The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  In the wedding photograph, Aung San sits like a coiled spring. He and his bride share a large, overstuffed sofa, sitting a good six inches apart. She has jasmine in her hair, a floral garland round her shoulders and a long white robe that sweeps the floor; her black eyebrows offset large, gentle, wide-set eyes. He is shaven-headed and dressed in his army uniform, his knee-length boots brightly polished. He grasps his slouch hat in both hands and leans forward, ready, one feels, to jump up and strike at the first opportunity. It is the portrait of a man who has already achieved a lot, but who knows that he cannot rest, that his work is not even half done.

  And so it was to prove. In March 1944 he was flown to Tokyo to be decorated by the emperor and promoted to the rank of major general. In August Burma was declared an independent nation, and the BIA renamed the Burma National Army. But it was all a sham. The Japanese realized that the army they had created under Suzuki was no longer to be trusted and kept moving its units around Burma to make it more difficult for them to organize. Meanwhile Japan was rapidly losing the war, as its lines of supply from Tokyo became impossibly overstretched, and its technological and financial limitations compared with those of the Americans became ever more starkly apparent.

  Aung San had now been around the Japanese long enough to know how to play the game by their rules. He accepted their honors with a stiff bow, did as he was told, kept an impassive face—and quietly set about organizing his second war of independence. Soon after his latest trip to Tokyo he made contact with the Allies across the Naga Hills, and began to prepare to open an internal front against the Japanese once the Allies invaded. With their support he secretly set up a resistance movement to work in tandem with his army as a partisan force, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL).

  But he maintained the pretence of loyalty to his masters. On March 17, 1945, standing alongside senior Japanese officers, he took a pledge at Rangoon’s City Hall to launch the Burma National Army’s campaign against the Allies, and while a Japanese military band played, his army marched out of Rangoon in the direction of the front. But once outside the city they scattered, following a prearranged plan, to base areas throughout central and lower Burma, and ten days later launched their attack on the Japanese. By August 4th, after tens of thousands of Japanese had been slaughtered by the Allies, now aided by Aung San’s “Patriot Burmese Forces” as they were renamed, in increasingly one-sided battles, the war in Burma was over. It was between those two crucial dates that Aung San Suu Kyi entered the world.

  Aung San was still only thirty when the Japanese surrendered, but he had matured beyond recognition since his clumsy performances in university debates ten years before. He had shown great courage, determination and cool-headedness as he took the leading role first in forging Burma’s first army since the fall of the king in 1885, then turning it, with perfect timing, against the power that had sponsored it. As the war ground on, his popularity among his people grew: To many millions of Burmese he seemed the only young leader with the determination, agility and charismatic appeal to save their country from utter destruction. And when the Allies finally arrived in Rangoon and met him face to face, they took the measure of this man, who had changed sides so nimbly, and decided that he was someone they could work with. Field Marshal William Slim, the British general who captured the Burmese capital on May 3rd at the head of the Fourteenth Army, took the view that he was “a genuine patriot and a well-balanced realist . . . the greatest impression he made on me was one of honesty.”12

  With peace the British returned, reinstalling their former governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, but they found the situation very different from when they had left in 1941. The country’s towns and cities had been devastated by the battles between the Allies and Japanese; in the British parliament, one MP said the degree of destruction in Burma was worse than in any other area in the East. And the Burmese under Aung San and his comrades in the AFPFL, hardened by years of war and hungry for the freedom for which they had been fighting so long, were no longer in a mood to compromise.

  Unable to submit to Aung San’s demands—which amounted to handing the government of the country over to his League—Dorman-Smith packed the executive council with pro-British Burmese who had no popular following. Aung San responded by calling on the Burmese to launch concerted nonviolent action against the British, refusing to pay rents and taxes or supply them with food. Dorman-Smith was recalled to London, resigning soon afterwards; a Labor government under Attlee replaced the Conservatives, and in early 1947 Aung San and his colleagues were invited to London to negotiate a settlement. During a stopover in Delhi he made no bones about his position. He told journalists that he wanted “complete independence,” not dominion status or any other halfway compromise—and that if he was not granted it, he would have “no inhibitions of any kind” about launching a struggle, nonviolent or violent or both, to obtain it.13

  Once again, his timing was superb: Attlee’s government was ideologically committed to freeing as many colonies as it could, and was in any case too strapped for cash to follow any other course. Aung San returned home with a promise of full independence. Burma would be a challenging country to rule: The Burman race to which he belonged was only one of several major ethnic groups within or straddling its borders, and the war had poisoned relations between them. But the following month the Panglong Conference in Shan State, in the northeast, secured the agreement of all of the main ones (except the Karen, who boycotted it, demanding their own state) to the proposed new nation. When elections for the Constituent Assembly were held on April 9, 1947, Aung San’s AFPFL won 248 of the 255 seats. Aung San was not only the father of Burma’s army and the hero of its freedom struggle but now the preeminent leader of the nation as well.

