Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  Right in the middle of the disaster effort, while millions of Burmese were breaking their backs to keep body and soul together, a referendum was held about a new constitution. The junta had worked on the issue for years and asserted that it would lead to the democratization of Burma. Their suggestion was, however, a parody of democracy. The military was to be guaranteed 25 percent of the seats in parliament on a permanent basis, and persons who were or had been married to foreigners were not to be permitted to stand as candidates for any political positions. This stipulation was aimed straight at Aung San Suu Kyi, who in 1972 had married Englishman Michael Aris. The constitution did not have the federal stamp that the ethnic minorities in Burma demanded either. They wanted a large degree of self-government, but the junta suggested that several of the most important political spheres should end up under the central government’s control.

  When the referendum results had been counted, the junta asserted in all seriousness that 99 percent of the Burmese had voted and that more than 90 percent had voted in favor of the new constitution. The entire world laughed scornfully, but the generals did not even show a ghost of a smile. Thereafter the junta gave notification that an election was to be held in Burma—or Myanmar, as they call the country. The population was to be given the opportunity of voting for a parliament, yet the generals had rigged the election process in order to be able to retain their power. Aung San Suu Kyi was a threat to their entire carefully worked-out plan. She was just too popular. The junta realized that the election would be out of their hands if she were to be released. That was what had happened on the previous occasion, in 1990, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD won over 80 percent of the seats in parliament.

  For this reason the junta made an issue of Yettaw’s little swim. They accused Aung San Suu Kyi of two things. First, she had broken the house arrest rules by letting John Yettaw into her house, and second, she had broken the law stating that one had to apply for special permission if anyone apart from the family were to spend a night in one’s home.

  The matter was decided in one of the junta’s military courts. The junta wanted at all costs to avoid extensive popular protests so they used a courtroom in the notorious Insein Prison. The room had a filthy stone floor and a roof but no walls. The two judges sat at the front on chairs with two-yard-high ornamented backs. It looked as though each of them was sitting on a royal throne. To the left of them sat Yettaw and his lawyer, and to the right, Aung San Suu Kyi’s lawyers. There was no sign anywhere in the courtroom of a tape recorder, a court secretary, any books, or other indications of what was to take place. Aung San Suu Kyi arrived just before the trial began.

  “Everyone says that she has such personal charm that I had really expected to be slightly disappointed,” said the Swedish diplomat Liselott Martynenko Agerlid, who was there to cover the trial. “But when she stepped out onto that cement floor, she was 100 percent charisma.” She talked and laughed with her lawyers and then she turned to the public. She spoke in a calm, quiet voice, and the audience had to closely gather around her in order to shut out the cackle of hens, the traffic noise from the street, and the patter of rain on the metal roof. She thanked them for coming and asked them to convey her gratitude to their governments. The presence of other countries was important, quite apart from whatever the outcome of the trial might be.

  Both Aung San Suu Kyi and her two domestic servants were sentenced to three years in prison. By direct order of the junta leader, Than Shwe, however, the punishment was lowered to eighteen months’ continued house arrest. Yettaw was sentenced to seven years’ hard labor for, among other things, “illegal swimming.” As a Westerner and an American citizen he did not need to worry, however. He was released after U.S. senator Jim Webb traveled to Rangoon and held negotiations to free him. John Yettaw was able to travel home to his wife and children in Falcon, Missouri.

  Now the junta had the opportunity to fix the elections the following year. With Suu Kyi safely locked up in her home at Lake Inya, nothing could stop them from finalizing their plan to give power to a civil government and still keep the military in charge. A long process was about to end—a process the junta had been forced to start in the late 1980s when Aung San Suu Kyi had returned to Burma.

  3

  The Homecoming

  Late in the evening on March 31, 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi and her husband, Michael Aris, were at their home in Oxford. It was a Friday. Michael had one or two matters on hand at the university the following day but otherwise they were looking forward to a quiet family weekend.

  They had been living in Oxford for some time now, after having lived in different places for long periods of time, often separated from each other by the continents as well as the oceans of the world. Kim and Alexander, their two sons, had fallen asleep, and the parents had just made themselves comfortable in their armchairs for an evening of reading when some jangling telephone rings broke the silence. The call came from Rangoon. A close friend of the family told them that Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother, Khin Kyi, had had a stroke. Her condition was critical and the doctors did not know whether or for how long she would stay alive.

  If a person’s life can be defined through separate moments, an occurrence or an opportunity that fundamentally changes his or her choice of path and priorities, then this was without doubt such a moment for Aung San Suu Kyi. “She put the phone down and at once started to pack. I had a premonition that our lives would change forever,” wrote Michael Aris several years later in the book Freedom from Fear.

