All over Burma, Suu Kyi was met by rejoicing crowds of people. In many places tens of thousands of people came to listen to her, and in several ways it began to resemble the mass movement that had made the junta so nervous during the election campaign in 1989.
A Swedish diplomat stationed in Bangkok met her after her release. He was received on the ground floor of the house on University Avenue in an eight-sided room with benches placed around the walls. Everything was decorated with traditional Burmese fabrics. At one end of the room, for some strange reason, stood a set of drums. After her second house arrest, her home had once again become a meeting place for those active in the party. When the diplomat asked Suu Kyi about the drums, she explained that the young people in the party enjoyed playing them.
The diplomat describes how Aung San Suu Kyi was full of energy and hopes for the future. He had with him an invitation to Sweden from the Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh, and Suu Kyi seemed sincerely interested in making the journey. For the first time since 1989, she believed in the possibility of leaving the country without its implying lifelong banishment. They met once again in 2002 and talked about humanitarian aid to Burma, among other things. On several occasions during the 1990s, Suu Kyi had exhorted the world at large not to give humanitarian aid as long as the donor countries were not completely certain that the aid was really reaching those who needed it most. The gross corruption in the country meant that officers and civil servants often lined their own pockets with aid money. Now Suu Kyi was no longer as negative. She had made a number of study visits to projects aimed at reducing the spread of HIV and she had seen that aid could be elicited. She also encouraged Sweden and other countries to accept exchange students from Burma. She said that it did not matter if children and supporters of the junta were those who traveled. They would in any case acquire a broader view of life through living abroad, and that would be good for everybody.
However, she was of the opinion that sanctions against Burma could still be useful. The United States and the European Union ought not to ease up on them without marked concessions on the part of the junta, and a basic demand was that the two thousand political prisoners in the country be released from prison.
She did fundamentally distrust the junta’s talk about political liberty, of course. Such promises had been given previously, and as soon as pressure on political changes had become too great, restrictions had been reintroduced.
This time it was the junta’s “popular” base, the USDA, that was to be the means of silencing the opposition. At every meeting, the NLD was surrounded by hundreds of perpetrators of violence, often criminals who had been released from prisons on the condition that they put themselves at the disposal of the USDA. They usually yelled slogans in support of the regime and jeered at Aung San Suu Kyi in the same way that the state-owned mass media did, calling her a spy and a whore who had married a foreigner. Their aim was to provoke a violent counterreaction from the followers of the NLD.
The SPDC had simultaneously closed the door in the face of further dialogue. During the second half of 2002, Aung San Suu Kyi waited for an invitation to real political negotiations, but no such invitation ever arrived.
There is much to indicate that the unclear behavior of the junta was dependent on an internal conflict. Despite their unscrupulous, extremely brutal methods, Khin Nyunt was a pragmatic politician. He understood that the military regime was going to fall, the question was only when and how. Would the transition to another system take place in a peaceful manner or would it be like Romania? Would the people hang their oppressors from the nearest lamppost? Nobody knew what the plan looked like, and perhaps Khin Nyunt was doing a double-cross in the same way as the others. It was possible that he felt more unsure of his power since his protector, the old dictator Ne Win, had been humiliated and publicly dragged through the mud. In Burma there were many who had assumed that it was he who was ruling the country from the wings, even a long time after he had formally resigned in 1988. However, in March 2002 the junta had sent out information that Ne Win had been confined to house arrest and that several of his relatives had been arrested, accused of planning a coup against the junta. Ne Win died in December 2002, still under house arrest, and the state-owned newspapers did not even mention that he had passed away.
It is unclear what kind of relationship Khin Nyunt had with Ne Win at that time, but it is conceivable that he was actually searching for an exit strategy through talks with Suu Kyi. Both of the other top names in the junta, Than Shwe and Maung Aye, were of a quite different opinion. Basically they still thought that the democratic movement should be combated by means of violence and that Aung San Suu Kyi should be kept in isolation.
