Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  “That was also typical,” she says, laughing. “I’ve traveled all over the world and would have been able to get myself to the station without any problem. But he had the same kind of human caring as Suu Kyi. She is always very concerned about her colleagues. She worries about their families, sees to it that they eat properly and makes tea for them when they need a break. He did the same kind of thing. They were like twins.”

  On their way to the station they passed through central Oxford, and Michael Aris pointed out places that Suu Kyi used to visit. “That was where my Suu used to go when the children were small,” he said as they drove past a park. Or “that was where my Suu used to work,” when they passed the Bodleian Library. It was as though he had carved out a sphere that was only theirs, against the background of the last years of public life. A map of common memories. Ann Pasternak Slater has perhaps captured something of the relationship between them in her essay on Suu Kyi. At the end of her text she quotes the poet W. B. Yeats: “How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false and true. / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.”

  “It’s my belief that it was the distance that killed him,” says Peter Carey. “It was very heavy for him not to be able to meet Suu, at the same time as he had to take care of everything at home in England. He was a clever Tibetologist, he wrote books and looked after the children, while being a public person. He really had no private life to call his own after 1988, but I never heard him complain. He did all this first and foremost because he was fond of Suu.”

  13

  The Murder Attempt

  The tugofwar between Aung San Suu Kyi and the junta continued into 2000, until Suu Kyi decided to test the limits once more. She got into a car, just as she had done two years earlier, this time along with her party colleague, the almost eighty-year-old U Tin Oo. Fourteen youths from the NLD, who were living in an annex on the grounds of Lake Inya, drove first in a Toyota pickup truck. When they came to Dala on the other side of the Rangoon River, the road was blocked by two military trucks, and just as in 1998, Aung San Suu Kyi refused to turn back.

  “The soldiers got very frustrated,” says Maung, one of the young students who sat in the back of the pickup truck in front of Suu Kyi’s car. I met him in Rangoon in 2010. “The chauffeur locked the steering wheel so that they wouldn’t be able to roll the car off the road and they didn’t know what to do to make her turn around. They sat on the hood and rocked the car so that it moved a couple of centimeters. In the end the car was quite simply lifted off the road by a group of soldiers.”

  There they remained for nine days.

  “The first four days were extremely exhausting,” says Maung. “We only had some biscuits to eat and barely any water. Those of us who had traveled in the pickup truck had to take turns in sleeping, and most of us just lay down on the ground outside the car with a jacket as our pillow. However, we had decided to endure it. Daw Suu Kyi was almost sixty years old and U Tin Oo was almost eighty. If they could manage it then so could we.”

  After four days they received permission to leave the cars and buy food and drink in the village nearby. They rigged up a piece of cloth outside Suu Kyi’s car to protect her from the worst of the midday sun. The junta’s propaganda apparatus then started to present it all as an “excursion” or a “tea party.” In order to reinforce this impression, the military brought in loudspeakers that played “Material Girl” by Madonna at top volume.

  “They don’t even know what music I like,” said Aung San Suu Kyi later, with a laugh, when she recounted the incident.

  The United States and the European Union condemned the junta’s action and demanded that Suu Kyi be allowed to travel freely and meet her party comrades in other parts of the country. The junta gave their standard reply that the restrictions were in place for her own security. In an official statement they explained that the population in Dala did not approve of the sanctions against Burma and that their “anger” might lead to violence against Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. The only people who were surprised by that statement were probably the villagers in Dala.

  It ended in the usual way. After nine days, a group of two hundred soldiers arrived. They forced Aung San Suu Kyi into an ambulance and drove her back to Rangoon. As soon as she was free again, she booked a ticket for the train to Mandalay, but then the security police intervened straight away. They carried her away from the train, and a few hours later the news was out all over the whole world: Aung San Suu Kyi had once again been confined to house arrest.

  They really did not know how to deal with her. The plan had been to keep her away from public life, by means of house arrest or other restrictions, for such a long time that she would be forgotten, or in any case lose her popularity. However, at the beginning of the 2000s this had mainly ended up in a deadlock. The national convention had been put on ice in 1996. The NLD had opted out, and several of the ethnic minorities were deeply critical of the junta’s attempts to steer the convention and marginalize their demands for a federal constitution. The junta had also received severe criticism for the regulations applied to the convention. Those who criticized the formation of the process could be sentenced to twenty years in prison, which meant that the delegates did not even dare to express any views from the rostrum about the working methods of the convention.

  The truces that Khin Nyunt had negotiated with the ethnic minorities were still in force, but none of the groups had laid down their arms. The conflict might blow up again at any time. For example, the Kachin Independence Army and the regime’s troops clashed several times after the election in 2010, and as I write this the new government has declared a will to find a long-term solution, but all the guns are still there and the long-sought political solution seems possible but still very far away.

