Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  DormanSmith chose to let the case rest but carried on working against both Aung San and PVO. His policy was not appreciated either by the politicians in London or by Lord Mountbatten, the head of the British command in India. Mountbatten was on the contrary impressed by Aung San’s calm and integrity, and he understood him to be a unifying force in a Burma that already found itself on the point of total chaos.

  Some months later Aung San won a significant victory when London decided to recall Dorman-Smith home. His replacement, Hubert Rance, immediately dissolved the political council that had acted as the country’s interim government under British control. He later allowed the AFPFL to occupy the majority of the seats in a new council. It was never said aloud, but it was soon also clear that the era of the White Paper was past. Aung San was appointed as vice chairman in the new council, second only to Rance, and he was also given responsibility for key issues such as defense and foreign affairs. And with that it was also clear that older nationalists like U Saw and U Ba Maw had lost their influence over the process of independence.

  Aung San’s promotion meant, however, that the AFPFL split into two sections. The communists had hoped for a more radical revolution. They had planned for comprehensive strikes and wanted to exploit the uncertain situation after the war to establish a socialist state with close relations to the Soviet Union. It was unthinkable for them to sit in some kind of transitional government in which the British still had the final word. Thakin Soe had already defected in the spring and fled to the Irrawaddy Delta. He had gathered together a minor guerrilla army (the Red Flag Communists) and was planning an armed revolt against the central government. At that point Than Tun and Thein Pe also broke away from the AFPFL and started their own communist guerrilla group, the White Flag Communists.

  Their defection was a heavy breach of unity among the nationalists, but it also meant that Aung San no longer needed to pretend. His political rhetoric grew milder, and he appeared more and more as a pragmatic social democrat rather than as a bombastic communist. Whether it was his personal eminence or real conviction that made him change his image is difficult to say.

  In January 1947, a delegation with Aung San at its head traveled to London to meet Prime Minister Attlee and to negotiate the final details in the agreement that was to give Burma its independence. On the way to England Aung San stopped in New Delhi, where he spent a few days at the home of Prime Minister Nehru. True to his habit, Aung San had not taken any notice of the dress code. He was wearing the same shabby uniform as during the invasion four years previous. Nehru laughed when he saw his Burmese colleague and tried to persuade him that a Japanese uniform was not the most suitable outfit for an official visit to 10 Downing Street. Nehru sent for a tailor who sewed a three-piece suit for Aung San; he is wearing it in all the photographs that have been preserved from the visit to London.

  In New Delhi, Aung San held a press conference in which he confirmed that the Burmese delegation was planning to make specific demands in London: total independence, meaning no British domination in any kind of diffusely composed commonwealth where the British would be on top as usual. He also repeated the threat of a new armed revolt. Before their departure the AFPFL had alerted PVO to full readiness if it should be seen that the talks with Attlee were a failure.

  However, Aung San and Attlee reached a compromise, and at the end of January an agreement was signed confirming that Burma would become independent within a year. Democratic elections were to be held in April, and the newly elected parliament’s first task would be to draw up a new constitution based on democratic and federal principles—federal in the sense that the ethnic minorities would have great influence in their respective regional states and that they would be guaranteed a certain number of seats in parliament and the government. The AFPFL would lead an interim government under British supervision.

  The agreement worsened the split within the nationalist movement. U Saw was a member of the delegation but refused to sign the document, and as soon as he had returned to Rangoon he and Ba Maw started their own right-wing party and accused Aung San of having sold himself to the imperialists in return for personal power.

  Aung San did not have time to worry about such accusations. They were predictable, and he had always counted on U Saw and Ba Maw starting their own party as soon as independence was a fact. Immediately after his arrival home, he traveled on to the little town of Panglong in the Shan state. Representatives from the ethnic minorities had gathered there to decide whether one state would be established within the borders we nowadays recognize as Burma, or whether they would continue with their demands for total independence. In principle there was nothing to hinder the second alternative. Economically they were of course underdeveloped, but that was the case for most of the Asian states after the war. Administratively, they would have great difficulties to overcome. Several of the regional states had during only a few decades gone from being local tribal communities to regional states in the British Empire. However, that did not make them any different from many other states that had been colonized and now had to build up their own societal structures. Geographically and demographically they were qualified, without a doubt. The Kachin state in north Burma is about as large as Austria. The Shan state has a population today of around four million and is more extensive than most European countries.

  Most assertive in their demands for independence were the Karenni people. They had been very close to the colonial power and understood that the British had promised them their own state. On September 11, 1946, one local Karenni leader had appointed a government for the “United Karenni States.” Other Karenni leaders had reinforced their arsenals, and if it proved necessary for achieving independence they were now ready for war.

