Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  This was the starting point for a summer of popular protests and violent riots, which were joined by more and more Burmese. Buddhist monks went out onto the streets in the thousands and workers left their factories. Green Islamic flags mingled with nationalist Bamar Kingdom (ancient kingdom of ethnic Burmese) symbols and flags with the peacock motif, which was a symbol for the ever stronger student movement. Pastors from the ethnic minorities carried around signs saying “Jesus loves democracy.” Even journalists from the country’s newspapers, previously under such iron control, broke free and now wrote what they understood as the truth about the country’s development. The guidelines from the Ministry of Information, which landed by fax every morning and which had previously ruled the entire system of news reporting, were now thrown in the wastebasket. The situation was so chaotic that nobody stopped them.

  “We had a month of freedom before the regime took control of the situation again. It was a strange experience to be able to write at last about what was really happening in the streets,” said one ex-journalist when I met him several years later in Rangoon. He had been convicted and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment after that brief period of freedom.

  Aung San Suu Kyi kept her distance from the huge demonstrations. During the first months after her arrival in Burma, she more or less lived in the same ward as her mother and returned to 54 University Avenue only to bathe, launder clothes, and tend to practical matters. But even if she had not had her mother to take care of, it is doubtful whether Aung San Suu Kyi would have involved herself as early as that. The streets were not her arena. “I am simply not the kind of person who joins demonstrations,” she said a few years afterward. “I admired the ones who did what they did, but it was a world I knew nothing about. I belonged to the silent majority who supported them.”

  On the other hand, she witnessed the effects of the junta’s brutality when mishandled and severely injured young people were admitted to the hospital. At the same time she often received visits from elderly politicians who had known her father and who were now sounding her out to see what the possibilities were of engaging her in the struggle against the junta. As early as the late 1970s, when she visited Burma to collect books for a library project in Oxford, U Tin Moe, professor of literature at the University in Rangoon, had asked whether she would consider doing anything to break the power of the military. “Yes, of course, uncle,” she had replied. “But what?” At that time no answer had existed. Now the older politicians had realized that the protest movement needed an ideological center, something or somebody that all groups—students, ethnic minorities, religious associations, and union organizations—could be united around. For decades the junta had divided and ruled, playing out the many groups against one another in order to keep the power to themselves. A unifying force was required if the revolt were to succeed.

  Revolt is the time for rumor, and for several weeks a rumor circulated that Aung San Suu Kyi’s older brother Aung San Oo was on his way from the United States, at the head of a vast army, in the same way their father had invaded Burma together with the Japanese in the 1940s. But Aung San Oo had never shown any political ambitions. He had been an American citizen for years and he had been educated as an engineer. During the 1990s it also became apparent that he didn’t sympathize with the democratic movement.

  Aung San Suu Kyi was already in the country and she shared to the greatest possible degree the same values as the democratic movement. Who then could be better suited for the task than the daughter of the man who had freed Burma and then united the country after the colonial era? In other words—was there anything that Aung San Suu Kyi could contribute? She received the question on several occasions and deliberated on the possibility, but she gave no clear answer during the spring and summer.

  At this point in time she was not a well-known person among the population in Burma either. Since she had left the country in 1960, the government newspapers had regularly published small notices about her, but always very sparingly, and when she appeared in public, it was always on account of the fact that she was the daughter of Aung San. After three months in the hospital, it was clear that her mother was not going to survive. Her condition steadily worsened, and Aung San Suu Kyi saw to it that she was able to live at home during her last days. In July the school term had come to an end in Oxford, so Michael and the boys were able to travel to Burma to visit her and also take a final farewell of Khin Kyi. For the first time in almost four months the whole family gathered together under one roof.

  The day after their arrival, on July 23, the junta leader, Ne Win, resigned. The pressure from the popular protests and the brutal violence in the streets had been too much in the end. It was a historic moment. Ne Win had run the country since the military coup in 1962, and poverty, the international isolation, and the military oppression were to a great degree his personal creation. Now he spoke regretfully about his “mistakes” and promised that a referendum would soon be held about the future of the country. It was slightly unclear what he meant but still a hopeful piece of information for the masses in the streets. The dictator’s resignation was celebrated like a victory. Although the price had been high, since most people who had taken part in the demonstration knew somebody who had been imprisoned, mishandled, or killed, now a change seemed possible.

  When Aung San Suu Kyi saw Ne Win’s farewell speech on the government TV channel it was as though something fell into place inside her. “She, like the whole country, was electrified,” wrote Michael Aris in Freedom from Fear. “The people at last had a chance to take control of their own destinies. I think it was at this moment that Suu made up her mind to step forward.”

  However, their hopes of a rapid transition to civil rule were almost immediately quashed. After Ne Win’s defection, Gen. Sein Lwin was appointed as prime minister. It was Sein Lwin who had led the bloodbath against the students in the spring of the same year and he was commonly known by the nickname “the butcher from Rangoon.” He was not exactly a politician whom the people would ever trust.

