by Peter Popham
“I was twenty-six,” Nyo Ohn Myint remembered.19 Today, still looking barely out of his twenties, he is head of the NLD-LA’s foreign affairs department and lives in exile in Thailand. “I had been a teacher for three years. My colleagues and I were mulling over what part we should play in the uprising. We produced pamphlets and wall posters, stuff like that. Then finally I met her. There were seven of us around the table.”
So far the only role Suu had conceived for herself was one behind the scenes. For Nyo Ohn Myint that was not enough. “I raised the fact that our movement really needed a leader,” he said. “And she said, no, I have just asked the general secretary of the Burma Socialist Program Party to stop killing the students and other innocent people. That is my role.”
Nyo Ohn Myint did not leave it at that. “I appealed to her to meet the student movement. She said no. Then I explained the nature of Burmese political culture to her, which is that you sacrifice a lot. She seemed quite reluctant to do as we asked. Some of us thought that she was an opportunist. She said she just wanted to mediate between the government and the students and the people.20
“I said then, ‘Okay, so why have we bothered you to come here and talk?’ I was quite fed up: I thought, oh my God, I’ve wasted my time. Because we believed that she was Aung San’s daughter, our hero, our mentor, we grew up with stories of Aung San’s morality, Aung San’s bravery—everything.”
Now Suu offered a compromise. “She said to us, ‘Why don’t you join with me, come and work with me. Come tomorrow, and then every day after that.’ She said she would open a small office in her house, in the dining room—the room that became the party’s main political office.” The others in the discussion group welcomed her proposal eagerly; walking down the road back to the bus stop, they were “very excited that they were going to be working with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” Nyo Ohn Myint recalled. But he remained unimpressed. “I told my colleagues, ‘I’m not coming tomorrow.’” For her to say that she wanted to work with them, he told them, was
a lie: She’s not a leader. She refused to lead. We need a leader. The rest wanted to join with her but I said no, I’m still looking for a leader.
But then two days later a friend of mine who was also a colleague called in on me and said, Daw Suu wants to talk to you. He rang her number and gave me the phone and I said, “How are you, sister?” (because at university it’s our custom to call any girl our age or somewhat older Ma Ma, “big sister”). And she said, “Will you come to my home? We need to talk.” I said, “No, I already heard you say that you didn’t want to lead the movement.” She said, “Shall we sit down and talk about it?”
So I went there on August 16th with two others, a high school student called Aung Gyi and a university student, one of the leaders of the student movement, called Koko Gyi, and we sat down with Suu and she explained that she didn’t want to be an opportunist, she didn’t want to take over a movement that was already going on—but if people really needed Aung San’s daughter, she said, “I will do it.” But then she said there were so many other considerations, her family life, her two kids, her ailing mother, etcetera. So I said, “The point is, we really need you. We expected your elder brother, Aung San Oo, to be available to help us”—and there were a lot of rumors [about him] in Burma at that point. But he was never interested in Burma or in Burmese political issues or anything. He just happens to be the son of Aung San.
So then she said, “All right, let’s start working, because I know something about the Burmese situation through my books and my research, but I have been away from the country so maybe you can fill me in on that part.” So we decided to work together as a team. And that’s her skill as a leader, as I see it. She never takes the upper hand, she never uses her family background to dominate. She never acts like that.
In fact, in the time it took Suu to persuade this young academic to give her a second chance, she had already made her first political intervention, behind the scenes as she preferred. It was as modest and decorous in form as it was ambitious in content. On August 15th, she and Hwe Myint, one of her earliest political allies, wrote to the Council of State, the circle of elderly generals grouped around Ne Win, to propose that they set up a “People’s Consultative Committee,” made up of people outside the BSPP, “to present the aspirations of the people in a peaceful manner within the framework of the law.”21 The letter went on, “In the words of the song which roused the patriotism of our people . . . ‘For the good of those to follow/without regard for ourselves,’ so is this proposal presented with the good of future generations in mind.”