  When Aung San Suu Kyi arrived in Burma to stand watch at her mother’s bedside at Rangoon General Hospital, she had not lived in the country for more than twenty-five years. At the age of fifteen she had moved to New Delhi with her mother, who had been appointed as Burma’s first female ambassador. When she was old enough to go to university, she was sent to Oxford, where she met Michael Aris. At the time of their wedding in 1972, Suu Kyi had already been working for several years as an employee of the United Nations in New York. She became pregnant with their first child, Alexander, when they were living in Bhutan, and from there they moved to Simla, a town in the Indian mountains. After that they returned to Oxford, leading a cosmopolitan life in a country that was a far cry from the isolated nation Burma had become under the military dictatorship.

  Her mother, on the other hand, had returned to Burma after her years as ambassador and Aung San Suu Kyi had been to visit her practically every year in the 1970s and ’80s. During these visits, friends and relatives updated her on what was happening in the country. They told her about the junta, about the human rights violations of the military, the wretched economy, and the wars against the ethnic minorities in the border regions of the country. “Sooner or later the discussions were always about politics,” she said in an interview with Alan Clements in the 1990s, published in his book Voice of Hope. Those visits to Burma were, however, just visits and nothing else. There was nothing to indicate that she was seriously planning to live in her old home country, even less that she would shortly be one of the most talked-about political leaders.

  One could of course assert that it was not her mother’s illness at all, nor that telephone call, that decided the matter. As the daughter of Aung San, Burma’s freedom hero, Aung San Suu Kyi had a heritage to live up to, people expected her to take a leading role, and it was perhaps the case that fate quite simply caught up with her.

  Her father had freed Burma from British colonial dominion and drawn up the country’s first democratic constitution in the 1940s. He was a person with strong charisma who also had support from most of the country’s ethnic groups. Most Burmese and almost all the ethnic minorities counted on Aung San to become the first prime minister in an independent Burma, but a few months before the official independence he was murdered by a rival group within the nationalist movement. Soldiers burst into the government’s meeting rooms in central Rangoon and opened fire with their automatic carbines. Several ministers were killed at the same time as Aung San. M
any people are of the opinion that this led to the military’s takeover of progressively more power, which finally resulted in the overthrow of the popularly elected government in a 1962 coup d’état.

  Aung San is still held in high regard in Burma. His portrait is seen hanging on walls everywhere, from the smallest teahouse to the barracks of the military and the offices of the democratic movement. Everyone wants to bask in the glory of the mythical Bogyoke (General) Aung San.

  Aung San Suu Kyi was only two years old when her father was murdered, and even though she had never had any concrete plans before 1988 of living a life in the public eye, she has been constantly aware of the significance of her heritage. During a period of time in the early 1970s, when she was working in New York and Michael Aris found himself in the little mountain principality of Bhutan on the other side of the globe, the two, who had only recently fallen in love, were able to communicate solely by means of letters. Over the enormous distance in time and space they carried on a conversation about their common future. In one of her letters Aung San Suu Kyi wrote,

  I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them. Would you mind very much should such a situation ever arise? How probable it is I do not know, but the possibility is there.

  Sometimes I am beset by fears that circumstances and national considerations might tear us apart just when we are so happy in each other that separation would be a torment. And yet such fears are so futile and inconsequential: if we love and cherish each other as much as we can while we can, I am sure love and compassion will triumph in the end.

  She knew that a time might come when Burma would demand her undivided attention. “She wanted me to promise not to stop her if her nation ever needed her. I made that promise to her,” said Michael Aris later, in an interview with the New York Times.

  But despite her social and political heritage, Aung San Suu Kyi totally refrained from getting involved in her home country’s political game until 1988. In The Voice of Hope, she describes how the fate of her father; his exhausting, self-sacrificing work during the fight for freedom; as well as his ultimate sacrifice made her choose to turn away from a public role. She did not want it. And when she had now returned she had no plans for remaining there permanently. The only idea she had, apart from looking after her mother, was to start a library in the name of her father, as she herself has said.

  The most likely scenario was thus that Aung San Suu Kyi would return to Oxford and continue the modest academic career she had started after the years raising her two small children. The world would then—at best— have gotten to know her as an author and researcher in the field of Burmese literature.

  But history does not always choose the most likely path.

  Her mother’s illness coincided with a time of political upheaval in Burma. In the mid-1980s, the United Nations classified the country as one of the ten poorest in the world. The classification was made according to the wishes of Burma itself. If one landed on the list of the poorest countries, then one was actually given more advantageous terms by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and Burma needed money.