  In the beginning of the new millennium the country’s economy was in a state of stagnation. After Burma became a member of ASEAN in the summer of 1997, the junta hoped for rapid economic development to stay in power. However, Burma was still just as corrupt and hard to work with as ever for foreign companies, and the financial crisis of the 1990s had furthermore struck in Southeast Asia just a few months after its membership became valid. The countries that had been expected to function as the junta’s locomotive were now compelled to deal with their own problems with unemployment and galloping poverty. As the millennium approached, a third of all the children in Burma were suffering from chronic malnutrition.

  Yet the junta still tried to keep up a façade. The newspapers were filled with examples of success and photos of generals who inaugurated new building projects. The propaganda went so far that the security police tried to convince the political prisoners the country was actually on the right track now. When NLD activist Zin Linn was released just before Christmas in 1997, after seven years in the Insein prison, he was picked up by a security agent who drove him around Rangoon, showing him new hotels, roads, and bridges. “Can’t you see the enormous economic development that the SPDC has provided for the country?” asked the agent. “How can you be against this? Don’t you want things to go well for Burma?”

  When Aung San Suu Kyi had the same question put to her by Australian journalist Roger Mitton, she replied,

  But isn’t putting up bridges and building roads the job of any government? If you are going to talk like that then we’ll have to start making a list of all the bridges and the roads and the railways lines that were put up by the colonial government. If you are going to say that good government is one which builds bridges and lays down roads and railways, then we’d have to favor the colonial government as a very good government. But I doubt that the regime would accept such a definition. . . . This is just normal work that any government would be expected to do and I would not think that this is a justification for a military regime to keep clinging to power.

  The junta’s propaganda did not mention anything about unemployment, of course, which was assessed by certain people as being over 50 percent. Or t
he enormous social problems following in the tracks of drug abuse, or the growing HIV epidemic that harvested thousands of deaths every year.

  During the years around the turn of the millennium, reports also began to flow in about the junta’s ever more brutal assaults against the ethnic minorities. The junta had increased the pressure against the guerrilla groups that had chosen not to sign the truce. At the beginning of 1995, the town of Manerplaw was attacked, being then the center for several of the resistance groups. Manerplaw fell into the hands of the junta, and the region that had been controlled by the Karen people shrank to a tiny strip of land on the border with Thailand.

  In order to finish off the remains of guerrilla resistance, the junta then applied a so-called four cut strategy, which means that their aim was to cut off the opposing army’s access to information, weapons, supplies, and new recruits. And the only way to do this was to attack the civilian population. In April 1998, Amnesty International released a report showing that the junta had forcibly moved over 300,000 people from the Shan state in eastern Burma. The government troops had entered the villages, burned down the huts, killed the cattle, and forced the population to go with them to new settlements in central Burma. This displacement created a wave of refugees who took themselves over the border to Thailand, but hundreds of thousands of people also became domestic refugees inside Burma. And those who tried to return to their former villages were shot to death by Tatmadaw. The number of forcibly moved and dispossessed refugees has multiplied many times over since then.

  Later that year, Amnesty International published two reports showing that the situation was just as much of an emergency in the Karen and Karenni states. Another report from the organization Shan Women’s Action Network revealed that the regime’s troops had used rape systematically as part of their warfare. In an interview in Bangkok Post Naang Yord, a middleaged woman from the Shan people, describes how all the inhabitants of her village had been forcibly moved to central Burma. The earth there was dry and barren, and they had no way of making a living. Along with her daughter and her niece, Naang Yord had crept back to her old home village to salvage the rice harvest. But a Burmese military patrol caught sight of them and the nightmare began.

  “They put a sheet of plastic over my head,” said Naang Yord, “and then took turns raping me. I couldn’t see what they did to my two girls, but I heard them panting desperately a little way away. After that I heard two gunshots.”

  The soldiers disappeared from there, and Naang Yord was able to free herself. The first thing she saw when she tore off the plastic sheeting was her niece’s body, lying nearby. She had been shot in the ankle, probably because she had tried to crawl away from the soldiers. The second time they had shot her in the head. The journalist Vasana Chunvarakorn from Bangkok Post met Naang Yord and other women who had had similar experiences in sheltered accommodation in Thailand. Their pain permeated every word in her article: “Those who listen to the survivors’ stories have to push their imaginations to a terrifying limit. The women’s weak voices are heard only as a whisper. They have scars on their foreheads, ankles, and wrists. Their skin seems to give off a scent of dejection, with distinct traces of suppressed rage. Can anyone really handle what they have experienced?”

  After several months into her second house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi realized once again that the junta had changed their tone. Khin Nyunt met her a number of times, and according to one of her close colleagues at that time, she and the hardboiled head of security reached an understanding. It would be wrong to assert that Suu Kyi trusted Khin Nyunt—he had previously shown that negotiations might only be a strategy for status quo, not a meeting to reach compromises—but the feeling she received was still that he was searching for a way forward.