Suu’s ad hoc University Avenue think tank was up and running: The proposal carried the endorsement of U Nu, Burma’s first prime minister after independence, and other leading politicians from the pre-Ne Win era. But—as so often in years to come when appeals went out to Burma’s generals from her address—there was no reply. Clearly, more direct methods would be required.
*
As the democracy movement came into existence around her, Suu was still in the bosom of her family, with all that implied—still nursing her gravely ill mother, keeping her sons up to the mark with their studies, stealing spare moments to resume work on her dissertation.22 But at the same time she found herself the beating heart of what would soon become the most important political movement her country had seen since independence.
“The boys are in fine form,” Michael reported. “Alex is relaxed and happy—trouncing me regularly at squash in the Australian Embassy Club, Kim is swimming, both of them spend time reading to their grandmother . . . There is a constant stream of visitors . . .”
A month later, after the children had flown back home to start the new school term, the life of the house had become even more hectic. “You have no idea how every second of the day is occupied,” Michael wrote. “One of my main tasks is to see that Suu gets some sleep.”
U Win Tin, a stubbornly contrarian journalist who had been silenced for years by Ne Win and who was at the time vice president of the journalists’ union, was one of many drawn to Suu’s door.23
Three separate groups formed around her, he explained:
In Rangoon everybody knows everybody and all the union strike committees—from the lawyers’ union, the doctors’ union, the students’ union and so on—wanted to make contact with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. So two or three people from each committee used to come to her house for talks lasting two or three hours, about the political situation outside, the government, the military and so on—that was one group.
After the strike started on August 8th, masses of people started coming into the city from the suburbs of Rangoon, maybe ten miles away, just walking without anything to drink or anything to eat—they did not dare to drink the tap water because there were rumors that it had been poisoned. It was very hard for them because the weather was very hot and humid, but people came down to the middle of town anyway because most of the offices are located in the downtown area. And as they marched and marched they shouted slogans, and anybody passing through from Rangoon’s northern suburbs to the center of town has to pass in front of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. So it was very easy for them [to come there] and they shouted slogans and tried to meet Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
There was a man called Thakin Tin Mya, now he’s an old man like me, he’s about ninety, he used to be a communist and a leader of the nationalist organization DoBama before the war. He was a very good organizer, he knew almost everybody in Burmese politics, and he formed a group to talk to all these people coming past the house hoping for a meeting: to ask their names and their leader’s names and their group’s name and whether they are involved in strike action and so on. In the evening he made reports to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and these reports became a sort of briefing in which he explained the contribution people were making to the strike, not only in Rangoon but also in the small towns and so on. And that was the second group.
And the third group was formed of people like me, senior politici
ans, journalists, writers and so on: We were her political consultants, thinking what we should do and so on.
The pressure of events—the host of people now clamoring for Suu to take some kind of initiative, and the failure of her proposal for a consultative committee to elicit any official reaction—were steadily pushing her towards the point of no return. Every evening, when all the different advisory groups had gone home, she and Michael sat down to talk over the day’s events. Eventually they decided there was no other way out: Suu would have to stand up and be counted. But with troops at every crossroads with orders “to shoot to hit,” in Ne Win’s words, if the martial law ban on assemblies was broken, the last thing she wanted to do was provoke another bloodbath.
So she took steps to prevent it—and in the process discovered the extent of her influence.
Despite his communist background and the help he was providing to Suu, Thakin Tin Mya, her gatekeeper, was a member of the ruling BSPP and in good standing with the country’s political establishment.24 At Suu’s urging he set up a secret meeting for August 23rd between her and U Tin Aung Hein, the Minister of Justice and one of the few people in Ne Win’s inner circle not tainted by corruption. Suu confided in the Minister that she intended to make a public speech aimed at bringing an end to the bloodshed in the country—and she wanted him and his boss to know that she had no political aspirations and no hidden agenda.