On the afternoon of May 29, 2003, Khin Nyunt had a meeting with a foreign diplomat. When they had been talking for a few minutes, Khin Nyunt suddenly received a call on his cell phone. He cast a glance at the display and then he accepted the call.
“His face got very pale,” the diplomat told me when I met him at a small café in central Bangkok, “and when he had put down the receiver he sat in silence for at least a minute. After that he excused himself and left the room.”
Khin Nyunt had just been informed that Aung San Suu Kyi was about to be murdered.
On the night before May 30, Suu Kyi and her party had spent the night at the home of an NLD supporter in the town of Monywa, some miles to the west of Mandalay. They were on a tour in central Burma and had a couple of stopovers left until it was time to return to Rangoon. Only a few days before her departure, Suu Kyi had had a conversation with a close acquaintance. He had complained about the NLD’s lack of a real political program. If they were to take the new political liberty seriously, then they must formulate their ideas more clearly when it came to educational policy, social policy, and other areas where they were critical of the junta’s policies. “You are right,” Suu Kyi had replied. When she returned from her journey, she was intending to gather a group and draw up the guidelines for a more explicit political program.
On the morning of May 30, she inaugurated a new NLD office in Monywa and then met a group of young people who were going to form a local youth section. The time was about ten a.m. when their five loaded trucks left Monywa to continue on northward. In the first vehicle sat a chauffeur, Aung San Suu Kyi, and some NLD activists from the local party section. In the fourth vehicle sat a group of young people from the NLD who were also acting as her bodyguards. U Tin Oo, the aged vice chairman of the party, traveled in a minibus last of all and behind him snaked a long caravan of supporters who had chosen to accompany them northward from Monywa.
After some miles they arrived at a village where the whole party stopped to inaugurate yet another NLD office and to meet yet another group of young people. This was the shape the tour had taken. The interest in Suu Kyi and the NLD was so great that they would have been able to start any number of local sections. All that was lacking was time.
At half past eight in the evening, Suu Kyi’s caravan only had a couple of miles left to Depayin, where they planned to stop for the night. Darkness had fallen. The road twisted and turned northward, barely six feet wide, badly worn, and wet after the day’s rain. When they passed the little hamlet of Kyee, they were met by thousands of people who had all gathered to catch a glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi. By a white stone sign marking the border of the hamlet, they were stopped by two monks who had taken up their position in the middle of the road. One of the bodyguards in the fourth truck leaped out to find out what they wanted.
“We have been waiting for a long time. Ask Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to give a speech,” said one of the monks. The bodyguard explained that they did not have time to stop in Kyee since people were waiting for them in Depayin.
At that moment four small trucks drove up behind the caravan. In the back of the trucks stood mercenaries from the USDA yelling the slogan: “Relying on external forces, axe handles; people with negative views, we don’t want!”
The people standing al
ong the road yelled back: “We the people, in turn, don’t want you!”
That sufficed as a provocation. The men jumped down from the trucks and started to strike out wildly around them with pointed iron bars and bamboo rods. One of the trucks accelerated and drove right into the crowd of people. People were gripped by panic and ran in every direction. The mercenaries beat their way forward through the crowds toward Aung San Suu Kyi’s truck. Meanwhile at least three thousand USDA supporters approached from the sides. Everyone understood that this was not one of the USDA’s ordinary provocations. This was well directed, and the attackers were so numerous that nobody could escape. Wunna Maung had been in one of the lorries in Aung San Suu Kyi’s caravan and saw the bloodbath firsthand.
“They beat women . . . after pulling off their blouses and sarongs,” he has said in a report about the incident published by the organization ALT-SEAN. “When the victims covered in blood fell to the ground, I saw the attackers jumped on to them and wrapped their hair around their hands and pounded their heads against stone surface of the road, with all their force.”
