The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  But then in the Burmese context Aung San was unique, as Maung Zarni explained. “According to my great uncle, who was a friend of Aung San and roomed next to him at Rangoon University when they were both undergraduates in the 1930s, Aung San was from his student days consumed by the single-minded pursuit of Burma’s liberation by any means necessary,” he said. “In place of economic wealth—Aung San left virtually no material possessions to his widow and two surviving children—or a powerful political machine, he left a legacy as unquestionably the most popular and revered nationalist of his time.”

  And if Aung San was unique, Aung San Suu Kyi was to prove no less so. Though nobody could have guessed it at the time.

  Her home on Inya Lake was directly across the water from the huge villa where General Ne Win resided, surrounded by 700 troops, reclusively holding court. And as a new and even more desperate cycle of protest and repression got under way, a host of people with different ideas and agendas began beating a path to her door.

  Watching on television that fateful session of the BSPP at which Ne Win resigned, “She, like the whole country, was electrified,” Michael Aris later recalled. “I think it was at this moment . . . that Suu made up her mind to step forward. However, the idea had gradually taken shape in her mind during the previous fifteen weeks.”21

  And now it took shape in the minds of many others, too. After Ne Win announced his decision to resign, “Suu’s house quickly became the main center of political activity in the country and the scene of such continuous comings and going as the curfew allowed,” Aris wrote.22 “Every conceivable type of activist from all walks of life and all generations poured in . . . She began to take her first steps into the maelstrom beyond her gates . . .”

  2

  DEBUT

  AUNG SAN SUU KYI had not lived in Burma since she was fifteen, nearly thirty years before, but her connections to her homeland were far from tenuous. Her presence was expected on July 19th, when, accompanied by the most senior generals in the Tatmadaw, the Burmese Army, she laid a wreath at the Martyrs’ Memorial in central Rangoon, to commemorate her father’s death. It was the most resonant day in the young republic’s calendar, and Suu was one of the principal actors in it.

  There were other reasons, too, for Suu to spend as much time as she could in the city of her birth. Her mother was aging and grateful for regular visits; Suu’s surviving brother Aung San Oo came over far less frequently from the United States. On a recent visit she had stayed four months. As a result Suu’s Rangoon life was perhaps as rich and full as her life in England. Her Burmese was not merely fluent but up to date and idiomatic. She was in town often enough and long enough to have a social life; she saw the high-ranking people her mother saw. And that gave her access to a very particular set of people.

  Daw Khin Kyi’s appointment as Burma’s first-ever woman ambassador was a signal honor, and one she could hardly have declined. One can understand why General Ne Win wanted her out of the way in the run-up to his coup d’état: Though never a political figure in her own right, she represented a certain vision of her nation, one symbolized by her late husband and by the man who took his place to become independent Burma’s first prime minister, U Nu, a vision in stark contrast to Ne Win’s. She must also have known the truth behind the rumor that on one occasion her husband, disgusted by Ne Win’s compulsive womanizing, had ordered another officer in the Burma Independence Army to kill him.1 But the officer flunked the task, for which, it was said, Aung San gave him such a ferocious kicking that decades later he still bore the scars.

  Despite remaining silent in public, Daw Khin Kyi’s disdain for Ne Win and his behavior were well known—which is why it suited Ne Win for her to be packed off to India. Other prominent figures he feared could cause him problems were also given diplomatic appointments far away. Seven years later, as Suu was preparing to sit her Finals in Oxford, Daw Khin Kyi took early retirement and returned to Rangoon.