The Minister replied with a piece of advice: The troops lining the streets regarded Ne Win as the father of the army, he said. “So please don’t launch any attacks on him, and don’t incite the people to do so, either.”25 Suu readily agreed, but had a specific request to make: To reduce the risk that her first public appearance would precipitate another massacre, she asked the Minister to petition Ne Win to allow the crowd to gather, despite the martial law provisions.
U Tin Aung Hein promised to do what he could. And he was as good as his word. The next day martial law was lifted; Maung Maung, four days into his presidency, announced that, in accordance with Ne Win’s proposal in July, a referendum would be held to decide between a one-party and a multiparty system; and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi gave the first public speech of her life.
It was a brief affair, delivered in the grounds of Rangoon General Hospital. Suu stood on a petrol drum to speak, wearing a white Burmese blouse and looking, as U Kyi Maung had observed, about seventeen. At her shoulder stood the shipwreck survivor and poet Maung Thaw Ka, with a quizzical expression on his craggy face. Who can say, he seems to be thinking, what this might lead to?
Grasping the microphone, she expressed her desire to see Burma move swiftly to a political system “in accord with the people’s desires.” She said she further wished that the people would show discipline and unity and use only the most pacific methods of demonstration. So far, there was nothing to disturb Ne Win’s sleep. Then she told them that she would be speaking again at greater length two days’ hence—this time at the Shwedagon pagoda.
*
Ralph Fitch, an English merchant who saw the pagoda in 1586, called it “the fairest place, as I suppose, that is in the world.”26 Norman Lewis called it “the heart and soul of Rangoon, the chief place of pilgrimage in the Buddhist world, the Buddhist equivalent of the Kaaba at Mecca, and, in sum, a great and glorious monument.” Its special holiness, he explained, “arises from the fact that it is the only pagoda recognized as enshrining relics not only of Gautama, but of the three Buddhas preceding him.” The value placed on the huge shrine was made manifest in the treasures lavished on it by successive kings, the guaranteed method—according to the somewhat mechanical dictates of traditional Theravada Buddhism—of speeding one’s approach to Nirvana. “It was the habit of the Burmese kings,” Lewis goes on, “to make extravagant gifts for the embellishment of the Shwedagon, diamond vanes, jewel-encrusted finial umbrellas, or at least their weight in gold, to be used in re-gilding the spire. The wealth that other Oriental princes kept in vaults and coffers was here spread out under the sun to astound humanity.” And its impact on the visitor, Lewis discovered, was quite as powerful as its importance suggested it should be. “I plunged suddenly into the most brilliant spectacle I had ever seen,” he reported of his arrival on the pagoda’s expansive terrace. “In the immediate background rises a golden escarpment, a featureless cliff of precious metal, spreading a misty dazzlement.”27
A statue draped in gold inside the Shwedagon shrine.
But the Shwedagon is far more than just a brilliant place of pilgrimage. Affirming the centrality of the Buddhist tradition at the heart of the nation’s identity, it became the focus during the 1920s and 1930s of the first mass demonstrations against British rule.28 Aung San delivered some of his most inflammatory speeches here, and is buried nearby. By announcing that she would speak at the Shwedagon, for the first time Suu showed her willingness to throw the charisma of her name behind the uprising. And the regime’s response was instantaneous.
Relations between Suu and her mother and the regime had never been less than correct all these years. Suu’s frequent appearances at the Martyrs’ Day event in July was the extent of their co-involvement, and both sides handled her father’s name and fame with great care and respect, exquisitely conscious of how much it meant to all of them. But suddenly, as she stepped into the maelstrom, all that was forgotten. Overnight thousands of leaflets were printed, stigmatizing Suu as the puppet of a foreign power, as a “genocidal prostitute,” the whore of a foreign bastard.29 In grotesque caricatures, the first of many to appear over the years, Suu and Michael were depicted having sex. “Take your bastard of a foreigner,” they commanded, “and leave at once!”
