A journalist inquired whether they were trying to break her down by means of surveillance. She replied, “If that is what they are trying to do, they will not succeed. Besides, it’s almost touching to see how poorly they hide their surveillance. What’s the point of a secret police if it’s not secret?”
The same “secret” police continued simultaneously to arrest NLD supporters and to harass the meetings of the party. On Burma’s day of independence Aung San Suu Kyi had invited people to a great celebration at 54 University Avenue; among the guests were two members of Moustache Brothers, a well-known group of comedians from Mandalay. When both of the comedians were about to leave the party, they were arrested by the police and sentenced to three years’ hard labor in the Kachin state.
The junta had furthermore got hold of a new weapon in the battle against the democratic movement. In the spring of 1993, the junta leader Than Shwe founded the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA). The idea was to create a force in civil society that was loyal to the regime, in the same way that Golkar has been to the dictator Suhartu in Indonesia or the Chinese communist party to Mao. The plan was simple: every NLD meeting would be disrupted by activists from USDA, which had the whole power apparatus at their disposal. The members were recruited more or less by force. School pupils were told that their school grades would deteriorate dramatically if they did not become members. Out in the rural areas, impoverished young people were recruited by being promised that their parents would not have to pay tax, or that they would avoid being conscripted into the army. In the villages, the USDA often took over the monopoly on violence previously held by the police force and sharpened the political surveillance. Its youth section developed into something that almost resembled an armed militia, in which the members were trained in the handling of weapons, the martial arts, and intelligence work, always in close cooperation with the security service. Their foremost assignment was to disrupt and sabotage the political meetings of the opposition.
At one meeting in the town of Inndaw in the autumn of 1996, the USDA’s general secretary, U Win Sein, had made several incendiary attacks on Aung San Suu Kyi. He demanded of his followers that they should “exterminate” the causes of the country’s internal political problems. “Do you understand what is meant by eradicated? Eradicated means to kill,” he yelled through his loudspeaker system and added, “Dare you kill Daw Suu Kyi?”
Later the same day, she and the rest of the party leadership were attacked when their cars were about to leave from a building in Rangoon. About two hundred USDA activists came after them with clubs and cobblestones. The car windows were smashed, but Aung San Suu Kyi succeeded in getting away unscathed. It later turned out that everyone who had taken part in the attack had received five thousand kyat, barely one week’s wages, from the USDA. After several more attacks by the USDA, among others against a Buddhist ceremony at which Suu Kyi was present, she warned the world of that organization:
The world community must realize that the USDA is not an innocent social-welfare organization, as it claims to be, but an organization being used by the authorities as a gang of thugs. Their operations resemble those of the Nazi Brown Shirts. The SLORC sent people from this so-called social-welfare organization to beat up people taking part in a nonviolent, religious ceremony. I must say that that amounts to something very, very close to what the Brown Shirts used to do in Germany.
In the autumn of 1997, the SLORC changed its name to State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), and the propaganda intimated that it would mean a change politically as well. Some of the junta’s members were picked out and accused of corruption, but just as it meant nothing when Burma changed its name to Myanmar, so in the same way this change meant nothing in practice. Bertil Lintner disclosed later that the junta had employed the American public relations firm Bain and Associates Inc., which had recommended a cosmetic rearrangement to quiet international criticism.
Rajsoomer Lallah pointed out that no improvements in human rights whatsoever had occurred during recent years. He had just taken over the role of the United Nations special envoy for human rights. In November 1998 United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan once more invited the SPDC to initiate a dialogue with the democratic opposition and the ethnic minorities. However, no dialogue came about this time either.
In the mid-1990s it also became apparent that the NLD had internal problems. First, there was hardly anything left of the organization that had been built up during the election campaign in 1989. Most of the party offices had been forced to close, several hundred leading activists were in prison, and the restrictions concerning Aung San Suu Kyi’s freedom of movement prevented a rapid reconstruction of the party.
Second, the junta’s arrests, torture, and harassment made several leading representatives defect from the party and openly reject Aung San Suu Kyi. The first to defect was Ma Thanegi, one of the women who had been in the NLD leadership group and who had walked behind Aung San Suu Kyi when the rifle was aimed at them in Danubyu during the election campaign in 1989. Ma Thanegi had spent three years in prison, and now she accused Aung San Suu Kyi of being too dogmatic, stubborn, and unwilling to really solve the country’s problems. She wrote an article in Far Eastern Economic Review in which she encouraged the international community not to see Burma as a game between good and evil, black and white. There are always gray zones, she wrote, and the answers to a country’s problems are never simple.
The core of her criticism was the sanctions. Influenced by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, Aung San Suu Kyi had exhorted the world at large to direct economic sanctions at Burma. Her exhortation concerned trade and commerce, and investments in tourism. (In a country like Burma it is very difficult to travel as a tourist without the money one spends ending up in the pockets of the regime.) Ma Thanegi did not make these charges explicit, but between the lines one could read that she recommended foreign capital and investments to solve the country’s problems. She also accused Aung San Suu Kyi of blocking a dialogue with the junta. Instead of initiating talks with the generals, she had chosen to put pressure on the junta and ask the world to desist from providing aid and economic support.