  It would be too brutal to say that he timed his death with equal panache. Little more than three months after his landslide election victory, on July 19, 1947, he was chairing a meeting of the Governor’s Executive Council in Rangoon’s huge Secretariat Building, the colonial behemoth that still dominates a large part of downtown Rangoon, discussing, ironically enough, the theft of 200 Bren guns from the ordnance depot a week before, when a jeep pulled up outside. Five men in fatigues jumped out, stormed into the building, ran up the stairs, felled the single guard at the door, then burst in and slaughtered most of the council where they sat with automatic gunfire, Aung San included. An embittered political enemy of Aung San’s was blamed for the attack, and later hanged. Factionalism and jealousy, “the two scourges of Burmese politics” according to Aung San Suu Kyi, had robbed the country of its most promising leader, less than a year before the independence to which he had dedicated his life was granted.

  *

  Aung San, his wife Ma Khin Kyi and their first baby, Aung San Oo (Oo means simply “first”).

  Aung San Suu Kyi was two years old when her father died, “too young,” as she put it, “to remember him.”14 In one of the last photographs taken before his death Aung San appears to have mellowed considerably since that nervous, high-intensity wedding picture. He and Ma Khin Kyi smile toothily at each other across the three children, two sons and a daughter, that she has borne him. One of Aung San’s hands holds the hand of Aung San Lin, their younger son, his other rests on Suu’s shoulder. Suu has protruding ears and looks up at the camera in frank alarm. As in the earlier photograph, Ma Khin Kyi has flowers in her hair, which is coiled in a cylindrical bun, and she looks as calm, radiant and tender as before.

  Aung San, his wife Ma Khin Kyi and their three children, Aung San Oo, Aung San Lin and Aung San Suu Kyi (left).

  There are numerous strange and ghostly parallels between the life of the heroic father and that of his daughter. It was in 1938 that the so-called “Revolution of 1300” occurred, the nationwide outbreak of strikes and protests that propelled Aung San and his comrades along the road to independence. And it was exactly fifty years later, in 1988, that the greatest uprising in independent Burma’s history occurred, propelling Suu to t
he leadership of the democracy movement.

  It was in Rangoon General Hospital in 1941, when he was a patient and she was a nurse, that Aung San met his future wife, Ma Khin Kyi; and it was in the same hospital forty-seven years later, when Ma Khin Kyi was a patient, having suffered a crippling stroke, and Aung San Suu Kyi was nursing her, that she met the students wounded when the army fired on their demonstrations; it was also outside that same hospital, on August 24, 1988, that she spoke to a political meeting for the first time in her life. Two days later she addressed a crowd of hundreds of thousands at the Shwedagon pagoda, the national shrine where Aung San had lambasted British rule before the war.

  The Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon, outside which Suu gave her crucial debut speech.

  The vengefulness of Aung San’s enemies robbed his family of a husband and father; the vengefulness and fearfulness of the military regime quite as effectively robbed Aung San Suu Kyi’s family of a wife and mother.

  Aung San won an overwhelming mandate from his people in 1947 but was cut down before he could show what he might have been capable of in government. His daughter won an equally imposing majority but was prevented almost as decisively from doing anything with it.

  In these ways Suu’s whole life has been haunted by the glory of what her father achieved, by an awareness of how much was left unfinished at the time of his premature death, and by regret for how much was done wrongly or inadequately by those who took his place; for independent Burma, which was to such a great extent Aung San’s personal achievement, was launched badly and unhappily, like a wagon with one buckled wheel, after that murderous attack.

  When Suu was fifteen the family moved to Delhi, where her mother became the Burmese ambassador. It was an honor, but it was also a way for General Ne Win, the head of the army who would shortly become the nation’s dictator, to get a politically inconvenient person out of the way before he seized power.

  Intellectually, moving to India proved to be a crucial step for Suu. In the Indian capital she discovered at first hand what a backwater she had been born and raised in, and began to learn how a great civilization, which had been under the thumb of the imperialists for far longer than Burma, had not lost its soul in the process, but rather had discovered new modes of feeling and expression that were a creative blend of Indian tradition and the modernity the British brought with them.15

  In Burma, colonialism had been experienced as a zero-sum game: The further the foreigners intruded into Burmese life, it was felt, the more the Burmese lost touch with their own traditions, ending up deracinated, demoralized and cynical. But now Suu discovered that just over the Burmese border in Bengal, in the cradle of Britain’s Indian empire, a creative renaissance had been set in motion, with the active participation of both Englishmen and Indians, which had resulted in a new synthesis, the forging of new tools to understand and even to mold the developing modern world. In an important essay she wrote many years later, comparing the intellectual life of Burma and India, she sketched what she felt Burma needed, and what it had so far entirely lacked.