Suu and her party left University Avenue at 8:30 AM in a convoy of eleven vehicles. Anonymous bomb scares and assassination threats had heightened the tension of the day. One of her advisers urged her to don a bulletproof vest for protection.30 “Why?” she retorted. “If I was afraid of being killed, I would never speak out against the government.” Already her supporters were getting a glimpse of her mettle. To guard against unpleasant surprises, dozens of the students who had been frequenting her home over the previous weeks, wearing long-sleeved white shirts and dark longyis, formed a large though unarmed bodyguard.
“We didn’t go along the main road,” Nyo Ohn Myint the lecturer recalled, “because there had been many rumors and we were afraid of being attacked—an army captain was arrested in downtown Rangoon with a lot of machine guns, he had supposedly been assigned to assassinate her. He confessed after he was arrested by members of the public, who then beat him.”31
Though well into the monsoon season, August 26th dawned sunny and hot. Word of the event had spread across the city, and thousands camped outside the Shwedagon all night to secure a good place. Many tens of thousands more began arriving at dawn. It is a short ride from University Avenue to the shrine—the two addresses are about a mile apart to the north of the city center—and on a normal day it would not take fifteen minutes. But on this day the crowds were so huge that Suu’s convoy, with a Jeep in front, herself in a Toyota Saloon and Michael and the boys in another car behind, could not even get close. “We couldn’t get through the crowd,” said Nyo Ohn Myint. “Michael was in my car and it took something like forty-five minutes because the street was so crowded.” They were forced to get down and walk the last few hundred yards, the road ahead of them cleared by students waving flags.
Nobody knows for sure how many people were gathered outside the Shwedagon pagoda that day. It is part of the reporter’s informal training to gauge the rough size of a crowd, but massive exaggeration is common in many countries, especially when the meetings are of great political importance; equally massive under-reporting by the authorities is also common, for the same reason. But Win Tin, the veteran journalist and close associate of Suu, insists that his own estimate of the numbers was not distorted by his political views. He said:
In those days the population of Rangoon was about three million, and about one million attended
the meeting on August 26th. The crowd stretched from the pagoda itself all the way to the market, the people were densely packed, so there might have been a million. It was my duty to inform the international press about the event, but when I sent the news to the BBC I said there might be 600,000 people. I didn’t want to sound too boastful because when Ne Win held a meeting he only drew 100,000 or 200,000 people. So I didn’t want to make too much of the amount.32
Faced with such an unprecedented throng, even her closest supporters did not know what to expect from their “big sister,” dwarfed on the stage by a stylized portrait of her father. Would she dry up? Would her courage fail this frightening test? Would this long-term expatriate, deeply learned in Burmese literature, be incomprehensible to ordinary people?
“As far as I knew she had never done any public speaking,” said Win Tin. “I knew that she could speak Burmese quite well, but we had some misgivings about whether she would be able to speak good Burmese on stage.”
The stage was packed with young people, many wearing yellow armbands; a line of young bodyguards wearing headbands sat or crouched watchfully at the edge. A famous film star called Htun Wai, a comfortable-looking figure in a lilac jacket and longyi, stepped to the microphone and introduced her with a vertical flourish of his arm: “Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!” He lowered the microphone six inches and moved to the side. She took his place center stage, her hands clasped over a folder of documents at her waist. And without preliminaries, without hesitation and without even the ghost of a smile she began to speak, in a high, loud voice.
It has been said with some authority that she read her speech from a prepared text.33 Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor was she reciting parrot-fashion a text she had learned by heart. Instead she spoke spontaneously, without notes, but sticking to a tight and cogent argument; spoke, in other words, on her first real outing, like a seasoned politician.
“She spoke very good Burmese,” said Win Tin, “very fluent and very convincingly and very clear. For a normal person it is not so easy to talk to such a huge crowd, a sea of people. She was not reading, and she talked so wittily—something like Obama. We saw at once that she was a born leader: ‘a star is born,’ something like that.”