  In the twenty-six years that had passed since the military junta took power in 1962, the country had been transformed from one of the most promising in Southeast Asia into a total economic and political failure. Unemployment had reached an all-time high and inflation had eaten up people’s savings. The price of rice could rise by 20 to 30 percent in a month. In parts of the country famine was rife, and in the border regions a seemingly never-ending civil war raged between the central government and the ethnic minorities. In the autumn of 1987 Ne Win, the leader of the junta, made the situation much worse in a single blow by annulling all existing banknotes. His daughter later declared that it was his astrologist who had recommended this measure to gain control over the economic development. From one day to another the old banknotes were replaced by new ones with new denominations, all of which were divisible by nine, that being Ne Win’s lucky number. Suddenly the bazaars and teahouses were flooded with new and not terribly rational forty-five-and ninety-kyat banknotes. At this time most Burmese—and with good reason—did not trust the country’s banks. They had their savings stowed away in their mattresses, and the decision to do away with the old banknote denominations, coming as it did with no warning, meant that millions of people lost all their savings overnight.

  The day after this decision, the students at Rangoon’s Technical University started a public protest. They left their dormitories in the northern parts of the city and went out onto the streets, throwing stones at public buildings, smashing up cars belonging to government officials, and destroying a few traffic lights while they were at it. The police intervened with violence and pushed the students back, but that did not quell their desire for revolt. A few weeks later the students in the state of Arakan (now Rakhine), situated in the east, went out in similar demonstrations, as was also the case in the little town of Pyinmana in central Burma. Since they had no political leaders of their own, several of the students were carrying placards with pictures of Aung San, which they continued to carry even when the police were shooting at them. At about the same time, a small number of bombs exploded in Mandalay and Rangoon. One of them partially destroyed the Czech Embassy, for reasons unknown.

  It was far from the first time that social unrest had broken out in Burma. Students and activists have in principle always gone out onto the streets at the first possible opportunity. They protested after the military coup in 1962. They did it again when the former secretary general to the United Nations, U Thant, was to be buried in Rangoon in 1974. The junta had struck back with violence every time, quickly and effectively. All the same, the junta must have understood that this time they were faced with something that was qualitatively new. The students never seemed to give up, and under the surface the whole country seemed to be seething with anger. All that was needed was an igniting spark. And as was so often the case in Burma’s history, it was the students at Rangoon University who started the fire.

  Three weeks before the arrival of Aung San Suu Kyi, three young students went into a teahouse in the vicinity of the university. With an earthen floor and bamboo poles as walls, it was small and shabby but popular among the students because the prices were reasonable. And then there was a tape recorder and several cassette tapes with the latest artists. When these three students arrived the tape recorder was occupied by a group of local citizens who were listening to traditional Burmese music. The young people had brought a cassette featuring the artist Sai Hti Hseng, a kind of Burmese Bob Dylan. After a while they asked the owner of the teahouse if he could change the cassette, but then the older men started protesting loudly. The quarrel developed into a scuffle, and one of the men hit one of the students, Win Myint, on the head with a chair. He had to be taken to the hospital. The police intervened, but it turned out that the man who had struck Win Myint was the son of one of the local powers-that-be, and he was released almost immediately from custody. The students became incensed and they went out onto the streets yet again to protest. Now they were several hundred, and on their way to the police station they were met by a force from the Lon Htein riot police, who opened fire on the totally defenseless students. A young man called Maung Phone Maw was shot and killed, and the fury of the students grew even fiercer. The day after, the Lon Htein surrounded the whole campus area at the Rangoon Institute of Technology (RIT). The students responded by carrying out new demonstrations within the campus area. After twenty-four hours, the gates of the area were forced by military vehicles, and soldiers went in with batons and guns and indiscriminately hit anything that moved.

  Meanwhile, the authorities activated the state propaganda apparatus in order to stop the protests from spreading. The state radio put out the information that the students inside the RIT had refused to negotiate and that military action had therefore been necessary. And the government newspaper Working People’s Daily reported that
Maung Phone Maw had not been killed by the soldiers at all but in a brawl between civilians.

  No Burmese in their right mind believed these reports. After twenty-six years of military government, they had learned that the newspapers and the radio were full of lies and that the truth must be sought elsewhere. Rumors about the bloody scenes that had occurred at the RIT spread like wildfire through the city, and at that point even the students at the larger Rangoon University woke up. A demonstration with a few hundred participants was quickly organized to march to the RIT, which was quite close by. After only half a mile or so, at the shore of Lake Inya, when the sun was at its zenith in the skies, the demonstration was blocked by the army. Thick layers of barbed wire had been rolled out, and when the students turned around they were met by the Lon Htein, which blocked the road in the other direction. The students were caught in a bloody vise, and this time the junta had decided to make an example of their prey: they went in with the intention of killing. Young women were knocked unconscious and raped, others were left to drown at the water’s edge. Over forty students were locked up in military vehicles where they suffocated to death in the oppressive midday heat.