  Sein Lwin initiated a state of emergency in the whole of Burma, and people in the streets became incensed. On the morning of August 8 at eight minutes past eight the greatest popular manifestation of unrest in the history of Burma started. Peter Conrad, a Buddhist theologian living in Bangkok, happened to be in Rangoon on that day. His eyewitness account is included in Bertil Lintner’s book Burma in Revolt:

  I was standing on the balcony of my hotel room just before 9 a.m. when I spotted some masked youths on bicycles racing down the almost empty road outside, calling out something in Burmese. Apparently they were announcing that the demonstrators were coming. A few minutes later, some students came and formed human chains around the soldiers who were posted at the main intersections. I was told that the students intended to protect the soldiers from possible, violent attacks from the demonstrators. And then they came in a massive column across the railway bridge at the Sule Pagoda Road with flags and banners, heading for the city centre. There were thousands of them, clenching their fists and chanting anti-government slogans.

  Thousands was an understatement. Actually millions of people went out onto the streets in Burma that day. In at least 200 of Burma’s 314 “townships,” vast demonstrations were carried out. In Taunggyi alone, the capital of the mountainous Shan state in eastern Burma, over a hundred thousand people demonstrated.

  Sein Lwin let them have their way until late in the evening on August 8. Then he sent in the military to clean up. During that night and the five or six following days, several thousand people were killed and even more imprisoned. There are brutal, almost indescribable stories from those who were there when the killing started. On my first journey to Burma in the mid-1990s, I met a tour guide who had been a student in 1988. He had marched in one of the front ranks in Rangoon when the military opened fire. A girl behind him had been hit by a bullet in the throat and died immediately. His best friend, walking beside him, had been shot in the leg and was
then dragged away by his terrified friends along the filthy streets. The tour guide was arrested during the night and sentenced to a year in prison, after a summary trial.

  “I hate this regime,” he said, glancing nervously over his shoulder, afraid that one of his countrymen might hear him and report him to the authorities.

  It was in this heated political environment that Aung San Suu Kyi chose to make a public appearance. Together with U Tin Oo and some others from the political opposition she wrote a letter to the junta in which they suggested a transitional solution in order to resolve the political deadlock. A committee without any connections to the military would take over the work of government and help guide the country toward democracy. The letter was basically about the need for dialogue, a theme that has returned time and again through the years in Aung San Suu Kyi’s rhetoric. But the generals chose to understand the letter as pure provocation. One could say that this was the start of several decades of conflict between Suu Kyi and the military.

  In that situation Aung San Suu Kyi did not yet see herself as the leader of the democratic movement. A few days after August 8, Aung San Suu Kyi met a group from a union organization that had been formed by teachers at the University of Rangoon. They had read the letter she had written to the junta and urged her to take on the role as leader of the opposition.

  “She was very doubtful,” said one of those who had been at the meeting. “She explained that she was not a politician. On the other hand, she could consider mediating between the demonstrators in the streets and the military junta.”

  However, the shabby white stone house by Lake Inya quickly became a central meeting place for the young and growing democratic movement. Activists, journalists, and student leaders flocked around Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as a group of older statesmen, defectors from the junta who had for a long time wished for a different development for their country. Former minister of defense U Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung, who had fought with Aung San against the British in the 1940s, were among the most prominent of those previously in power who now stood up for the democratic movement. Both had joined the army and made careers as officers during the democratic period in the 1940s. U Kyi Maung resigned as an officer in 1963, one year after the military coup, while U Tin Oo left the junta during the repercussions in connection with U Thant’s funeral in 1974. Both became critics of Ne Win and spent several years in prison. For both it was a great development that Gen. Aung San’s daughter now stood on the side of the opposition. “I knew her father,” said U Tin Oo in an interview, “and she resembled him. The way she talked, her features, the way she smiled and moved her head. All her gestures were similar to her father’s.”

  And living amid all this, in the middle of the tropical heat during the rainy period, the violence in the streets, and the more and more crowded housing on University Avenue, was Suu Kyi’s family. Those months in Rangoon are described with tenderness by Michael Aris a few years later in his book Freedom from Fear:

  Despite all the frenetic activity in her house, it never really lost the sense of being a haven of love and care. Suu is an astonishing person by any standards, and I think I can say I know her after twenty years of marriage, but I shall never quite understand how she managed to divide her efforts so equally between the devoted care of her incapacitated, dying mother and all the activity which brought her the leadership of the struggle for human rights and democracy in her country. It has something to do with her inflexible sense of duty and her sure grasp of what is right and wrong—qualities which can sit as dead weight on some shoulders but which she carries with such eminent grace.

  The bloodbath on August 8 did not stop people from continuing to demonstrate. They defied the machine guns and went out once again onto the streets, and in the end the junta realized that they had to change their strategy. Sein Lwin was dismissed from office as president and leader of the junta and was replaced by the well-known historian Maung Maung, who had written, among other things, an ingratiating biography of the dictator Ne Win. For the first time since the coup in 1962, there was a civilian at the head of the country’s political leadership. The state of emergency was annulled, and Maung Maung repeated Ne Win’s promise that a referendum would be held about the political future of the country.

