Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  They walked for three hundred or so feet along the main street, and when they arrived in the vicinity of the town marketplace, they met six soldiers blocking their path. Capt. Myint Oo stood beside them with a pistol in one hand and a megaphone in the other. One of the bodyguards, Win Thein, walked diagonally in front of the rest of the group with an NLD flag.

  Maw Min Lwin, who was the chief of the bodyguard force, realized that Suu Kyi was exposing herself to unnecessary danger. Along with Nyo Ohn Myint, he tried to walk in front of Suu Kyi, but she stopped them. “No, you don’t need to,” she said. “That will only make them nervous. Let me go first.”

  They continued on their way.

  At that time of day, Danubyu was usually teeming with market noise, traffic, and the babble of thousands of human voices. Now not a sound was to be heard.

  Ma Thanegi, one of the women in the NLD leadership, was walking a few steps behind the bodyguards. She tried to speak to the captain. “Stop this. You must let us pass,” she said. “You must let us walk to our office.”

  But the captain yelled that they would be shot on the spot if they continued walking in the middle of the road. “Okay,” said Suu Kyi, “then we will walk along the side of the road instead.” The captain yelled back that they would be shot even if they walked along the side of the road. He started counting from one and ordered his soldiers to open fire when he got to ten. Then Suu Kyi turned around to the rest of her party and asked them to stop. If the captain meant what he said, she did not want to risk a bloodbath. Aung San Suu Kyi herself continued slowly onward.

  The soldiers cocked their weapons.

  “I was scared to death,” says Nyo Ohn Myint, telling me the story of this incident twenty years later. “But just as the captain was about to give the order to fire one of his superiors came running, a major, and stopped the counting.”

  A violent exchange of words broke out on the pavement. It ended with Capt. Myint Oo tearing off the officer’s tabs from his uniform and yelling, “What have I got these for if I can’t give an order to fire?” By that time Aung San Suu Kyi had already walked straight through the line of soldiers. As she passed, Suu Kyi saw how they were trembling with nervousness. One of the soldiers was crying. Later on, Aung San Suu Kyi told Alan Clements about this incident: “My thought was, one doesn’t turn back in a situation like this. I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’ve often heard people who have taken part in demonstrations say that when you are charged by the police you can’t make up your mind in advance about what you’ll do; it’s a decision which you have to make there and then.”

  Nyo Ohn Myint remembers how the NLD had an informal meeting later on in the evening in the Danubyu office. Everyone was shocked by what had happened. He had been unable to speak for an hour after they had arrived in safety. One of the local NLD activists also recounted that Capt. Myint Oo had sat in the local police station after his humiliation earlier on in the day and swore to kill Aung San Suu Kyi. He had been terribly drunk, waved his pistol about, and screamed that he had “saved a bullet for the wife of that Indian!” Among racist Bamar, all foreigners are often called Indians.

  Well inside the NLD office, most people thought it was time to go home, but Suu Kyi refused to cancel the arrangements for the following day. They were going to visit a monument dedicated to General Bandula, who was killed at Danubyu in 1825 during a crucial battle against the British in the first Anglo-Bamar war.

  “If I die in Danubyu,” she said, “you have to seize the opportunity to democratize the country.” When they arrived at the monument, they were met by the major who had stopped the shooting the previous day. He told them that Capt. Myint Oo had been transported away from Danubyu and assured them that Suu Kyi no longer needed to feel threatened.

  The self--sacrificing behavior she had demonstrated at Danubyu was an important explanation as to why the young activists in the democratic movement joined her after the bloody autumn of 1988. She showed that her own safety was not more valuable than anyone else’s, and she did whatever she could to protect the activists who gathered around her.

  Immediately after their homecoming from Danubyu, Moe Myat Thu, one of her bodyguards, and five other young people were arrested outside the gates of 54 University Avenue. The soldiers dragged them out of their car and took them to an army camp in the vicinity. When Aung San Suu Kyi heard about this incident, she immediately went out onto University Avenue and sat down on the pavement. She told the surprised soldiers that she was thinking of sitting there until her colleagues were released. The soldiers grew nervous. It was the first day of the annual Burmese water festival, and they knew that the whole street would soon be flooded with people wanting to celebrate at the NLD headquarters, situated five hundred feet from there. If Aung San Suu Kyi was still sitting out on the street, the whole situation might develop into a demonstration against the junta. After about thirty minutes, the NLD activists were released.

  “It isn’t a hard choice to make, to follow a leader who acts like that to protect her colleagues,” says Moe Myat Thu when I interviewed him in Thailand in the winter of 2010.

  Most of all, of course, it shows a strange, sometimes almost death-defying obstinacy. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi will not agree that she is brave. When asked a question about Danubyu, she has replied, “There must be thousands of soldiers who do that kind of thing every day. Because, unfortunately, there are battles going on all the time in this world.”

  Aung San Suu Kyi often emphasizes that she refuses to allow fear to rule her life, even if there is often good reason to be afraid. “You must not let your fear stop you from doing what is right,” she has explained. “You must not deny fear. Fear is normal. But it’s dangerous if you let it stop you from doing what you know is right.”