  Back in University Avenue she lived extremely quietly, rarely leaving home except for an annual medical check. As in Delhi, she continued to entertain: Ne Win himself was among the people she invited over for lunch. At least once he and his then wife, Kitty Ba Than, accepted the invitation. Both Suu and her brother were present on that occasion; Suu remembered Kitty Ba Than making light conversation. But Ne Win himself merely ate and said not a word.2

  Perhaps he had noticed the flag flying at her gate, the original flag of the Union of Burma, with five small stars circling a single large one, which he had abolished and replaced in 1974.3 It was her discreet symbol of defiance: Over the years, and very unostentatiously, her home on Inya Lake became a point of reference for the growing number of influential people—academics, journalists, senior army officers in disgrace—who had reached the conclusion that Burma was in need of a new direction. And at least a handful of them had encountered Daw Khin Kyi’s daughter, listened to her conversation, noted her qualities and drawn certain conclusions.

  As early as 1974, when the dishonorable treatment given by the regime to the corpse of its most famous son, the late Secretary General of the UN, U Thant, provoked violent demonstrations, the regime had called Suu in and enquired if she intended to get involved in anti-government activities. “I replied that I would never do anything from abroad, and that if I were to engage in any political movement I would do so from within the country,” she wrote later.4 U Kyi Maung, a colonel in the army who had been imprisoned for years for opposing Ne Win’s coup and who later became one of the founders of the NLD, said that he first heard that Suu was thinking of going into politics from a mutual friend in 1987.5 Twice the friend, U Htwe Myint, mentioned her interest. U Kyi Maung however was unmoved.

  The fact is that, until Ne Win’s stunning speech of July 23, 1988, there was no way into Burmese politics: With only one party permitted by law, it was the ultimate closed shop. Then suddenly, as the nation’s political and economic crisis reached a head, the doors were thrown open. From being a no-man’s-land, overnight Burmese politics became a free-for-all. And the elegant and sober lady of 54 University Avenue became the focus of intense speculation.

  U Kyi Maung, though he later became one of her closest colleagues, is scathing in his early estimate of her. He met her first, he said, “by chance, at the home of a mutual friend here in Rangoon. It was back in 1986 . . . We spoke for only a few minutes. My most lasting impression was how shy and reticent she was. She seemed like a decent girl who had no interest in frivolous talk or gossip. In fact, I remember thinking how peculiar it was that I never saw her laugh . . . Anyway the point is that she didn’t impress me at all. Except by how young she looked. She must have been about forty-two at the time but she could have passed for a girl of seventeen.”6

  But a man known to the Burmese public as Maung Thaw Ka saw far more in her than that. A Burmese Muslim whose tall figure and craggy face betrayed his roots in the subcontinent, he had been a captain in the Burmese Navy;7 after his vessel was wrecked he survived twelve days at sea without food or water until rescued by a passing Japanese ship. His account of the ordeal became a bestseller. Invalided out of the service, he reinvented himself as a witty and popular journalist and an acclaimed poet. He became head of the Burmese Literary Society, and traveled around the country giving talks about books and writing. He was a known opponent of the regime, and Military Intelligence agents always occupied the first row at his lectures.

  It was only natural for the woman now embarked on a postgraduate degree in modern Burmese literature to seek out this substantial literary figure. But whatever information he gave Suu about books and writers, of more immediate value was his detailed knowledge of the first five months of the Burmese insurgency. “He took her around Rangoon,” said Bertil Lintner, who subsequently got to know him, “and showed her, ‘Look, this is where people were shot.’ He took her to the site of the so-called Red Bridge incident, the White Bridge incident, Sule pagoda, everywhere that students were killed.”8 It was a crash course in the pol
itical story so far.

  The journalist, poet and political activist Maung Thaw Ka, standing to Suu’s left.

  *

  And there was to be no respite. Within days of “Butcher” Sein Lwin taking over the top job, he made his intentions clear. Aung Gyi, the ex-general who had shattered the taboo against criticizing Ne Win with his hostile open letters, was arrested, as was Sein Win, one of the country’s most respected journalists. But the resistance, too, was organizing, its efforts given new focus and urgency by the formerly unimaginable hope of returning to multiparty democracy.