While the dirty asphalt was being stained red with blood, the attackers yelled that the women were “racial criminals” who were intending to marry Kala (a Burmese word used disparagingly for Indians and Westerners). Another witness was fifty-year-old U Khin Saw:
I saw how people were brutally mishandled. I heard how dying people whimpered in pain, screamed in agony and called out for help. . . . It was as though all hell was let loose. I saw how the attackers knocked people down with all their strength and how they hacked at them with sharpened iron bars. . . . They struck until their victims were no longer alive.
The young people from the NLD, most of them students in their twenties, formed a ring around Aung San Suu Kyi’s truck to protect her, but the attackers were too many. Several of the students were gravely injured. The photographers Tin Maung Oo and Ko Thin Toe died on the spot from hard blows to the head. When the assailants had reached the truck, they struck indiscriminately against the windows, doors, and roof. Suu Kyi’s chauffeur realized what was at stake and stepped on the accelerator as hard as he could, and the car shot off through the chaos. A few miles farther on, they were stopped by a group of agents from the security service, who dragged Aung San Suu Kyi out of the backseat and carried her away. U Tin Oo, who had been sitting in the last vehicle in convoy, was given a hard blow to the head and carried away by the USDA forces.
Nobody has been able to prove it, but there is evidence that speaks for the fact that the agents who Suu Kyi met had been sent out by Khin Nyunt and that their assignment was to take her away from the massacre. About seventy people were killed at Depayin, but according to the media controlled by the junta, the number of fatalities was only four, and they claimed that the violence had started because Aung San Suu Kyi’s caravan of trucks had driven right into a group of “peaceful government supporters” who were demonstrating by the roadside.
One of those who were injured during the attack was the thirty-six-year-old NLD activist Ko Chit San. In the report about the massacre he tells that he found himself still at that place when about eighty policemen with shields and batons suddenly turned up, barely an hour after the massacre:
About eighty policemen, holding shields and wooden clubs, came to [one area of killing after the massacre was over]. . . . Two officers got out of the cars and checked the killing field. Hiding under cover of night, I witnessed that the eighty policemen threw the bodies of the dead and injured, as if they were garbage, into the trucks. I could clearly see in the lights of trucks that had been to that area before and others that got there later, although I could not discriminate between who was who. The two Helix pickup trucks left at the scene were pushed down into the rice field and then they set them up as if they had overturned. The other two Helix pickup trucks were set up to look like they had had a head-on collision. Then they took pictures of them with video and still cameras, for the record. After that, I left that area so that I could find a venue to hide for a night.
For several days it was feared that Aung San Suu Kyi had been killed or seriously injured. Nobody knew where she had disappeared to. The state-owned media cabled out a fantastic story about an international conspiracy against her and that she needed to be protected against a group of professional murderers who had been sent to Burma. “We don’t know the target for the assassins, but we will be blamed if anything happens to her,” said the foreign minister, Win Aung. The junta leader Than Shwe wrote a letter to his colleagues in ASEAN, in which he claimed that the NLD had planned to create anarchy in the country just in time for Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday on July 19. The letter was intended to excuse the massive campaign that now began to suppress the democratic movement yet again. Within a few days the junta had shut down all the NLD offices and made it clear that they would not tolerate any political mass meetings. There is a law in Burma that says that more than five people may not gather in the same place without permission from the authorities. This law, a remnant from the British colonial era, has been used diligently through the years, but during periods of greater openness the police had not placed that much importance on it. Now it was being applied slavishly.
At first the junta refused to say where they were keeping Suu Kyi prisoner, and there were rumors that she was dead and that the junta did not dare to tell the truth for fear of the people’s revenge. However, after a number of weeks it emerged that she had been thrown into the Insein prison. There she remained until September, when she was diagnosed with an illness that compelled her to undergo a gynecological operation. When she was discharged from the hospital she was taken to her home on University Avenue for a third period of house arrest.
