conversation, I asked, "What would you write about if there were no censorship?"
He threw up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. He had spent almost ten years in Burma's prisons, most of them in an island concentration camp, where he had had to forage for his food. "Since 1962, we have lived through the Dark Ages," he said. His voice shook as he tried to control his rage. "Torture, murder, poverty ... I have never been able to write about any of these things."
The country's chief censoring body is the Press Scrutiny Board. Among the items that attracted its ire last year were two magazine covers: one featured a penguin on an ice floe, and the other pictured a young woman seated among fallen flowers; both were interpreted as oblique references to Suu Kyi.
A Secular Reincarnation
The first time I attended one of Suu Kyi's weekend meetings, early this year, I was taken aback by her public manner. I was startled by how much she laughed. At times she would break up in giggles, with a hand over her mouth; at other times she would laugh full-throatedly, throwing her head back. I had expected, I suppose, a certain solemnity of demeanor—if for no other reason than merely as an acknowledgment of the atmosphere of intimidation that surrounds those meetings. The people in the crowd didn't seem to care: they laughed with her, uproariously.
The meetings are held at four in the afternoon. Crowds start gathering at midday, and they vary in size from four thousand to ten thousand. Suu Kyi addresses them as she stands at her gate. People sit in orderly rows opposite her, hugging their longyishrouded knees, while venders hawk cheroots, betel, and skewers of blackened chicken. Vans, cars, and minibuses throng the avenue, squeezing slowly through the crowd. The passengers try to look nonchalant, but their composure dissolves once they spot Suu Kyi, and they smile and wave, craning their necks to get a full view. From time to time, intelligence men holding video cameras stand up and pan slowly over the crowd.
The form of the meetings is simple. Suu Kyi answers written questions given to her by members of the crowd. The questions range from matters of food and health to politics and literature. On Sundays she is joined by at least one senior member of her party, a reminder that the National League for Democracy is a party and not an individual.
University Avenue is a curving, tree-shaded street that skirts the picturesque Inya Lake. Suu Kyi's house, screened by a mass of unkempt greenery, is not visible from the street. When I later walked through the house's blue gates to meet her, I was surprised by how modest and dilapidated the building was: a plain but solid two-story bungalow, with a portico and veranda overlooking a garden and the lake.
I was shown to a large room on the ground floor. A portrait of her father hung on a flaking, mildewed wall, slightly askew. Close by was an orange banner bearing the symbol of the National League for Democracy, a fighting peacock. Through a barred window I caught a glimpse of the lake, its sunbathed surface speckled with lotus pads.
When Suu Kyi entered the room, dressed, as usual, in a Burmese sarong, I knew why she had made such an impression on me when I first met her. It is not her beauty, although her beauty is considerable. It is that she emanates an almost mystical quality of solitude—not solemnity, for she is always animated, either laughing or driving a point home with an upraised finger, but a sovereign, inviolate aloneness.
I had prepared a long list of questions, but now, in her presence, I didn't know where to begin. The unexpectedly complicated business of entering her house had unsettled me: the taxi driver who dropped me at a distance and sped away; the camera-wielding intelligence agents who loitered by her gate; the smiling policeman who inquired politely after the name of my hotel. After these sinister preliminaries, the normalcy of her house and the calm authority of her presence came almost as a jolt.
I glanced at my notes. Most of my questions were about her party's policies, SLORC's machinations, and so on. I knew now what her answers would be. She meets with foreign reporters almost daily, and her answers are unvarying; they could hardly be otherwise, considering how often the questions are repeated.
She never leaves any doubt about her opposition to foreign investment in Burma under the current regime, although at the time we spoke she stopped short of calling for economic sanctions. Also by implication she is critical of attempts to lure tourists to Burma. She is unequivocal in her criticism of a so-called constitutional convention that was called by SLORC three years ago; the constitution that was proposed, she points out, would effectively institutionalize military rule, since it reserves a large proportion of seats for military appointees. At the same time, she is generally nonconfrontational in her references to the current regime; she rarely even uses the term "SLORC," preferring to use the phrase "the authorities."
As I listened to these answers, I knew what I really wanted to ask: I wanted to know what it was like to be under house arrest for six years; what it meant to be separated from one's spouse and one's children, to be offered the option of leaving and turning it down. I thought of my own family, thousands of miles away, and the pain of even a brief separation; of the times I'd found myself looking at my watch and wondering whether my children were asleep or at play.
Her gateside meetings, I'd noticed, were attended by dozens of foreigners. Only a few were reporters and journalists; most were tourists and travelers. They were people like me, members of the world's vast, newspaper-reading middle class, people who took it for granted that there are no heroes among us. But Suu Kyi had proved us wrong. She lived the same kind of life, attended the same classes, read the same books and magazines, got into the same arguments. And she had shown us that the apparently soft and yielding world of books and words could sometimes forge a very fine kind of steel.
I too had come on a pilgrimage of sorts. What I really wanted to know was, "Where did you find the courage to do what you have done? What gave you the strength?" And what could one possibly learn of this in an hour—or two hours, or even a hundred? It would take a poet or a novelist years of labor to find a way of understanding what she had done.
The futility of my prepared questions made them inevitable. "So many people around the world marvel at how you survived those years of house arrest," I said. "In a way, house arrest must be worse than prison—"
She interrupted me with a laugh. "Sometimes I thought it would be better in
prison," she said, "because I wouldn't have to cope with keeping the house clean."
Every time it rained, she said, the roof sprang new leaks, and she had to run up and down the stairs positioning buckets. "It was a great nuisance. Sometimes I thought, I wonder if it leaks at Insein jail? Whether the prisoners have to run around with buckets to catch the leaks?"
"Did Buddhism help?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "Buddhist meditation helped because it created a sense of awareness and a sense of calm."
"What was it like," I asked, "the first time you saw your children after those years of house arrest?"
She paused to reflect. "I didn't see them together," she said. "My elder son came first, you see. He was fifteen when I last saw him, and he had already taken on his adolescent shape. But my younger son was eleven, and he was still a little boy. When I saw him again, he had changed completely. He had changed physically. If I had seen him out on the street, I would not have known he was my son. I was very happy that nothing had happened—that nothing had really affected the closeness between us."
She stopped. She evidently found it difficult, possibly distasteful, to talk about her family to a stranger. I felt that I had trespassed, in a small way. Like Suu Kyi, I was brought up to believe in the appropriateness of a strict separation between the public and the private, the political and the domestic. In this view, it is wrong as well as unseemly to reduce a vast political movement to the career of a single leader—to identify the aspirations of millions of people with the life of an individual.