Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  Khin Nyunt’s first measure as new prime minister was to launch a “roadmap to democracy.” In practice, it would be a rehash of the plan he had already launched in the 1990s. First he reconvened the national convention, whose assignment was still to draw up a new constitution. After that the junta promised yet again that elections would be held.

  Parallel to this, the economic liberalization would continue, but now more and more members of the junta began to question the deep dependence on China that had developed during the 1990s. India and other countries in Asia were competing to capture market shares for themselves, not least in the growing oil and gas industry. Than Shwe and the junta’s second-in-command, Maung Aye, considered that Khin Nyunt, who himself came from a Chinese background, was far too concerned about having good relations with the rulers in Beijing.

  It is impossible to know whether it was his desire to open the economy for Chinese businessmen, his contacts with Razali, or perhaps his willingness to compromise in the relations with Suu Kyi that was the decisive factor, but in the middle of October 2004, Khin Nyunt was dismissed as prime minister. The coup was made public in a press release that announced that Khin Nyunt had resigned “for health reasons.” He disappeared without a trace, and several months later information leaked out that he had been taken to a top-security prison in the Coco Islands in the Indian Ocean. Over two thousand of his most loyal colleagues in the military security service were simultaneously sacked or imprisoned.

  When I traveled to Burma in 2005 to do research for my book Granatklockorna i Myitkyina (“The Grenade Bells in Myitkyina”), I met several political activists who pointed out with grim humor that the security apparatus since Khin Nyunt’s fall from power had become “harder but more stupid.”

  “That is still true, but only partly,” Zaw Zaw pointed out, when we had seated ourselves on the small plastic chairs and each ordered a cup of green China tea. “Than Shwe has intensified surveillance, so people are more frightened nowadays. The organization USDA has started to function more and more as a security service and the control has become extra hard after the great protests in 2007. The people from USDA are also being made into village chiefs and the organization is to be provided with offices in all towns and villages. USDA is on its way to becoming the new totalitarian power center in Burma.”

  Zaw Zaw was earlier active in the youth section of the NLD. When Aung San Suu Kyi was freed at the end of the 1990s, he lived in one of her houses on University Avenue, along with a group of other young people from the NLD. To stop the young people from organizing themselves politically, the junta had closed all the universities in 1996, and they were not reopened until four years later. The idea was to avoid a new student revolt, but the effect was partly the direct opposite. A whole generation of academics became unemployed and now had more time to get involved in the democratic movement. Later on Zaw Zaw continued with his involvement and was a driving force in building up new NLD sections during Aung San Suu Kyi’s tours in the countryside in 2002 and 2003.

  Zaw Zaw now told me that he was tired of it all. Not of Aung San Suu Kyi—she still has strong support (and since her release I’m pretty sure Zaw Zaw and his friends have even greater confidence in her work)—but of the others in the NLD leadership.

  “They are old and afraid and don’t dare to do anything,” he says while taking a gulp of tea. “When the monks’ protests started in September 2007, everyone was waiting for the NLD to take the lead. But it didn’t happen. Instead they encouraged people to take things easy and not to demonstrate.

  The uprising therefore lacked political leadership, and it became easier for the junta to quell the demonstrations.”

  Zaw Zaw had an intense gaze and an ironic smile, and during our conversation I caught myself thinking about Aung San. This must have been how the young nationalists worked during the 1930s. One hundred percent focused on the task at hand. Tired of the “oldies” in the movement.

  For those who have been following the developments in Burma through the years, the demonstrations in 2007 came partly as a surprise. It was obvious that the population in Burma hated the regime and that poverty had increased the dissatisfaction. But there was not much to indicate that so many people were ready once again to confront the junta openly. Nineteen years had passed since the gigantic protests in 1988, and Aung San Suu Kyi had effectively been kept out of the public eye since 2003.

  This in turn meant that the international interest in Burma had faded. A rapid review of the international English-language newspapers shows that the number of news articles about Burma decreased dramatically during the years 2003–2007. The ethnic cleansing and the assaults along the borders of Burma are not newsworthy enough for the Western press.

  It was as though the human rights campaign that had started with such intensity in the 1990s had lost its thunder at the same time. Burma showed in a brutal and concrete way that the promises of a perpetually expanding democratic world did not necessarily have to be kept. The optimism among Burma’s exile groups also diminished in the 2000s. Many activists had spent almost twenty years away from their home country, without meeting their families or their childhood friends, without seeing any clear result of the campaign for democracy at home. When I traveled along the border between Thailand and Burma in 1998, most of the people I met believed that the junta would fall within a year or two. “Next year in Rangoon,” said one student who had fled after the elections in 1990, when we said good-bye to each other in the border town of Mae Sot. But the following year, everything was just as usual in Burma. The oppression just as severe. The poverty just as immense. This does not mean that the work of the exile groups had been in vain all these years. Quite the opposite. By educating young people along the border, establishing a dialogue between the ethnic groups, developing medical care, and discussing basic political issues, they are creating a popular base that will increase the chances of success for democracy in Burma when the day arrives for developments to take such a turn.