  “And what should they know of England who only England know?” Kipling had asked rhetorically, and Aung San Suu Kyi came to feel the same way about her own homeland: Only by leaving it could you really see it, and now she saw its follies and limitations with the clarity of the self-exiled. In an essay written two decades later she quoted the caustic judgment of an early countryman who had traveled abroad, U May Oung, who joined the Young Men’s Buddhist Association in 1908 after qualifying as a barrister in London. The modern Burman, May Oung wrote, was “a Burman to all outward appearances, but entirely out of harmony with his surroundings. He laughed at the old school of men . . . he thought there was nothing to be learned from them . . . he had adopted the luxuries but not the steadfastness and high-souled integrity of the European, the lavish display of wealth but not the business instincts of the Indian, the love of sensuous ease but not the frantic perseverance of the Chinaman.”16

  Suu examined her countrymen from her new perspective and saw how right May Oung had been. And she compared the sad figure of the confused and superficial modernized Burmese with the sort of Indians who had emerged from early encounters with the British in Bengal. In particular she describes Rammohun Roy, the eighteenth-century Bengali scholar known as “the father of the Indian Renaissance.” She wrote:

  Rammohun Roy set the tone for the Indian Renaissance, which was essentially a search for ways and means of revitalizing the classical heritage of India, so that it could face the onslaught of new and alien forces without losing its individual character or failing to fulfill the demands of a rapidly changing society . . . It was important that social, religious and political aspects of reform should move together . . . But . . . the underlying purpose tended to be the same: to bring India into harmonious step with modern developments without losing her identity.17

  “To bring Burma into step with modern developments without losing her identity”: That could be the challenge of a lifetime. This quotation is taken from a long and subtle essay, first published in 1990, in which Suu compares the intellectual life of India and Burma; but in a sense it was a letter to herself, setting out the sort of mental and emotional, not to mention spiritual and political, development that Burma cried out for, and which, in the first, bruising century of its encounter with modernity, it had almost entirely lacked—and which (the essay implies rather than says it) only someone like Suu herself, a child of Burma who was also steeped in the modern wisdom of India and points west, might be able to provide. These were some of the seminal ideas that an adolescence spent among the brilliant and highly articulate brains of New Delhi had planted and watered.

  In New Delhi, and later at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she read Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), Suu was developing her ideas of how Burma needed to change so that it could embrace democratic development in the way India had, without losing touch with its identity. But in the real world back home, following his coup d’état, General Ne Win had embarked on a reckless adventure in eccentric, home-grown socialism, nationalizing everything, closing down parliament, terminating the free press and jailing anyone who resisted. Anticipating Afghanistan’s Taliban by a couple of decades, he closed down popular entertainments, including horse racing.18

  Millions of ethnic Indians, many of whom had been in Burma for generations, were forcibly repatriated and Burma’s other links with the outside world, such as the Ford Foundation and the British Council, were rapidly eliminated. The sort of ideologically driven economic disaster that overtook much of the socialist world in these years was now enacted in Burma, too, and the “rice bowl of Asia” became a net importer of food. The nation began a long descent through the world’s rankings, ending in the ignominious position, twenty-five years after the coup d’état, of having to ask the United Nations to grant it “least-developed nation status,” in order to receive the handouts that go with it.

  On the other side of the world, Suu graduated from Oxford and worked for three years at the United Nations in New York under the Burmese Secretary General U Thant. Returning to England she married Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar, and they settled down in Oxford with their two small sons. Amid the responsibilities of raising a family on a small academic income, any grand ideas Suu may have entertained about her possible role in Burma shrank in scale.

  Yet, as Aris later wrote, Suu had never forgotten who she was and who her father was, had never renounced the idea that sometime, at some unimaginable future date, her country might need her. “From her earliest childhood,” he wrote in 1991, “Suu has been deeply preoccupied with the question of what she might do to help her people. She never for a moment forgot that she was the daughter of Burma’s national hero . . . She always used to say to me that if her people ever needed her, she would not fail them.”19 In the months before they married, she wrote to him over and over again, and in her loving letters the same anxious theme kept recurring. “Again and again she expressed
her worry that her family and people might misinterpret our marriage and see it as a lessening of her devotion to them,” he writes. “She constantly reminded me that one day she would have to return to Burma, that she counted on my support at that time, not as her due, but as a favor.”20

  And he quotes from some of these letters—almost unbearably painful to read now, nearly forty years on, more than ten years after Michael’s death, and twenty years after she was first confined to her home.

  In the end the destiny about which she had such a strong intuition did indeed call. As Michael Aris wrote, there is no indication that she saw it coming. But then suddenly it was there, standing before her, unarguably huge and fearful and compelling. And all she did, all she is still doing, is to answer its call.

  PART TWO

  THE PEACOCK’S FAN

  1

  LATE CALL

  THEY were practically born on the move, but as the English winter slowly gave way to spring at the end of March 1988, the exotic family that lived at number 15 Park Town, a road of stately Victorian houses in north Oxford, seemed at last to have reached a sort of equilibrium.

  After more than twenty years of struggle, Michael Aris was closing in on his ambitions. He had been a lonely pioneer in the madly difficult and obscure subject of Tibetan language and culture; and he had found within that rarified discipline an even more obscure and rarified niche of his own—the history and culture of the kingdom of Bhutan, an offshoot of Tibet high in the Indian Himalayas, the last Tibetan kingdom to open its doors to the modern world. But there is something to be said for obscure niches: For six years, until interrupted by the call of love, he had been able to pursue his studies in the heart of the kingdom itself, as private tutor to the sons of the king.