  In her next breath she usually mentions how as a child she used to handle her fear in the same way she did during the election campaign when perpetually harassed by the junta—by challenging it. During her earliest years, she, like most other children, was afraid of the dark when she was about to go to sleep in the evenings. But instead of pulling the covers up over her head and shutting her eyes, she chose to get up and go down into the pitch-dark cellar. There she sat on the floor and waited until she was used to the darkness, until she controlled it. One of the most famous things she is quoted as saying is “Fear is a habit.”

  After Danubyu, the junta realized that Aung San Suu Kyi was not going to give an inch even when faced with the threat of death, and the election campaign had shown that both the democratic movement and the ethnic minorities stood behind her. Even a large part of the army looked up to her. Aung San Suu Kyi thus constituted a direct threat against the continuation of the junta’s long hold on power. She still believed that they might draw up some kind of formal death sentence against her. If it became public, then it would trigger a revolution. At the same time Capt. Myint Oo’s unstable behavior demonstrated that there were elements within the army who wanted to see her dead.

  The temperature rose even higher during the spring and summer of 1989. The junta intensified their harassment, and more and more democratic activists were arrested and sentenced to long terms in prison after summary trials.

  That did not stop Aung San Suu Kyi from intensifying her criticism of the military rule. Lian Sakhong, who lives in Uppsala nowadays, remembers a meeting immediately before the annual water festival in Rangoon. Lian comes from the Chin people, and at that time he was one of the leaders of the ethnic minorities’ alliance, the United Nationalities League for Democracy (UNLD). He was going to give a speech after Aung San Suu Kyi:

  Before the meeting she seemed quite calm. Her face was expressionless, but the look in her eyes was concentrated, filled with energy and focused straight ahead all the time. She was wearing a white blouse with full sleeves, and just as the meeting was about to start, she rolled them up above her elbows. I’ve never seen anything like it. She looked like a gunman preparing for a shoot-out.

  In her speech a few
minutes later she went on the attack for the first time against the former dictator Ne Win. In prior speeches, she had avoided pointing him out in any specific way. In Burma one has a duty to respect and revere those who are older, even if they are guilty of a brutal genocide, and nobody else in the democratic movement had dared to criticize the former dictator. It is true that he had given up his power in the summer of 1988, but both the people of Burma and the international community assumed that he still ruled from the wings. Aung San Suu Kyi accused him now of having corrupted her father’s legacy, having dragged the country down into poverty, and not having had the ability to make peace with the ethnic minorities.

  This last issue—relations with the ethnic minorities—was controversial even for the democratic movement and the NLD. With July 19, 1989, in view, Aung San Suu Kyi sent out information that she was thinking of arranging an alternative demonstration in memory of her father on the forty-second anniversary of his murder. Ever since 1962, they have transformed this memorial day into a celebration of the country’s military power. However, instead of taking part in the celebrations of the regime, Aung San Suu Kyi was now planning a peaceful march of her own along the streets of Rangoon. On July 19 a meeting was held between the NLD and the ethnic groups’ UNLD. Lian Sakhong, one of the participants at the meeting, relates that Aung San Suu Kyi and the representatives from the UNLD planned to make it into a shared demonstration. However, U Tin Oo and the other generals in the executive for the NLD reacted very strongly and threatened to join the regime’s demonstration if the suggestion was accepted. The pensioned generals in the executive of the NLD distrusted the ethnic groups, and several of them wanted to keep the national control of the federal states in one way or another. Aung San Suu Kyi, on the contrary, was of the opinion that a federal constitution was necessary in order to create peace in the country, and she strove for even closer cooperation with the UNLD. She also suggested that the NLD refrain from running for office in the federal states so that the ethnic parties would not suffer competition from her own party.

  Meeting at NLD’s head office (spring 1989). From the left: Salai Ngai Sak, Lian Sakhong, Ram Ling Hmung (standing), Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and U Tin Oo. Courtesy of Lian Sakhong.

  The conflict within the NLD never became acute during the election campaign. When the SLORC heard about the plans for an alternative July 19 demonstration, they called in several battalions from the regiments stationed around the capital and let them patrol the streets at the same time the state-controlled mass media trumpeted out that the junta was going to keep law and order at any price.

  With this threat of a new bloodbath hanging over it, the demonstration was canceled, but the junta had now been given an excuse to tighten the thumbscrews. Early in the morning of July 20, 1989, eleven covered trucks drove up along University Avenue. The vehicles were parked so that they blocked all transport past Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. Soldiers poured out of the backs of the trucks and stopped the forty NLD activists and family members who were inside the house from leaving.

  Several hours passed without anything happening. The soldiers wanted either to spread anxiety and uncertainty among those inside the house, or else they were waiting for orders from above. Aung San Suu Kyi realized that the time had come and spent the day packing. “I thought if they were going to take me to prison then at least I should have a bag packed with essentials,” said Suu Kyi a few years later, in an interview with Barbara Victor, “such as toothbrush and a change of clothes. After I did that, we all had a nice time just waiting.”