  On August 26, Aung San Suu Kyi gave a major public speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda. A few days earlier she had made a minor public appearance outside the Rangoon General Hospital, but that had chiefly been a dress rehearsal. This was the real thing. The place had been chosen with great care so that nobody would miss the symbolism. Shwedagon, with its two-hundred-foot-high completely golden stupa (the “tower” and center of the Buddhist temple) is one of Buddhism’s holiest places. For the Burmese the pagoda has served for a long time as a symbol of the struggle against British colonial power. Aung San had besides given one of his most important political speeches at the same place in 1946, when Burma stood on the verge of independence.

  Information varies concerning the numbers who came to listen to her on this occasion, but it was probably over half a million people. They poured in from the whole region around Rangoon. Several thousand had made their way there as early as the previous evening and spent the night in front of the pagoda, and others had gotten up early in the morning and walked several kilometers in order to arrive on time.

  The propaganda apparatus of the junta was also active. They had understood that they were being confronted by a threat that was out of the ordinary. A small truck drove around distributing great piles of leaflets. When the spectators picked up the leaflets, they read the brutal attacks against Aung San Suu Kyi and her husband, from “call you bastard foreigner and buzz off” to “genocidal prostitute.” Several of the drawings on the leaflets were downright obscene.

  Aung San Suu Kyi arrived at the meeting a few minutes late. She was, as always, wearing traditional Burmese clothes: a short-sleeved white blouse; a colorful Burmese sarong, known as a longyi; and a white flower in her hair. Her ever greater band of followers had heard rumors that the junta was planning to murder her, and therefore she was surrounded by a dozen young women who were all dressed identically so that it would be difficult to distinguish her from the group.

  Suu Kyi felt calm and sure that her voice would carry out to the vast public, but she grew nervous when her party was barely able to make its way through the mass of people. She realized that the meeting was going to be well and truly delayed. She finally climbed up on the temporary podium in front of the pagoda despite all. Behind her the organizers had suspended a large portrait of Aung San and placed a flag from the 1940s freedom movement beside it. Once again: nobody could miss the symbolism.

  The inadequate sound system and all of the people meant that most of them did not even hear what she said. But Aung San’s daughter had come to give them support in the struggle against the junta, and that was enough. It was just the kind of support they needed. In all the dark times the people of Burma had been through since the military had escalated its violence, she herself acted as an arrow of light and life. “Such was the mood of yearning and anticipation that she could have recited a laundry list and still her every word would have been applauded,” wrote Justin Wintle in his book Perfect Hostage.

  “We couldn’t really picture her before the speech at Shwedagon,” says Maung, who was later to become a leading member of the democratic movement’s youth league. “Many of us were pretty skeptical. She had lived her whole life abroad. What could she know about our problems? Could she even speak Burmese? But she convinced us.”

  She gave her speech in almost perfect Burmese, and many of those who remembered her father were astonished too by the great resemblance between them. They looked alike, with the same slim figure and stately deportment, the same intelligent dark eyes, and the same clean facial features. They both had the same way of speaking as well. Aung San had been a more vociferous and agitating leader, more of a troublemaker, some might certainly say, but they had the same way of going straight
to the core of a problem, without any circumlocution, and they used the same brief sentences and striking expressions.

  She began her speech with a tribute to the students and other activists who had walked in the vanguard of the popular uprising, and she commanded there to be a minute of silence in homage to all those who had sacrificed their lives for a better future of their country. It must have been a magic moment, when half a million people turned from a noisy, seething mass into one that stood still and totally silent. After that Aung San Suu Kyi declared her reasons for choosing to get involved with the democratic movement:

  A number of people are saying that since I have spent most of my time abroad and am married to a foreigner I could not be familiar with this nation’s politics. . . . The trouble is that I know too much. My family knows best how complicated and tricky Burmese politics can be and how much my father had to suffer on this account.

  She talked about her father’s doubts about actually taking upon himself the role of prime minister after the independence. He had realized that the road forward after the liberation would be complicated and that great personal sacrifices would be required of those who stood at the head of the new nation. He had spoken about withdrawing and becoming an author instead.

  Since my father had such a desire I too have always wanted to place myself at a distance from this kind of politics. . . . So someone might ask why should I now be involved in this movement. The answer is that the present crisis is the concern of the entire nation. I could not as my father’s daughter remain indifferent to all that was going on. This national crisis could in fact be called the second struggle for national independence.

  That final expression is utterly central for the mission Aung San Suu Kyi now took upon herself. She intended to carry on her father’s work. The Burmese had been robbed of their independence through the military coup in 1962 and the oppression that followed it. Now she spoke persuasively for the transition to a multiparty system with democratic elections. On one point, though, it was clear that she differed radically from her father. Aung San never hesitated to use violent methods in the struggle for independence. In fact, he agitated actively to get the young nationalists in the 1930s to arm themselves. On the contrary, Aung San Suu Kyi was of the opinion that the new democratic movement must be a nonviolent movement. Violent protests would only give the junta an excuse to reciprocate. But despite her pacifist convictions, deeply rooted in Buddhism and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas, she asserted anyway that the army must have a function to fill even in the future democratic Burma.