  A BBC journalist called Christopher Gunness had flown into Rangoon to cover the ruling party’s extraordinary congress in July and stayed on to try to find out what was stirring behind the city’s shabby walls—because it was already clear that Ne Win’s declaration was not the end of something but only the beginning. “My impression when I arrived was that the situation was extremely tense,” he said later. “People were frustrated and angry and there was a feeling of unfinished business; it was easy to sense that something big was about to happen. But there was a feeling of doom as well. I was enormously depressed by what I heard and what I saw.”9

  Gunness became the first foreign correspondent to give the world details of the beatings, tortures and rapes that arrested students had suffered in custody, as well as the medical disasters and the plummeting morale among Burmese troops fighting Karen rebels near the Thai border. But his most vital news was not about the past but the future: The students, he reported, were calling for a nationwide general strike on the auspicious date of August 8, 1988—8/8/88 as the date has been known in Burma ever since: exactly fifty years after a general strike led by militant students, including Aung San, against the British in August 1938. The BBC’s Burmese language service had millions of regular listeners in Burma, who depended on it to learn facts the regime preferred to hide. Gunness’s report ensured that on 8/8/88 there would be a good turnout.

  But the students were not sitting around waiting for the big event: The uprising was already under way. “The first serious demonstration actually occurred on the afternoon of August 3,” wrote Dominic Faulder, one of the few undercover foreign journalists to witness it.10 “It took me completely by surprise as it swept down Shwedagon Pagoda Road towards the city center then turned east going past Sule Pagoda and City Hall, before sweeping round to roar back past the Indian and US Embassies . . . As a display of raw courage it was spine-tingling . . . There were no security forces in sight and no attempt was made to stop the demonstration, which faded into the wet afternoon with astonishing speed.”

  That same day, the junta clamped martial law on Rangoon. But the next day and the day after thousands of demonstrators ignored the restrictions, marching through downtown, while further north in the capital students began digging themselves in close to the Shwedagon pagoda, the nation’s Holy of Holies which had been the rallying-point for anti-regime protests since British days. Demonstrations were now breaking out, not merely in the capital and Mandalay but across the country. And everywhere the protesters’ indignation and hunger for change were met by casual, murderous violence.

  A fifteen-year-old schoolboy called Ko Ko took to the streets of central Rangoon on August 6th along with thousands of others. He recalled many years later:

  Before 1988 I loved the army. My grandfather and grandmother came from the same part of the country as Ne Win. So when I saw what they did to us protesters I was shocked. At the time we were not demanding democracy. We just wanted our friends to be released from prison.

  As I joined the demonstration I was afraid, but I thought they could not shoot me if I was carrying a picture of General Aung San. So I went into a cinema in the city center and asked them to give me the large framed photo of Aung San that was hanging on the wall. With thousands of others I walked along the road towards Sule Pagoda in the center of Rangoon holding the portrait in front of me. We were all shouting slogans, walking along in the rain.

  We were hoarse from shouting so much and a girl came up offering wedges of lemon for our sore throats. I was holding the photograph so she put the lemon directly in my mouth. Then I said to her, please hold the photograph, I have to re-tie my longyi, so she took the photograph and gave me the bag of lemons to hold. And after I had re-tied my longyi she kept holding on to the photograph while I held the lemons. Then I heard the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire and she was lying on the ground dead and the photograph was full of bullet holes.

  I was so upset by this event that I ran away from the capital and joined the Kachin rebels on the border in the north of the country.11

  *

  The 8/8/88 general strike would have been a big event anyway, given the incendiary state of the nation. But now it had been trailed on the BBC, no one could doubt that it would be the cue for a mass, nationwide uprising.

  The protest that day began when dockworkers in Rangoon port marched off the job at precisely eight minutes past eight. The movement that had begun with a student fracas in a tea shop had now spiraled out to include the most vital workers in the economy. Hundreds of thousands marched on City Hall in defiance of martial law.