  The developments in the Rakhine state in western Burma were just as explosive. There the Buddhist monk U Sein Da had assembled a guerrilla army to restore the old Rakhine Kingdom. At the same time a Muslim guerrilla force had been created to defend the Rohyinga people’s rights against U Sein Da’s soldiers. The Muslims and the Buddhists had lived side by side for centuries in the region, but that unity was now in the process of cracking.

  The Karens were also dubious about becoming members of the new union. The war had deepened their historical distrust of the Bamar. They even sent a delegation of their own to London in the hopes that Attlee would give them an agreement similar to the one Aung San had been given. However, the government in London had decided to stake everything on Aung San, and the Karen delegation did not get to meet any important civil servants or politicians. During some painful days in the British capital, they were shown the various cultural and historical sights.

  Several days before the meeting in Panglong, the Karen National Union (KNU) had been formed. The Karens were totally focused on independence and were present in Panglong purely as observers.

  Aung San laid all his political prestige on the line and succeeded in persuading the representatives for the Chin, Kachin, and Shan peoples to sign an agreement about becoming members of the new union. The Shan princes were given a special clause giving them the right to secede from the union after ten years if they were not satisfied with the cooperation. The same right was given to the Karenni.

  There were still many loose ends, but the success in Panglong demonstrated that Aung San’s plan for progress was watertight. In April, Burma’s first democratic elections were held and the AFPFL won a walkover. The elections were indeed boycotted by both the “red” and the “white” communists, and likewise by the Karens in KNU, but the election victory nonetheless legitimized Aung San’s leadership. He was on his way to becoming independent Burma’s first democratically elected prime minister.

  He would have attained that post, if it had not been for those shots at the Secretariat.

  The Secretariat is a redbrick building covering almost an entire block in an area near the port of Rangoon. It is surrounded by a high brick wall with barbed wire along the top, and an overgrown garden. It
s windows look emptily out in the direction of the shabby center of Rangoon, but although having been abandoned, it is watched day and night by armed guards. In 1947, it was a building completely open to all. Despite Rangoon being the capital for Burma’s government-to-be, despite the sensitive negotiations with the ethnic groups, and despite the existence of infinite numbers of weapons in circulation after the war, security around those who were to constitute the new leadership of the country had not been reinforced. Aung San was utterly unprotected.

  On the morning of July 19, Aung San did the same as he did most mornings during those hectic months in 1947. He awoke at 5 a.m. in the family’s house on Tower Lane. It was situated on a verdant hill in a wealthy residential area just north of Lake Kandawgyi. The two-story house was built in a colonial style with a white-plastered tower, and it was completely surrounded by a white stone wall.

  Aung San ate a breakfast consisting of noodles and drank a cup of tea, and then he hugged his three children before walking out to the waiting official car that would take him to the Secretariat. During the morning he was to spend a couple of hours on administrative tasks before meeting his government cabinet at half past ten. Some of the most promising politicians of the day were members of the government, and Aung San had consciously chosen several representatives from the ethnic minorities, for example the Karen leader Mahn Ba Khaing and Hsam Htun, one of the princes from the Shan people. Normally, the government gathered in the British governor’s office, but on this particular day there was nothing on the agenda that warranted the attendance of the governor.

  It seemed to be a regular working day, but the politician U Saw had other plans. On his command a group of soldiers was on its way to the Secretariat. U Saw had been planning the attack for months. Thoughts of revenge had taken root as early as when Governor Rance had allowed Aung San and the AFPFL to gain a majority in the interim government. U Saw understood himself to be the rightful leader of the nationalist movement. He was older and had more experience than Aung San. He did not like Aung San’s left-wing views, and some months earlier he himself had been the target of an attempted murder. He was certain that Aung San was the person behind it. (Nobody has been able to prove it.)

  The vehicle with the armed men drove fast southward through the chaotic network of Rangoon’s roads. It passed street markets, pagodas, English cars, and ox wagons from the countryside around the capital. Nobody stopped the vehicle when it drove into the courtyard of the Secretariat, and the armed men were able to make their way up to the second floor, where the interim government had just assembled, without any problem. They fatally shot a guard posted outside the meeting room, and then they jerked open the door and opened fire. Aung San had risen as soon as the first shot was fired; he was immediately hit by thirteen bullets. Six other ministers were also executed. Among them were Mahn Ba Khain and Hsam Htun, along with Aung San’s brother U Ba Win. It later turned out that a number of British officers had delivered the weapons used in the attack, but the matter was never properly investigated and U Saw had to bear the entire blame for the murders.

  One of the most eminent nationalist leaders in Southeast Asia no longer existed. Aung San had only reached the age of thirtytwo. He died at 10:37 a.m. on July 19, 1947, a day that is still ceremoniously held as the Day of the Martyrs in Burma. He had made a remarkable journey from the dusty streets of his childhood in Natmauk to the university and the struggle for independence. Along the way he had not only conquered his own antisocial characteristics, but this oddity of a man had become a national hero.