  However, the junta did not fall. Burma did not become a new South Africa, at least not with the aid of some “quick fix.” Perhaps it was a result of the restlessness of our times and our demands for rapid results. When the Burma campaigns did not achieve any results, many young Western activists moved onto the next thing.

  The decrease in interest resulted most of all from the attack against the United States on September 11, 2001, and on the ensuing war on terrorism. For a number of years, the international discourse was almost entirely about fundamentalist Islam, the brutal methods used in the war on terrorism, and the West’s own violations of human rights. The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, just two months before the junta in Burma decided once again to strangle the democratic movement.

  The junta did all they could to link their own fight to stay in power to the war on terrorism. The members of the democratic movement were more and more often called terrorists, and the state-owned newspapers carried continual reminders about the groups that were still at war with the junta. In particular, the population in the Muslim-dominated regions in the Arakan states to the west of Rangoon was badly affected. The Burmese government army commenced harsh attacks against the guerrillas from the Muslim Rohyinga people, who were fighting against Tatmadaw. The Rohyinga people, who had been living in the Arakan state for hundreds of years, were called Muslim extremists and “infiltrators from Bangladesh.” The populations of hundreds of villages were driven away with violence and were replaced by Bamar who were forcibly moved from other parts of the country.

  On a few occasions, smallish explosive charges were detonated in Rangoon, but they were probably primed by Christian Karen groups that had tired of jungle warfare and chosen terrorism as a method. At the end of the 1990s, a Karen group calling itself God’s Army had occupied Burma’s embassy in Bangkok for a few days, and on another occasion its members held several hundred patients hostage in a hospital in the town of Ratchanaburi. These incidents received tremendous international at
tention when it turned out that God’s Army was led by Jonny and Luther Hto, twins who were then only eleven years old. Their followers believed that they had magic powers, among other invulnerabilities, and in all of the photos that were published of them each had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

  However, God’s Army was crushed within a few months and there was no more “terrorism” in Burma.

  The junta did not receive any support either from the United States or the European Union when it came to their purported problems. Yet the junta was able to benefit from the change in the international climate that the war on terrorism brought with it. The world was once more deeply affected by the logic of the Cold War. This meant partly that Burma fell off the world’s radar since there was no way of linking the “little” conflict in Burma to the “big” conflict against radical Islamism. Countries like Russia and China could furthermore use the terrorism card when they argued for Burma’s case in the United Nations or other international contexts.

  The lines of conflict after 2001 have also created a new kind of affinity between those countries that were lumped together by the United States during the Bush regime as “the axis of evil.” Burma, Iran, North Korea, Eritrea, and other similar countries have realized that they can become stronger through cooperation. In their resistance to democratic reforms, they have found a solidarity that should really be impossible for regimes whose identity is based on nationalism and on fear of the rest of the world.

  In this way one can say that the junta had succeeded with their strategy. They were no longer the focal point for the international floodlights, and by isolating Aung San Suu Kyi they had strangled the domestic opposition. Foreign diplomats in Rangoon and groups that wanted to see increased trade with Burma even started to say that the world must accept the military rule, cooperate with the junta, and stop relying on Aung San Suu Kyi. Almost twenty years had passed since the elections in 1990, despite everything. How long should the results actually be valid? Had the junta not actually consolidated their popular support?

  It was this that made the monks’ saffron revolution so hopeful. It reminded the whole world of what was at stake in Burma.

  Although it did not really start with the monks at all.

  In the autumn of 2004, several of the student leaders who had been in the vanguard of the demonstrations in 1988 were released, among others Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi. Most of them had been in prison for almost sixteen years. When I visited Burma in the spring of 2005 I met some of them. The meeting took place under extremely hush-hush circumstances. It was the middle of the night and we sat on the floor of a candlelit apartment in central Rangoon. The security police were spying on the student leaders who had been released, round the clock, so I had arrived there two hours before the others so that nobody would take note of my arrival. They told me about life in prison, how one copes with years of isolation, and how it feels to lose a major part of one’s life.

  “We were prepared for things to take that turn,” they said. “We had seen how earlier generations of activists had sacrificed their lives or been thrown into prison.”

  One of them said that every day during his imprisonment, he thought about his day as though he had still been at liberty. When breakfast was pushed in to him through a hatch in the door, he thought about the kitchen back at his parents’ home. How they used to sit drinking tea and eating rice together. In the evenings he fantasized about getto-gethers with relatives and student friends, their conversations, laughter and arguments. Every day.

  And in the same way as Aung San Suu Kyi during her periods of house arrest, they had meditated every day for at least an hour. It was a way of clearing their thoughts and focusing on the aspects of their existence that they were able to influence.

  They told me how the strip lighting in the cells was on all day and night in order to break them down mentally, and how they were mishandled during the long interrogations with the security service. I asked whether they were intending to get involved once more? Did they dare to risk their liberty yet again? They contemplated the answer.