  Throughout the hours of daylight the soldiers and riot police stayed in the background. “Despite its overwhelming superiority of force, the regime is today under siege by its people,” Seth Mydans wrote in the New York Times, reporting on the cataclysmic day. “The protests . . . have spread to every major city . . . led by students and joined by large numbers of workers and Buddhist monks, as well as by a cross-section of citizens, including government employees.”12

  “No one likes this brutal government,” Mydans reported the owner of a curry shop saying. “It has no respect for the people, no respect for human rights. All the people are angry now. All the people support the students.”

  The huge demonstration, matched by similar shows of popular force all over the country, continued all day in a mood closer to a carnival than a riot. “Happy New Year,” Mydans reported one demonstrator shouting to him. “This is our revolution day!” “The euphoric atmosphere prevailed all day,” wrote Bertil Lintner. “In the evening, thousands of people moved to the Shwedagon, where a meeting was being held. Meanwhile, Bren carriers and trucks full of armed soldiers were parked in the compound of City Hall . . . But nobody really thought that the troops would be called out.”13

  Then at 11:30, after the last of many “last warnings” issued to the protesters over loudspeakers, the army suddenly went into action. “The tanks roared at top speed past [Sule] pagoda, followed by armored cars and twenty-four truckloads of soldiers,” Mydans wrote.14 “The protesters scattered screaming into alleys and doorways, stumbling over open gutters, crouching by walls and then, in a new wave of panic, running again.” The shooting continued until 3 AM. No one knows how many died. The Butcher had lived up to his name.

  But if the protesters, who remained as amorphous and apparently leaderless as they had been since the upheaval began, had not achieved the revolution which astrologers had promised and which they had been dreaming of, neither had Sein Lwin succeeded in imposing his will, despite all the bloodshed. The strike continued into the next day. By now the hermit state, till weeks before one of the least-known countries on the planet, was splashed all over the world’s news bulletins day after day. While the regime claimed that only a hundred people had been killed in Rangoon, diplomats put the figure ten times higher, while hospital workers in the capital, who were closest to the butchery, said the true figure was more than 3,000.15 The US Senate, in a shocking blow to Burma’s amour propre, passed a motion unanimously condemning the regime and the killings for which they were responsible.

  Then on August 12th, after less than three weeks in power, the Butcher threw in the towel.

  *

  Aung San Suu Kyi played no part in the demonstrations.16 “It’s not my sort of thing,” she replied with a touch of memsahib haughtiness when asked why not. One might say, given her presence in the country
all this time, and the power of her name, that her absence from the protests was conspicuous. As Bo Kyi, one of the leaders of the students, put it, “When we staged demonstrations in 1988, in March, April, May, June, July and August, at that time there was no Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. But all the time that we were holding demonstrations, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was in Burma . . .”17

  But she had not closed her eyes to the sufferings of her people. On the contrary, it is clear that she was thinking very hard about what role she could and ought to play.

  Sein Lwin’s stunning resignation prompted dancing in the street. He was replaced one week later, on August 19th, by Dr. Maung Maung, a London-trained barrister, a former chief justice, an academic who had done research at Yale, one of the very few civilians of stature in Ne Win’s circle. But Maung Maung had lost whatever intellectual respectability he might once have claimed when he wrote the official hagiography of Number One—which included a sly reworking of the life of Aung San, depicting him as a supporter of Japanese-style fascism and an opponent of democracy.18 If Ne Win and his advisers imagined that the appointment of this ex-military pseudo-moderate would buy off the protesters’ anger, they were rudely disappointed. It barely bought them twenty-four hours of calm.

  What was now plain was that Burma confronted a gaping power vacuum. And it was during these strange days that a young Rangoon University history teacher met Suu for the first time.

  Nyo Ohn Myint: as a young history professor at Rangoon University, in August 1988, he was one of the first intellectuals to urge Suu to seize the opportunity to lead the democracy movement. He is now foreign affairs spokesman for the NLD-Liberated Areas, based in Thailand.