  “He was an intuitive intellectual,” said Professor Khynt Maung at the University of Rangoon a long time afterward, in an interview with Angelene Naw, “and at the same time he could be totally undisciplined. I knew him well and I knew many people who worked with him and some of them said he was extremely rude and unpredictable. But of course, he was a genius so people accepted his idiosyncratic manners.”

  It is impossible to know how Aung San would have tackled the difficulties that Burma was faced with during the 1950s. Civil war broke out only a few months after the formal independence in January 1948. The Karens took up arms, as did the communists. And during the 1950s, the Union of Burma cracked little by little, until the end of democracy in 1962. Perhaps Aung San, with his strong winning instinct and his “independence at any price” mentality might have been just as brutal and violent as the generals who later came to power. Or else he might have been able to stop the breakdown thanks to his diplomatic capacity and the strong confidence he enjoyed among the ethnic minorities. One often hears that view in the Burma of today, where it is said that the murders at the Secretariat meant a death sentence for the whole of the democratic promise that independence and the new constitution brought with them.

  U Saw’s dream of becoming the country’s first prime minister was already dashed the afternoon after the murders. He was arrested, condemned to death for murder and treason, and hanged in May 1948.

  Instead it was U Nu who took over as prime minister. He had followed on the heels of Aung San during all the years they were students together, via the Thakin movement and out into the war. But when independence was within reach, he had withdrawn from public life into a monastery. He was a wise leader, considerate and reasoning, and he had been the vice chairman of the AFPFL. However, as a candidate, he was not at all the unifying force that the country needed when it was balancing between stability and chaos. U Nu was not accorded the same confidence by the ethnic minorities and—perhaps most important of all—he did not have the same support from the army. Aung San was understood to be its founder, and with him gone, there was nobody who was able or willing to control the destructive power of the armed forces.

  6

  The Election Campaign

  Critics sometimes accuse Aung San Suu Kyi of being obsessed with her father. What they are implicitly driving at is that she is not a popular leader in her own right; she is totally dependent on Aung San’s status as a national hero. This is of course true in the sense that she became famous and rapidly gained a political position because she is his daughter. If she had not had this relationship, then she would not have held that speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda in 1988 and she would not have become a symbol for the democratic movement in the same way.

  It is also true that a significant proportion of her own texts and speeches have often revolved around her father. Even before her return to Burma in 1988, she had published Aung San of Burma, an outline of his life in which she gives prominence to his good aspects and glosses rather too glibly over his faults and transgressions. She writes only briefly about the accusations against him of murder and nothing at all about his flirtation with totalitarian ideologies in the 1930s. Even Peter Carey, one of her and Michael’s friends in Oxford, says that she had “the uncritical and admiring attitude of a daughter to her father.”

  But obsessed? She has always forcefully rejected that allegation: “I don’t think about my father every day. I’m not obsessed by him, as some people seem to think. I prefer to believe that my attitude to him is based on healthy respect and admiration, not obsession,” as she said in an interview with Alan Clements.

  Of course, the accusation of obsession is really about something else. It is in the interests of the junta to discredit Aung San Suu Kyi, and therefore they are trying to spread the image of her as someone who has nothing worth saying. That she is just being nostalgic, living on and exploiting her father’s greatness.

  It is particularly strange if one considers that almost everyone in Burma has regarded Aung San as a hero—the military and the democratic movement alike, the country’s political elite as well as the ordinary people in the streets. His picture has been put up everywhere, in teahouses, in officers’ barracks, and in the offices of the NLD. Streets, markets, and whole blocks have been named after him. In more recent years, however, the junta have been less keen to promote him as an example, well aware that people always think about Aung San Suu Kyi when they se
e pictures of her father.

  Aung San Suu Kyi’s possible obsession does not differ much from that of the average Burmese. Basically, it is a battle about historiography. Ever since Ne Win seized power in 1962, the junta’s propaganda has drawn a straight line between the national hero Aung San and dictatorship. Aung San’s founding of the army and the army’s liberation of the country from the colonial powers have been used to justify military rule, as well as implicitly give the generals the right to interpret reality and an eternal right to rule the country.

  By invoking her father and pointing to her own connections to the liberation of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi has torn this argument out of the junta’s hands. She has cut loose and shown that the oppression established by the junta is not at all the natural continuation of the state that Aung San sketched in the 1940s. By calling the great popular protests during 1988 “the second struggle for independence,” she instead links the opposition and the democratic movement to the struggle for liberation. In that sense, her appearance at Shwedagon was the starting point for a revision of the inheritance from Aung San and the anticolonial struggle.