The noose had once again been tightened, and this time it would be over four years before the population in Burma would catch a glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi.
14
The Saffron Revolution
A 1947 black DeSoto picked me up from outside the hotel. The car was in perfect condition, with shiny chrome work on the instrument panel.
“It’s my father’s,” said the chauffeur, a young man who, to judge by his appearance, could have found a place in any reggae band. “He has always taken good care of this car, as though it was a child. Mostly so as not to have to buy a new one. We could never have afforded that.”
It was January 2010, and I had traveled to Burma to interview some of Aung San Suu Kyi’s colleagues. Darkness was about to fall as we slowly glided along the road. There was a scent of incense and spicy food from the outdoor food stalls in the streets. Rangoon is and as far as I know has always been full of street trade. People sit on blankets and cheap mats and sell everything from dried fish to two-month-old issues of magazines like Time or New Statesman. There are crowds everywhere. Children playing or working in their parents’ street stall, women in their eighties with their two or three remaining teeth red from betel nut juice.
Central Rangoon has not changed much since the 1950s. The blocks in the harbor district consist of long, narrow lanes lined with turquoise, white, and blue three-story houses that could just as well have been taken out of an early novel by Graham Greene. The style is colonial and decadent. The façades are stained by soot and damp. The plaster has fallen off and the windows are so shabby that one wonders how the panes can remain in the frames. It is as though somebody had moved one of the most charming suburbs of Paris to the tropics and then allowed it to rot for half a century.
We passed some young men who wanted to exchange dollars on the black market.
“Change money? Good rate for you!”
Nobody in Burma believes any longer in the domestic economy, and the inflation is brutal, so dollars have become the most desirable currency. When I first traveled to Burma in the mid-1990s, one received 250 kyat for a dollar on the black market. Nowadays it’s four times that amount.
We are on our way to a teahouse to meet Zaw Zaw, a former member of the NLD who now calls himself an activist.
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A meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi was out of the question. She had not been allowed to meet any journalists since May 2003. The fact is that she had not met many people at all during the most recent, long period of isolation. She had been visited by her doctor, her two housekeepers, on a few occasions one of her party comrades, and on even fewer occasions by UN representatives.
Razali Ismail was given permission to meet her a few times during the autumn and winter of 2003–2004. On the first occasion, Suu Kyi had written down a list of names of the young NLD activists who had been at Depayin. She wanted Razali to check that they were safe or—if they had been arrested—that they were being treated well by the authorities.
“It was tragic,” says Debbie Stothard, who later received the list from Razali. “Who was going to tell her that several of the young people had been killed at Depayin?”
Beginning in the spring of 2004, no further visits were permitted. Razali was blocked from entering the country, and in January 2006 he resigned from the post of the United Nations special envoy in protest against the junta’s unwillingness to cooperate. He was replaced by Ibrahim Gambari, a Nigerian politician who did not have any particular previous knowledge about Burma and who, up until his resignation in 2009, did not succeed in finding any cracks in the junta’s façade.
For Gen. Khin Nyunt, the third party in what could have been a meaningful dialogue, the period after Depayin was a political roller coaster with regard to power. Khin Nyunt has always been a survivor, and despite the obvious conflicts with Than Shwe, he was appointed prime minister in August 2004. By then he had continued to be in favor of talks with Suu Kyi, though he didn’t take part in them himself. After her release in 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi mentioned that there had also been a short period of dialogue following the Depayin massacre.
“I can say that real discussions took place when I met with Col. Tin Hlaing, Maj. Gen. Kyaw Win, and Brig. Gen. Than Htun after the Depayin incident,” she said in an interview with the magazine The Irrawaddy. “I think they did the best they could. Whenever I spoke with them, I always noticed that they raised good points. That’s why I never thought that I was always right. I always felt friendly toward them. Perhaps they felt the same about me. However, what we discussed has never actually been implemented.”
Aung San Suu Kyi Page 23