Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  During the days following May 27, people celebrated all over Burma, and everyone was counting on the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. The paradox was that the junta had created just the kind of personal cult around her, by imprisoning her, that they had wished to avoid. They had made her into a martyr and a symbol for the opposition. Zin Linn was one of those who took part in the organization of the election campaign in one of the constituencies in Rangoon.

  “My candidate himself had a military background,” he recounted when I met him twenty years later at a café in Bangkok. “That made people skeptical, but they chose to vote for him anyway since he was Aung San Suu Kyi’s candidate. One voter told me that he would even vote for a dog if it was backed up by Aung San Suu Kyi.”

  After the election, two months of confusion followed. The generals seemed almost paralyzed by their total misjudgement of the situation, and out in the streets the first delirium of victory had been replaced by uncertainty. Why was nothing happening? Would the junta acknowledge the election results or were the generals searching for an excuse to declare the whole process null and void?

  During this period the NLD had its chance to have assembled parliament on its own. The NLD could have proclaimed a government that other countries would have been able to recognize, in that way increasing the pressure on the junta. But even the NLD did not want to rock the boat. Aung San Suu Kyi was isolated in her home, and others in the party leadership chose to wait and see. Most of them were themselves former generals and officers, and they probably planned on the SLORC getting in touch with them to initiate talks about the way forward. However, that was not what happened. On July 27 the head of the security service, Khin Nyunt, gave a speech in which he declared that the election had not been about voting for a new parliament at all. The election had instead been about choosing a new assembly to formulate a new constitution. The election results were in the process of being declared null and void.

  The day after, the NLD gathered in Gandhi Hall in central Rangoon, but its members did not choose to proclaim a new government on that occasion either. Instead they gave the junta another two months in which to recognize the election results, and they demanded an open and unconditional dialogue in order to put a stop to the crisis that the country found itself in. This final wording bears the stamp of Aung San Suu Kyi. Her critics inside and outside the military junta often accuse her of being uncompromising and stubborn to the point of stupidity. However, during the entire election campaign she underlined that she was not demanding any kind of revolution in Burma. It takes time to change a political system, she has said, and it is going to require cooperation from everyone in our society. Even the military.

  During this time, Michael, Alexander, and Kim were at home in Oxford. Michael had had certain hopes of traveling there in the summer but had been denied an entry visa. Now they were hoping that Suu Kyi would be freed and that the family could be reunited. But in a letter to Michael dated July 17, 1990, Suu Kyi did not mention any date for her release. Instead she asked Michael to send her the almost impenetrable Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. The rest of the letter was about her longing for the children and practical family matters. Between the lines, Michael understood that she was calculating on a long time under house arrest.

  When it began to dawn on the people that the election was going to be declared null and void, their anger intensified once again. On August 8, 1990, on the anniversary of the massacres two years earlier, a large protest action was held in Mandalay, and this time it was the monks from the monastery who took the lead. The action on August 8 had not been advertised in advance. The monks just might have been out on their morning walk to collect donations for the monastery. However, the number of monks and the symbolic significance of the date meant that nobody could avoid being aware of what it was really all about. Tens of thousands of civilians joined them. The students flanked the monks to protect them from attack. The soldiers were called in, and when one of the students unrolled a peacock flag, they got nervous and opened fire. Nine monks were shot to death and an additional fourteen were badly beaten. Several of the injured disappeared without a trace after the military had cleaned up the streets.

  The incident was covered up by the state-owned mass media, which asserted that only one monk had been killed and that the violence had been sparked by the students who had attacked the armed guards.

  The violence and the attempt to conceal what had really happened triggered a new wave of protests, and all over the country monks assembled to show solidarity with the killed and wounded. When they passed officers and their families during their morning walks, they turned their begging bowls upside down and refused to accept alms from them. Not to be allowed to donate money to the monasteries gives bad karma and is among the worst that can happen to a Buddhist. When the boycott had been going on for some time, the officers became so nervous that they brought in by plane monks from Thailand who had to accept their alms.

  This challenge by the monks was one of the greatest threats the junta had encountered, and the generals realized that they would have to act quickly. Gen. Saw Maung gave the command that all the monastery orders that had taken part in the protests were to be dissolved, an utterly exceptional decision given the fact that the worldly powers in Burma had never had any mandate for direct rule over the monasteries. He proclaimed that those who opposed this decision no longer had the right to be monks. The local commanders were given the authority to tear the orange clothing off the backs of those monks who refused to cooperate. In October the army carried out raids against the monasteries. Thousands of monks were harassed and thrown into prison. Later the traditional religious leadership was dissolved, and the junta appointed on their own initiative a new, more easily controlled and centralized group of monks to lead the sanghan.