  Suu Kyi was able to spend the day conversing with her party comrades and being together with her sons, Alexander and Kim. They had come to Rangoon some weeks earlier with their father, but Michael had returned to attend his own father’s funeral in Scotland. Sixteen-year-old Alexander was old enough to understand that the soldiers constituted a threat, but Kim mostly thought that it was exciting. “I remember the soldiers coming to the house,” he said in an interview in 2004 in the magazine The Weekly. “There was a huge amount of activity and lots of guns and shouting. Of course, I wasn’t really aware of what it was all about, but, for a young boy, it was incredibly exciting. Mother tried to be reassuring, at least when I was around, and I can’t remember ever being frightened.”

  One of Suu Kyi’s assistants played Monopoly with the children to pass the time. At about four o’clock in the afternoon the wait seemed to be over. Half a dozen soldiers entered the house and searched through the office spaces on the ground floor. They turned desk drawers upside down and poured out the contents on the floor. They tore items out of the wardrobes and the kitchen cupboards. After them, an older officer made his entrance. He exhorted U Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung to leave the house. The others there were arrested and thrown into prison. Some of them were released after two or three days, and others received long prison sentences.

  The officer who had forced his way into the house read a document with allegations against Aung San Suu Kyi. She was a “dangerous” and “subversive” person, he said, since she was planning to carry out an alternative ceremony to commemorate her father’s death, and therefore she would now be committed to house arrest. The house was emptied. Only her sons and two maids were permitted to remain.

  Aung San Suu Kyi was now a prisoner in the shabby white stone house on the shores of Lake Inya, the very house in which she had spent so many years of her childhood.

  7

  Childhood

  Burma in the 1950s was a country full of sharp contrasts. On the one hand, there was a civil war and unrest. Aung San was dead and society was going through an ever more blatant militarization. On the other hand, there was a strong belief in the future, with an economy that was on its way to being built up after the war and a freedom in society that Burma had never before experienced.

  The Danish doctor and author Aage Krarup Nielsen writes about the bright side of Burmese life in his book De gyllene pagodernas land (“The Land of the Golden Pagodas”), published in 1959. His narrative is about Burma’s immense natural resources, wide-stretched teak forests, and fertile paddy fields. He also describes how the system of education was well developed and the literacy rate was the highest in Southeast Asia. Krarup Nielsen met businessmen and politicians who all described Burma as a successful example for other Asian countries. The concept had not yet been invented at that time, but everybody took for granted that Burma would become one of the “Asian tigers.”

  Burma was, however, confronted with enormous problems. To start with, large areas of the country were bombed to bits after the Second World War. The Japanese attack and the Allies’ counterattack had razed whole towns and villages to the ground, leaving them in ruins. The harbor in Rangoon had been wrecked, and more than five hundred trains and railway carriages had been blown up by the Japanese before they retreated. And just as reconstruction was about to begin, the communists went underground and started an armed struggle against the central government. At that point three months had passed since independence, and shortly after that the Karenni people’s guerrilla army and the Karens with their armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), declared war on the central government. The first phase of the civil war was extremely bloody, hindering all further development in the countryside. During this period, U Nu’s government was only in control of the region around the capital. After a few years the Karen guerrillas had been driven back, but even so they were in control of the greater part of the Karen state and in practice they established an independent nation in the mountains between Burma and Thailand.

  Most of the other ethnic groups were at first loyal to the government in Rangoon, but they took care to arm themselves. No group fully trusted the Bamars’ assurances of independence within the framework of a federal union, and it was easy to obtain weapons. Both the Japanese and the Allies had left behind large arsenals, and most groups had of course been drawn into the world war in one way or another.

  Amid this chaos, Burma also became a paw
n in the Cold War. When Mao Zedong’s communists took power in Beijing in 1949, the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan. His Guomindang established a military dictatorship on the island and swore to retake mainland China one day. The Western world supported GMD for a long time, and right up until the 1970s Taiwan was allowed to represent China at the United Nations.

  That part of the story is relatively well known. Less well known is that two of Chiang Kai-shek’s army units planned to do what Mao had once done, that is to say remain in a distant part of the country, keep a hold on that region, and then start the counteroffensive from there. They decided that Jonghong in the southern Yunnan province would be their “base,” but before they had realized their plans, Mao’s People’s Army had already gained control of the town. Instead, about 1,700 soldiers from Chiang Kai-shek’s Eighth and Ninth Armies marched over the border into Burma. So as not to be discovered and pressed back by Burmese government troops they traveled right through the inaccessible jungle of the Shan state. One of the officers, Zhang Weicheng, had fought together with the Allied forces during the war and knew the area. In the end they settled in the town Mong Hsat in a green, fertile valley in the eastern Shan state. There were plenty of supplies and the local people seemed to be friendly. During the coming years, GMD established its own state in northeastern Burma.