The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  If brutality is one of the distinguishing marks of the Burmese regime, the other is complacency: It has long had the bully’s serene confidence that fear will triumph. So sure was General Ne Win, known as “the Old Man” or “Number One,” that the latest spasm of rebellion had been crushed that on April 11th he slipped out of the country and flew to Europe, to relax in the cool, clean air of his favorite Swiss and West German spas. Meanwhile an Inquiry Commission the regime had appointed to look into the death of the first victim of the violence was going about its work.

  The Commission presented its report on May 6th. It admitted that Maung Phone Maw and one other student had been killed by gunfire—but anyone hoping for a clear account of what happened subsequently would have felt badly let down. The report blamed “some students who wanted to create disturbances” for the chaos, gave gross underestimates of the number injured and arrested, and instead invited sympathy for the twenty-eight riot police it said had been wounded by stones. Of the hundreds more students shot dead and the dozens who suffocated in the police van there was not a word. “Rather than soothing the already inflamed tempers,” wrote the Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner in his book about the uprising, the report “added insult to injury.”8

  The impudent lies in the report provoked an old critic of the regime, silent for many years, to return to the offensive. U Aung Gyi, aged sixty-seven, a senior brigadier who had been sacked from the army back in the early 1960s for publicly attacking the regime’s policies—he had spent two terms in jail, though he still seemed to be on affable terms with Ne Win—suddenly piped up again, sending his old boss a blistering open letter condemning the Inquiry Commission’s report and estimating that 282 people had been killed in March. In his conclusion he attempted to draw the sting, exculpating his former boss from direct responsibility—“Sir, may I request you . . . not to get involved or you will regret it,” he wrote fawningly.9 “These violations of human rights will be infamous. You actually were not involved.” But even so, his condemnation of the report gave new heart to the growing resistance movement.

  At the end of May the silence of the streets persuaded the regime to allow schools and colleges to reopen. This was its final act of folly: Back on their campuses again the students could for the first time see who and how many of them were missing, could hear from the injured the stories of who had died and how, and could once again stoke the fires of anger that had been stifled since the second week of March. Within two weeks the streets again exploded, with demonstrations and running battles which pitched the protesters, who now included textile workers and Buddhist monks as well as students, against the hated riot police.

  After almost a week of clashes, the government again slammed down the shutters, ordering classes on all four of Rangoon University’s campuses closed—but neglecting to do the same for the two campuses of the Institute of Medicine, one of which was just across the road from the hospital where Suu had for ten weeks been nursing her mother. Without skipping a beat the protests shifted there, taking in also the Institute of Dental Medicine which was next door.

  “We held a big meeting on the Prome Road campus [north of the city center] on June 21st,” remembered Soe Win, a medical student.10 “Thousands of people were there and suddenly someone got the idea that we should march down town to the main Institute of Medicine in central Rangoon, where another meeting was being held. We marched off at 1 pm, a solid column of several thousand students. We took our peacock and student union flags and someone went inside the teachers’ office [and] brought out Aung San’s portrait to be carried in front of the demonstration.”

  But before the marchers could get close to the city center, they found themselves hemmed in by riot police with rifles and batons and by soldiers with machine guns. Remembering the massacre in March, when the students had been trapped and shot dead by troops, the demonstrators scattered into the lanes and nearby houses before the soldiers could open fire. Most of them survived—but on the same day elsewhere in the city many died.

  Word of the new clashes flashed across the city. Down at the Institute of Medicine the student meeting was still in progress, and a witness of the violence further north burst in with the news. Suspected spies inside the hall were pointed out by angry students, and grabbed and hauled to the front of the meeting for summary justice; one of them narrowly escaped being lynched. A hundred or more people died in the clashes that day, according to diplomats’ estimates, and many dozens were wounded, and now they streamed into the hospital in ambulances and cars and rickshaws and carried on the shoulders of friends. These were the first protests to erupt since Suu’s arrival in the country at the beginning of April, and at the hospital she found herself with a ringside seat. Burma’s bloody tragedy was unfolding before her eyes.

  The regime acted fast to end the protests, shutting the medical and dental campuses, making hundreds more arrests, and for the first time clamping a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the city. This brought mayhem to markets whose stallholders were accustomed to setting up their stalls and laying out their wares in the early hours of the morning. Forced to start work later, they raised their prices to make up for the loss of trade, adding another new element to the cocktail of misery and fury that was steadily rendering Burma ungovernable.

  *

  And then the rains came, and Suu and her mother went home.

  The month of July has a special meaning in Suu’s story, and that of her family: It is the month when her father was killed, the event commemorated every year on Burma’s Martyrs’ Day. It is when the monsoon, which normally starts in June, increases to its greatest intensity, coinciding with the Burmese lunar months of Wahso and Wagaung. “The word ‘monsoon’ has always sounded beautiful to me,” she wrote eight years later, “possibly because we Burmese, who are rather inclined to indulge in nostalgia, think of the rainy season as most romantic. As a child I would stand on the veranda of the house where I was born and watch the sky darken and listen to the grown-ups wax sentimental over smoky banks of massed rain clouds . . . When bathing in the rain was no longer one of the great pleasures of my existence, I knew I had left my childhood behind me. . . .”11

  It is the season when Burma is most quintessentially Burmese—hot and sultry and shriekingly green and fertile, when the rain comes down like a waterfall every morning and evening, and sometimes in the middle of the day as well. It is the season in which ecstasy, melancholy and tragedy seem inextricably mixed—for her nation as a whole, and for Suu and her family in particular.