  The democratic movement’s hope of rapid political change had already diminished dramatically in September. At that point a smallish group of parliamentarians from the NLD had assembled in Mandalay to form a shadow government, which the party should already have done in the summer. The SLORC discovered that the meeting was going to be held, and they started a mass hunt-down of all the elected parliamentarians. The entire remaining leadership of the NLD had been taken prisoner, among others U Kyi Maung, the retired general who was acting as chairman during the absence of Aung San Suu Kyi. All remaining hope was crushed when the junta demonstrated that they had no hesitation whatsoever in striking at the monk orders or putting themselves above the religious traditions. The signal could not have been clearer: the junta was intending to remain in power, whatever the price.

  The junta had no intention of letting Aung San Suu Kyi go. On the contrary, they readjusted the laws once again so that it would be possible to keep her out of the public eye in the foreseeable future. It had previously been possible for the police to keep somebody under house arrest for one year without a trial. Now the time was prolonged to five years.

  Aung San Suu Kyi took this, too, in her usual calm manner, so well known nowadays. In order to tease the guards who visited her now and then, she filled the walls of her house with pasted-up quotations by Gandhi, Nehru, and her own father, Aung San. She had a large portrait of him in her reception room on the ground floor. Sometimes when she was unable to sleep at night, she went downstairs and looked at the picture. She was able—perhaps for the first time—to feel that they were close, that he was present. She looked into his eyes and said to herself, “Okay, now it’s you and me against them.”

  She read books about vipassana meditation and practiced purposefully in order to improve herself. When she had been released some years later and was asked about what she would do if she were to be arrested once again, she replied with a laugh that she would in that case see to it that she reached even higher levels in her meditation.

  Meditation is central for understanding how she and the other political prisoners coped with their time in isolation. “For a Buddhist it is not necessarily a negative thing to shut ou
t the world. Even as children we learn to withdraw into ourselves, to shut out the world and purify our senses,” said the student leader Min Ko Naing in an interview in 2005. At that point he had spent sixteen years in an isolation cell and had meditated every day.

  Every time Suu Kyi is asked about the years under house arrest, she emphasizes that she has been treated very mildly when compared to many other political prisoners. In a television interview with the Swedish journalist Malou von Sievers, she said that she has not felt like a prisoner since she has not been held in a prison, and that many of her party comrades had had a much harder time. They had been tortured and not known what had happened to their families. Her own family was safe in another country, and she has said in several interviews that she has felt a security in knowing that they were not directly threatened.

  On another occasion she recounted that the Buddhist principles of self-control and inner peace were crucial for her to cope with the period during which she was under house arrest. She “accepted” the circumstances under which she lived and tried only to influence those parts of her life that were still hers to control. “I simply stopped worrying about my family,” she said in 1996. “I couldn’t do anything about the situation so I learned to control my thoughts.”

  Restraint. Self-control. Suu Kyi often speaks about these as goals for one’s personal development. One cannot influence everything around him or her. The only things that one can control with any certainty are his or her own thoughts and actions. Inside yourself you can always in some sense be free; even under strict imprisonment there is room for action. It is ultimately a matter of preserving one’s integrity. As is often the case with Suu Kyi, she seasons this philosophical reasoning with humor and a peal of laughter. “I believe that some people who have been in prison also did not feel like prisoners,” she told Alan Clements, and then she quoted her party comrade U Kyi Maung as having said, “If my wife knew how free I felt in Insein prison she’d be furious.”

  Even though Aung San Suu Kyi kept up her courage and was “free in thought,” those six years, as well as the later periods of house arrest, must have been both mentally and physically stressful. One problem was money. She was not allowed to receive money from the outside, and at the same time she refused to accept free food from the guards who were stationed by the dozen outside her house. The junta was not going to be given any kind of hold on her. However, after a short time she had no money left and she had to be satisfied with eating two small portions of rice a day. In the end she came to an agreement with the junta. They would deliver food to her and she would pay with furniture and fittings from the house. Slowly but surely the building was emptied of the furniture her mother had collected throughout the years. The officers who were responsible for the guard could not bear the thought that Aung San’s daughter should be totally destitute, so they secretly stored all the furniture in a warehouse a little distance away from 54 University Avenue. When she was freed in 1995, they wanted to give her back her belongings, but Aung San Suu Kyi refused to receive them and demanded that she be allowed to buy them back. No favors.

  Even after the furniture-for-food system had been established, she was compelled to live frugally. Her breakfast usually consisted of tea and a piece of fruit. Never bread, that was too expensive. Once every weekend she allowed herself the luxury of eating a hard-boiled egg. The effect of this diet was that she rapidly lost a lot of weight, from 110 to around 90 pounds, and during that period she must have been on the brink of malnutrition.

  The economic problems were partly solved when Michael Aris published the book Freedom from Fear, with texts by Aung San Suu Kyi and people who had come to know her over the years. The income from the book was deposited in an account in Rangoon and was thereafter at the disposal of Suu Kyi.

  In the meantime the junta continued to slander her, consistently and without any sign of shame for their blatant racism and narrow-mindedness. On one occasion a cartoon was published in one of the state-owned newspapers. It showed a lone boy beside a group of children. The boy was ugly and crippled, and his caption made it clear that he was of mixed race, a direct allusion to Kim and Alexander. The group of children were athletic and full of well-being, and under this group of children the caption stated that they were “real citizens.”