  The continued economic crisis certainly played a part. The regime could not even provide a living for its own population. At the beginning of the 2000s there periodically existed famine in parts of the country, and the state authorities were so dysfunctional that they were not able to pay the wages of the ordinary soldiers in the army, while at the same time the officers continued to assemble large fortunes. Even as late as in the beginning of 2010, they received a wage that is the equivalent of not more than five dollars a week. This explains some of the assaults against the ethnic minorities— plundering was and is a way for the soldiers in Tatmadaw to survive. Reports have even come in about them selling ammunition and weapons on the black market for a little extra money.

  During the early 2000s, the external pressure had also increased, if only marginally. The United States had introduced a ban on new investments in Burma, and harder sanctions by the European Union were being discussed, although not against any of the goods that meant anything for Burma’s exports. The United Nations working committee UN entity International Labour Organization (ILO) had aimed sharp criticism against Burma because the country systematically made use of forced labor. The ILO calculated that about 800,000 people were being forced to work without pay on roadwork, building schools, and as porters in the army. When the junta had received such criticism previously, they had waved it away and claimed that it was an Asian tradition to provide free labor for one’s government. However, this time the ILO exhorted all its member organizations, states, and companies, as well as unions, to stop dealing with Burma if the situation was not improved.

  In December 1999, the United Nations General Assembly adopted yet another resolution (54/186) demanding that Burma should live up to the United Nations’ basic principles on human rights. This document was unusually direct in tone for a diplomatic product. It demanded that the junta start a tripartite dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi and representatives for the ethnic minorities. The 1990 elections should be respected and the power should successively be channeled over to a government based on the election results. The resolution demanded an immediate stop of the assaults against the ethnic minorities, as well as the exploitation of forced labor and child soldiers.

  Another explanation for the new willingness to negotiate was that Kofi Annan had appointed the Malaysian Razali Ismail as the United Nations special envoy to Burma in April 2000. Razali had worked as a diplomat for decades. He had been Malaysia’s ambassador in India and led a number of his country’s delegations at ASEAN and the United Nations. During a period in the 1990s he was also the chairman of the United Nations General Assembly. Malaysia’s government has always had good relations with Burma’s military junta.

  Razali seems to have convinced Khin Nyunt of the need for a dialogue, and a person close to Aung San Suu Kyi says that she and Khin Nyunt were in agreement about an advanced plan of their course, which among others meant that the NLD would retake its seats in the national convention. While the talks were going on, a total of 244 NLD activists were released from the prisons, of which 54 were parliamentarians from the elections in 1990.

  However, most Burma experts were nonetheless skeptical of the junta’s ambitions.

  “SPDC talked with Suu Kyi to buy time,” said Aung Zaw, the editor in chief of the Thailand-based magazine The Irrawaddy. “Time to buy more weapons and time to give the Burmese people more false expectations that there will be political reforms.”

  On May 6, 2002, Aung San Suu Kyi was released. In the television broadcasts of her first day of freedom she looked worn and tired out. She was being led through crowds of people on her way to the NLD head office. On one occasion she seemed close to falling down. However, just as was the case after her first house arrest, she recovered and was soon able to take charge of the task of restoring the democratic movement.

  A government spokesperson affirmed that she was now “free to practice her political duties, even the ones connected to her party, NLD. Today we turn a page and write a new chapter for the people of Myanmar and for our relations with the international community. There is no way back.”

  Mass media all over the world immediately cabled out the news that the political deadlock in Burma was on its way to being resolved. “Thi
s is the first decisive step SPDC has taken in years,” said Dr. Zar Ni, a Burmese exile and the founder of the organization Free Burma Coalition.

  Clearly, not everybody was as positive, however. Aung Din, who had been in prison for five years because he had been one of the leaders of the student revolt in 1988, pointed out that the junta had as of yet not made any concessions that decreased their own power. Some political prisoners had been released, but they could be imprisoned again whenever it pleased the junta. “Besides, there are more than 2,000 political prisoners in Burma’s prisons. They must be released too,” noted Aung Din in The Irrawaddy.

  One thing had, however, really been changed: for the first time since 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi was free to move around outside Rangoon. And there was no lack of work to do. The formidable party apparatus that the NLD had set up before the elections in 1990, the network of offices and activists that had constituted the basis of the party’s election victory, had systematically been pulled to pieces by the military junta. The number of offices had been greatly reduced, the leadership had been held in prison or under house arrest, and the activists had been harassed by the USDA and the military security service. Aung San Suu Kyi therefore did as she had done during the election campaign thirteen years earlier: she set out on the road. Within the course of a few months she had visited dozens of NLD offices in the vicinity of Mandalay and Pegu, in the Karen state, the Mon state, and the Irrawaddy Delta.

  It now became apparent that her popularity had not diminished. The foreign diplomats who had claimed that she had played out her part as a political role model had been wrong. Even profoundly so.