Her attack received much attention and was supported by the circle of businessmen who had found their way to Burma after the economic liberalization, as well as by several foreign diplomats in Rangoon, whose view was that the politics of isolation were a thing of the past.
However, the greatest loss of all for the NLD was still perhaps U Kyi Maung’s defection. He had been one of Aung San Suu Kyi’s closest collaborators and the chairman of the party during the election campaign. U Kyi Maung had earlier made an ambivalent statement that Suu Kyi was devoted, on the verge of being fanatical, and he had made it clear that he understood this to be a flaw. Rumors now had it that he defected in protest against her leadership. Later on, twenty-five of the parliamentarians who had been elected from the NLD in 1990 wrote an open letter in which they accused Aung San Suu Kyi of blocking any meaningful dialogue with the junta.
Was there any truth in their criticism?
On the one hand, the answer is no. This criticism, which has been part of the political discourse since then, is bizarre. What can one really expect of a person who has spent so many years under house arrest and seen her own friends and colleagues die in the country’s prisons? Furthermore, ever since she came forward as the leader of the democratic movement, she has wished for a dialogue with the junta. When she was released after her first house arrest, what she first requested was precisely talks, not any immediate and unconditional capitulation by the generals. It was the junta that refused to conduct talks with her. In one interview with Asia Week in 1999 she even opened up the possibility of carrying on talks with the junta at a lower level and that she herself did not necessarily need to be at the table. Several times in the 1990s she emphasized that she was not necessarily striving for any formal political position for herself. Even in that way she was seeking to emula
te Gandhi.
That attitude can be called neither dogmatic nor inflexible, and the criticism against her must be seen as partly an effect of the junta’s propaganda, and partly that of an increasing frustration in sections of the democratic movement over the fact that developments were standing, and remain standing, still.
Burma has gotten stuck at rock bottom, and in that situation there are many who hope for something, almost anything, that can kic-kstart the process of change.
On the other hand, it may be a problem that the democratic movement is so dependent on Aung San Suu Kyi, and that it is really impossible to criticize her without seeming to support the SPDC. There is probably also some truth to the accusation that she is intractably stubborn—which is good and bad—and that she made a number of statements after her first house arrest that may be perceived as both dogmatic and severe. “It’s us or utter devastation,” she said, for example, at a press conference a few weeks after her release. Several years later, during dinner at a restaurant in the Shan state, she revealed to a close friend that if there was anything that she regretted from those years in the 1990s, it was precisely those words. It was really U Tin Oo who had used them to describe the significance of the democratic movement for the future of Burma, and she had repeated them as a way of honoring her older party comrade. However, it was far too rhetorical, she admitted, and it was exploited time after time by the junta to stamp her as a person who would rather sacrifice Burma’s economic development than her own political career.
The image of Aung San Suu Kyi is, in other words, more split than one might perceive at first glance. An image emerges of a person who is prepared to negotiate almost anything if only it leads to greater openness and democracy, but who also makes certain basic demands of her counterpart. The junta must release all political prisoners, allow the NLD to be active, and permit Aung San Suu Kyi herself freedom of movement.
When those demands—perfectly reasonable—are not met, she can be just as stubborn as her critics assert.
The junta was made to experience this, if nothing else, in the summer of 1998. For over two years they had refused to carry on any kind of meaningful talks and prevented her from leaving Rangoon. She had done all she could to restore the NLD organization in the capital, but she had also been harassed during that work. On May 27, members of the NLD gathered at a congress that had been hastily announced and at which they demanded that the junta should convene in August at the latest the parliament that had been elected in 1990. As usual the junta responded by arresting a few dozen of those who had been elected, in order to make an example of them.
In that situation, Aung San Suu Kyi decided to test the limits of her own freedom of movement. Twice during the summer of 1998 she attempted to leave Rangoon by car, but both times she was stopped by the police. On July 22 she made a third attempt. She got into a car along with an assistant and two chauffeurs. They drove west toward Bassein in the Irrawaddy Delta. After twenty miles they were stopped by armed police. Aung San Suu Kyi refused to turn back, however, and for six days the whole of her party slept in the car, watched by the police and international media. They had no food with them and only a limited amount of water, and the police saw to it that nobody could reach them with supplies. Later on the police decided that enough was enough. They jerked open the doors of the car and threw out the chauffeurs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was lying asleep in the back, was pushed violently down into the seat, and then the car was driven back to University Avenue.
Aung San Suu Kyi was furious. “They kidnapped me. They even stole my car,” she said via a spokesperson, and she promised to make a new attempt to leave the capital as soon as she had recovered her strength.
The moment was strategically chosen. While Aung San Suu Kyi was spending the nights in the backseat of a car on the outskirts of Rangoon, the ASEAN was holding a meeting in the capital city of the Philippines, Manila. The U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was present at the meeting, and along with her colleagues from the ASEAN countries she put pressure on Burma’s representatives to release Aung San Suu Kyi and initiate a dialogue with the democratic movement. The spokesperson for the SPDC, Hla Min, rejected the criticism with irritation and accused Suu Kyi of having consciously provoked the clash so that Madeleine Albright would have an excuse to attack Burma.