  At Rangoon General Hospital, her doctors discharged Daw Khin Kyi: There was nothing more they could do for her. Suu converted one of the large downstairs rooms at 54 University Avenue into a sickbay and on July 8th, she took her home. Mother and daughter were back together in the villa on the shore of Inya Lake, in the north of Rangoon, where they had moved with Suu’s brother Aung San Oo when she was eight.

  54 University Avenue, Rangoon, the family home where Suu was detained for more than fifteen years.

  However gloomy the prognosis, it must have been a relief to be back in familiar surroundings. And on July 22nd, to Suu’s joy, the family was reunited when Michael, Alexander and Kim flew out to join them. In a letter to her parents-in-law in June, she had revealed how much she missed them.12 Prior to this, her longest separation from all of them had been a month, and she was looking forward to having them with her again. The house, Michael wrote, was “an island of peace and order under Suu’s firm, loving control. The study downstairs had been transformed into a hospital ward and the old lady’s spirits rallied when she knew her grandsons had arrived.”13 But the preparations had worn Suu out: “When we first arrived,” Michael wrote in a letter to his twin brother Anthony in August, “the boys said that Suu looked as if she had just been released from a concentration camp! She had really exhausted herself trying to renovate the house before her mother’s return. She has put on some weight and is looking much better.”14

  The future, though bleak, was
now attaining a visible form: Suu would wait out the inevitable, making her mother’s last weeks and months as comfortable as possible. Her family would keep her company until the boys had to go back to school. What were their plans once her mother had passed away? Would Suu shut up the house, perhaps sell it, and close that chapter in her life forever, severing her closest ties to her homeland? With the boys still at school in Oxford and both Michael and Suu committed to their academic work in England, that would have been the logical, almost inevitable course.

  But then something happened which stunned the nation.

  After the last bout of bloodletting, it seems finally to have dawned on General Ne Win that things could not go on as they were. So on July 23rd—one day after the arrival of Michael and the boys—he convened an extraordinary congress of the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP), the monopolistic political party he had created and through which he ruled the country. Standing on the podium before the thousand delegates, the blubbery-lipped, muscle-bound, imposing but now fading tyrant made the most remarkable speech of his career, transmitted live on state television.

  “Dear delegates,” he told the hall, “I believe that the bloody events of March and June show a lack of trust in the government and the party that guides it.”15

  People all over the country watched mesmerized as the man with the power of life and death announced that he was rewriting the rules.

  “It is necessary,” Ne Win went on, “to find out whether it is the majority or the minority that support the people showing the lack of trust . . . The current congress is requested to approve a national referendum . . . If the choice is for a multiparty system, we must hold elections for a new parliament.”

  Burma had been awash with rumors about the state of Ne Win’s mental health ever since the death of his favorite wife some years before. But now this turkey was apparently voting for Christmas: Had he finally cracked?

  The general now handed the microphone to an underling called Htwe Han—who continued to read his boss’s speech, still in the first person. And now came the real bombshell. “As I consider that I am not totally free from responsibility, even if indirectly, for the sad events that took place in March and June,” Htwe Han read out, “and because I am advancing in age, I would like to request party members to allow me to relinquish the duty of party chairman and party member.” As if that was not enough, he added that five other top office-holders, his entire inner circle, the gang who had run Burma for years, would do likewise. “The atmosphere,” Michael wrote, “was electric with hope.”16

  Yet anybody who interpreted the speech to mean that the protesters would now have free rein were disabused by his final words—Ne Win had taken the microphone back now—which epitomized the crude menace of his style. “In continuing to maintain control,” he said, “I want the entire nation, the people, to know that if in future there are mob disturbances, if the army shoots, it hits—there is no firing in the air to scare.”

  Nonetheless, the simple message was: All change! “The nation,” wrote Bertil Lintner, “and possibly even more so the diplomatic community in Rangoon, was flabbergasted. International wire service reports were euphoric. Public outrage in Burma had forced an end to twenty-six years of one-party rule and one of Asia’s most rigid socialist systems . . . Or had it?”17

  Bertil Lintner, the veteran Swedish Burma-watcher based in Thailand, photographed in November 2010 in Chiangmai. Lintner’s book Outrage documented the uprising of 1988 and its bloody repression in great detail.

  *

  As Lintner indicated, things were not as straightforward as they seemed. By the time the congress ended two days later, it had rejected the idea of a referendum on a multiparty system that Ne Win himself had proposed. The Old Man was probably responsible for that, tugging the strings behind the scenes. It had also turned down four of the six resignations he had offered. Ne Win himself was allowed to bow out—but only to be replaced as president and chairman of the party by the most brutal of his underlings, Sein Lwin, the man who had ordered the killings back in March and who had since been known as “the Butcher” to the protesters.