  “We must first find out which possibilities we have. Just at present we are under such tight control and we don’t know what the opposition movement looks like.”

  In February 2007, information leaked out that small groups of activists had carried out public protests in Rangoon. They gathered in groups of five to ten persons, handed out leaflets, and protested against the unemployment and poverty in the country. The United Nations had classified Burma as one of the twenty poorest countries in the world, and late in the year 2006 inflation increased exponentially. The price of rice, eggs, and cooking oil rose to such high levels that many people could no longer afford to buy even these most basic of daily groceries.

  Events began to resemble those in 1988, and this impression was reinforced by the name 88 Generation Students, chosen by the group leading the gradually expanding protest movement. Those whom I had met in Rangoon two years previously were part of this movement. Their movement grew during the spring and summer, and when the junta decided on August 15 to abolish state subventions of oil and gas, they saw their chance. The decision to abolish subventions was taken after the World Bank and the IMF had recommended precisely such measures. However, nobody had counted on the junta’s abolishing them altogether, and the decision was as usual made completely without warning. The prices doubled several times over, and people were suddenly forced to spend their total incomes on fuel and transport. 88 Generation Students decided to carry out a larger demonstration on August 19. About four hundred people assembled in central Rangoon, but at that point the junta struck immediately. The leaders of 88 Generation Students were thrown into prison, and the activists who had already been in prison for over fifteen years were given prison sentences of up to sixty-five years.

  It was in this situation, when 88 Generation Students had been silenced, that the orange-robed monks took over, and a whole world dressed in orange to support their struggle.

  On September 5 the soldiers crushed a peaceful demonstration in the little town of Pakokku. Three monks were injured, and the day after, a group of young monks took a number of civil servants hostage in a building near the monastery. They demanded an apology for the unnecessary violence of the previous day, but the military refused and the protest escalated step by step to become the most extensive popular protest since 1988. When the demonstrations were at their peak, over a hundred thousand people had dared to go out onto the streets. The monks marked their attitude toward the military in the same way they had after the elections in 1990: if they passed officers or members of their families they turned their begging bowls upside down and refused to accept alms—a tremendous insult to every faithful Buddhist.

  The most emotional moment of the protests was when a group of monks wandered along University Avenue in order to honor Aung San Suu Kyi. When they arrived at the barricades outside her house, one saw how the soldiers hesitated. Would they let the monks through? Would it give them bad karma if they stopped them? An officer pulled out a communications radio, and on a few shaky sequences taken by an onlooker one can see how he nods, puts down the receiver, and gives the order to let the monks pass. Suu Kyi met them at the gates to her home. They prayed together and people standing beyond the barricades claim that she was weeping. She had been able to show herself in public for the first time in several years. And for the first time in several years the monks revealed who they understood to be the rightful leader of the country. It was as though the whole of Burma had been given an electric shock. The Burmese journalist Myint Swe described how the simple fact that she once again appeared in public brought new energy to the democracy movement.

  The junta realized that the situation was beginning to get out of hand. To avoid risking anything, the junta leader Than Shwe sent his entire family abroad. They chartered a plane from the air company Air Bagan and flew to Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

  However, they really did not need to worry.
The military had learned its lesson since the demonstrations twenty years ago, and the whole security apparatus had been trimmed to handle exactly the same type of situation as the monks’ protests in 2007. On September 25, the junta threatened the demonstrators with violent reprisals. Soldiers and military vehicles were stationed at the Shwedagon Pagoda, and the next day they attacked a demonstration procession with about seven hundred participants. They fired tear gas grenades and advanced into the crowd of people while striking wildly about with batons and rifle butts. The same afternoon, photos were cabled out from Burma showing monks continuing to demonstrate. Some of them, still dressed in their orange robes, had put on gas masks as protection against the soldiers’ attack.

  On September 27, reports came in that many members of the army refused to participate in the assaults on the demonstrators. The British newspaper The Guardian published information that a group of officers had openly given their support to the protest movement, and a rumor said that four hundred soldiers at a regiment outside Mandalay had been arrested because they refused to obey orders. It is unclear if the information was really true, but in order to avoid disruption within the army, the junta leader Than Shwe personally took command of the troops.

  That was the last day of extensive protests. In the morning, the junta struck out against the monks. Those who were not arrested were compelled to remain inside the monasteries that were surrounded by heavily armed soldiers. By the Sule Pagoda in central Rangoon, a large demonstration was repulsed and several people were killed when the army opened fire. One of them was Japanese photographer Kenji Nagai, who was shot to death when he was about to take photographs of the soldiers’ excessive violence. A hidden camera from the radio station Democratic Voice of Burma caught the whole incident on film. It is a macabre and tragic sight when Kenji Nagai raises his camera, adjusts the focus, and then falls headlong backward, hit by a bullet from a machine gun. He dies a few seconds later on the warm, damp asphalt by the Sule Pagoda. Later, when the crowds of people had been dispelled, a soldier went up to him and took the camera from his dead body so as to get rid of all the evidence.