  The junta also exploited the fact that Michael was able to send parcels to her, and one day pictures were published showing the alleged contents of one of the parcels. They were a tube of lipstick and a couple of American fashion magazines. In the text Aung San Suu Kyi is described as a “Western fashion girl.” Clearly something very reprehensible in the eyes of the junta.

  During her first period under house arrest, changes also occurred at the top level of the junta. During 1991 Gen. Saw Maung, who had led the SLORC’s seizure of power in 1988, displayed several signs of being mentally ill. Rumors went around that he was an alcoholic and had heart trouble. During a visit to a golf course he pulled out his pistol and threatened others there while yelling at them that he was the reincarnation of King Kyanzittha, a Bamar king in the eleventh century. He was forced to resign from his appointment as the leader of the SLORC in April 1992.

  He was succeeded by Gen. Than Shwe. Than Shwe was born in 1933 in the vicinity of Mandalay, and during Ne Win’s years in office he rose in rank until he was appointed brigadier general and acting minister of defense in 1985. After the SLORC’s power takeover in 1988, he became the second-in-command of the junta.

  Now he formed a leadership troika with Gen. Maung Aye and Khin Nyunt. The latter was formally third-in-command, but as the chief of the powerful military security service and with the support of Ne Win from the sidelines, he was understood by many to be Burma’s strong man. Khin Nyunt has Chinese roots, and after his military career he had been called to Rangoon in 1984 to investigate a bloody terrorist action against a group of politicians from South Korea who were visiting Burma. Khin Nyunt quickly took control of the military security service, which became a state within the state under his leadership. Khin Nyunt was considered to be Ne Win’s favorite among the younger officers.

  It soon turned out that the SLORC had a plan. The junta hoped that the economic development after liberalization would assuage people’s anger. It was only a matter of keeping Aung San Suu Kyi imprisoned until they had constructed a political framework that would enable them to stay in power and finally ignore the election results from 1990.

  The first step in the plan was to set up a national convention with the task of drawing up a new constitution. More than a thousand delegates were handpicked by the junta. Only a very few of them were politicians who had been elected to parliament in 1990. The convention assembled for the first time in 1993, and initially the NLD chose to cooperate in the process, despite Aung San Suu Kyi still being held under house arrest.

  After that, Khin Nyunt succeeded in achieving a truce with most of the ethnic groups, who were tired of decades of war. None of them handed in their weapons, but they had realized that they would never be able to conquer the regime in Rangoon by military means.

  Khin Nyunt’s biggest victory was the agreement he concluded with the remaining members of the old communist party, the CPB, in the northeastern Shan state. The CPB had controlled the region since 1968, but China had withdrawn its support at the end of the 1980s, and the dissatisfaction among the soldiers had increased dramatically. The old leadership of the CPB refused, however, to give up and said no when Beijing offered them a place to retreat to in China. The troops mutinied in the spring of 1989, driving their leaders into a humiliating exile. What was left was a number of loosely connected armies. The biggest of them, with its base among the Wa people, took for itself the name United Wa State Army (UWSA).

  Khin Nyunt called in the notorious drug smuggler Lo Hsing-Han to mediate between the junta and the new groups. The result was a truce with the regime that was reminiscent of the agreement Ne Win had concluded with the KKY units in the 1960s. UWSA received the green light to produ
ce heroin and methamphetamine in return for a promise of support in the war against other guerrilla groups.

  Some of the major resistance armies, such as the Karen National Liberation Army and the Shan State Army, still refused to cooperate, and the truce with the UWSA meant that the junta was able to send in greater military resources against the groups that were still at war. Step by step, often with extremely brutal methods, the SLORC gained control over regions that had previously been controlled by the ethnic groups.

  Parallel to this, Khin Nyunt was also carrying on talks with Aung San Suu Kyi. Some of her earlier collaborators assert that she actually experienced these talks as being meaningful. At one meeting with Khin Nyunt, she put forth a suggestion the gist of which was to open the NLD offices that had been closed and to allow the democratic opposition to elect its own delegates to the convention. It is possible that Khin Nyunt actually considered this, but that he was stopped by other powers within the junta.

  On July 10, 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. In the few photographs of her that exist from those first days, she looks almost impudently full of energy. None of those who met her could see that she had just spent six years under house arrest. It was as though six years of isolation had just been a brief interlude, an unwelcome but manageable interruption to the work she had now made into the mission of her life.

  11

  The World Wakes Up

  Michael Aris was an academic and teacher, and he was happy with that life. However, during the first period of house arrest he also became Aung San Suu Kyi’s mouthpiece in an international context. It was a public role that he neither liked nor felt especially suited to. Yet he persevered with bravura. He argued her and the Burmese democratic movement’s case before the United Nations, innumerable human rights organizations, and foreign governments that wanted closer insight into the conditions at University Avenue.