  Sein Lwin, “the Butcher,” who briefly replaced Ne Win as head of state in 1988, until forced from power by mass protests.

  “Sein Lwin’s takeover was aimed solely at preventing the loss of [Ne Win’s] own power and security,” Michael later wrote to his brother.18 “As Ne Win’s hit man and crony he’s used to combining the role of court executioner, astrologer, sorcerer and alchemist—literally, not figuratively, in the peculiar mixture of magic and repression that the former regime has depended upon to stay in power, and which will now continue unabated.”

  It was like offering the demonstrators a carrot—but then cracking them over the head with a stick before they could take a bite of it. It was like opening Pandora’s Box but then trying to slam it shut again before anything got out.

  For whatever reason, acting on whatever senile, cock-eyed calculation, the Old Man had planted a seed, and nothing would be the same again. “Up to then,” diplomat Martin Morland remembered, “the student movement . . . was completely unfocused. It was in essence anti-government: protest against brutality, a frustrated reaction against the inane policies, the demonetization, the hopelessness of the students, the lack of any future. There was no focus to it. Ne Win, unwittingly, provides a focus by calling for a multiparty system, and from there on in, the student cry is for democracy.”

  And in that context, substituting the Butcher for the Old Man was like lighting the short fuse of a big bomb. The curfew, so destructive to the local economy, had been lifted at the end of June. Colleges remained closed, but a hard core of protesters had merely moved from their campuses to pavilions around the Shwedagon pagoda, the nation’s most important Buddhist shrine, where they continued to organize. And when Sein Lwin’s appointment was announced, the protests began almost at once. Martial law was declared the day after the congress ended, but instead of scaring people off the streets it simply raised the stakes. “Dissatisfaction among the public gave way to hatred,” wrote Lintner. “‘That man is not going to be the ruler of Burma,’ was a common phrase repeated all over the country.”19 The Old Man himself had acknowledged that his country was ripe for profound change, and the fact that he had tried to eat those words as soon as they were out of his mouth could not alter it. He had indicated that the future did not belong to him and, the Butcher notwithstanding, that it might not even belong to the army. And quite quickly Aung San Suu Kyi became a very busy person indeed.

  *

  How are we to explain the fact that this elegant, scholarly, middle-aged woman, who had not lived in her country for thirty years and who had never been involved in politics anywhere, suddenly became the focus of political speculation and intrigue?

  Most countries in Asia that became independent after the Second World War found themselves, as the first or second wave of independence leaders died out, confronting the conundrum of legitimacy. When your country has been arbitrarily ruled by foreigners, backed by the gun, for generations or centuries, how does an indigenous leader convince the people of his rightful claim on power?

  In many cases, the solution to which people turned was dynastic. In India, the daughter of the first prime minister had fortuitously married a man called Gandhi; he was no kin of the great Mahatma, but that name plus the Nehru bloodline gave Indira Gandhi a claim to power which none of her rivals could match. Next door in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of a charismatic prime minister who had been hanged by a usurping general proved to have both the name and the mass clan following to become prime minister twice, even though she lacked the political gifts to become a great leader. And in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, too, variations on that dynastic theme have had a decisive impact on politics for generations.

  In Burma, independent since 1948, Aung San, Suu’s father, was venerated in every corner of the land: No town, at least in the areas dominated by Burmans, was witho
ut its “Bogyoke [General] Aung San” road or square. No public office was complete without its portrait of the national hero, killed before he could fulfill his destiny and lead the country to freedom, alongside the equally obligatory portrait of Number One. And for months now, in the absence of anyone of flesh and blood to follow, the protests that had thundered up and down the streets of the nation’s cities and towns were often spearheaded by a young man or woman holding aloft the portrait of Aung San.

  So powerful was the desire for a figure around whom the protesters could unite that in July posters were stuck up all over Rangoon, announcing the imminent return from exile of Aung San Oo, Aung San’s oldest child and only surviving son. “He’s coming to lead us,” went the rumors, “he is the one we are waiting for.” But that hope was vain: Many years before Aung San Oo had settled in San Diego with a steady job as an engineer, and had taken American citizenship. During the uprising of 1988 he sent messages of solidarity to Burmese students in Tokyo, where his brother-in-law lived, some of whom cherished the hope that he would galvanize the Burmese diaspora.20 But the hope came to nothing. He “was not cut out to lead the exiles,” says Dr. Maung Zarni, who was a student in Tokyo at the time and read out some of those messages. “Worse still, after his failure to establish himself as the leader of the Burmese exiles he became an annual ‘state guest’ in Rangoon where he and his wife were wined and dined by the generals.”

  Maung Zarni, today a sociologist and a prominent activist in the Burmese diaspora, pointed out that the dynastic principle is in fact far weaker in Burma than in many other developing countries, from North Korea to Syria: Neither Ne Win nor his ultimate successor Than Shwe managed to hand over power to their children, despite being the nation’s preeminent rulers for a total of more than forty years.