During the autumn, the NLD formed a committee to represent the popularly elected parliament, and the junta responded by once more increasing the pressure. Over a thousand NLD activists were imprisoned or forced to reject the party. Several popularly elected parliamentarians were arrested in so-called guesthouses, and the junta explained that they would stay there until they had been put through a “reforming education.” If there had been any trust between Khin Nyunt and Aung San Suu Kyi in 1994, it had now definitely been demolished. In January 1999, the NLD handed in a summons in which the powerful chief of the security police was accused of undermining and sabotaging a political party that had every right to act freely according to Burmese legislation.
And at that exact moment, when the situation in Burma was at its most dramatic, something happened in Oxford that changed everything: Michael Aris was told that he had cancer.
Some very heavy years for the family had passed. While the boys had of course suffered severely from not having their mother for six years, they had never complained or for one moment criticized Suu Kyi for her decision to remain in Rangoon. Alexander was already in the process of leaving home when she was confined to house arrest, and he moved to the United States to study. Kim was just on his way into his teens and missing his mother. Michael had also been given a post as guest researcher at Harvard in 1990, and for two years Kim stayed at the home of Michael’s sister, Lucinda Phillips, and her spouse, Adrienne. “The house was not the same without the restless, creative presence of Suu,” he said much later on, when he had married and started a family, and was working in Oxford. “There were always friends coming and things happening, and we had some fantastic travels. Without her, I suppose we lived a simpler life.”
The family traveled to Burma twice after her release in 1995, the first time in the summer and then around Christmas. After that Kim received permission to travel there twice by himself during the years that followed. He stayed with her for a couple of weeks at a time. Since the family had always been very strict about the boys’ right to a private life, nothing has ever been written about these occasions. The only thing Suu Kyi has mentioned is an anecdote about how Kim taught her to listen to reggae and rock during one of his visits. When he first arrived, he walked around with a Walkman all day every day, with the music at full volume in his headphones. Suu Kyi became worried that he would injure his hearing so she allowed him to play his CDs on the stereo in the house. She, who had never listened to anything other than classical music, found herself liking Bob Marley as well as the Grateful Dead.
Michael Aris had not been given an entry visa since 1995, despite having applied several times. Life had carried on. He continued his work as a teacher and researcher and among other things been one of the people who founded a center for Tibetan studies at the University of Oxford. Just before Christmas Eve in 1998, he was informed that he had prostate cancer. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s he called his friend Peter Carey. “I’ve got one piece of bad news and one piece of good news,” he had said to Peter Carey. “The bad news is that I’ve got cancer. The good news is I’m going to beat it.”
Then he received new test results showing that the illness had spread to his lungs and spine. He understood that he did not have much time left and immediately applied for a visa to Burma. He wanted to see his wife one last time. However, he was denied an entry visa even on this occasion. The medical system in Burma did not have the resources to take care of him, the junta explained in a statement, and they then suggested that Aung San Suu Kyi “who is in good health is free to travel to England to meet her dying husband who desperately wants to meet her.” It must have been a terribly hard
decision, but after having discussed the matter several times on the telephone they decided unanimously that she must stay. The junta wished for nothing better than to be rid of her. If she left the country, the generals would prevent her from returning, and the struggle of the past years would have been in vain. During the winter and spring, while Michael was in the hospital, they talked to each other every evening. The junta had still not allowed Suu Kyi to connect a telephone, so she had to go to the home of a foreign diplomat in Rangoon in order to receive Michael’s calls. This worked until the junta understood what they were doing, and one evening the telephone line died as soon as they had said hello to each other. The diplomat has described how he saw Suu Kyi weep for the first time at that moment.
Alexander had moved to the United States to study, and he now returned temporarily to Oxford to be close to his father. He and Kim did not agree with their parents. They longed for their mother and they also wanted their parents to be together during the last period of Michael’s life. “You can imagine how hard it was to deny them that,” Suu Kyi said later.
A broad international campaign started to persuade the generals to change their decision. Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, and even the pope, John Paul II, appealed to the junta to let Michael Aris enter Burma. But nothing helped. He died on his birthday: March 27, 1999.
“They were very similar to each other,” says Debbie Stothard, who got to know Michael during the years she was working for Suu Kyi. Debbie had been on a visit to Europe in 1998 and he had invited her to Oxford.
Kim and Alexander with their mother during a visit to Rangoon after the first house arrest (1989). Courtesy of Norstedts.
“It was fascinating to see the house at 15 Park Town,” she says. “He had decorated it almost as homage to Suu Kyi. Portraits of her hung everywhere and plaques and pictures from all the prizes she had received during the years.” When they had talked for a few hours, Michael Aris insisted on driving her back to the railway station, so that she would be sure to arrive there safely.
Aung San Suu Kyi Page 21