by Peter Popham
“It was so direct and down to earth,” said Bertil Lintner. “Everyone was absolutely taken aback by that speech. Here was this tiny woman talking and everyone was spellbound. It was amazing. She looked like her father and she sounded like him too.”34
The crowd stretched away into the monsoon haze, a sea of dark heads. Close to the stage it was slashed by a broad wedge of maroon: hundreds of monks, shielding their shaved pates from the sun with their robes. “The attendance was so big,” remembered Win Tin. “Never had so many people come together for a political meeting.”
How would this chit of a girl—to judge by her appearance—begin? By regurgitating the consultative committee proposal she had launched ten days before, to no avail? By apologizing for her months of silence and absence? By bemoaning the killings and pleading with the people to return to the path of docility and obedience?
Anyone expecting this sort of thing gravely underestimated the Bogyoke’s daughter.
The very first words were like a cannon blast aimed at the regime’s monopoly of power.
“Reverend monks and people!” she shouted. “This public rally is aimed at informing the whole world of the will of the people . . . Our purpose is to show that the entire people entertain the keenest desire for a multiparty system of government.”35
It was a broadside. Here, she declared, were the people—that was incontrovertible—and here and now the people were going to tell, not merely the Burmese authorities but the “whole world”—the world from which she had returned, and which the regime had for a generation done everything in its power to exclude from its calculations—exactly what they wanted. She herself—she had no hesitation in claiming—was the people’s mouthpiece. And what they wanted was not the cheese-paring referendum Dr. Maung Maung had announced just two days before, but something very clear. “I believe,” she went on, “that all the people who have assembled here have without exception come with the unshakeable desire to strive for and win a multiparty democratic system.”
What business did she, thirty years removed from the fray and married to an Englishman, have sticking her oar in Burmese waters? She addressed that issue, the one raised by the obscene posters, head on. “It is true that I have lived abroad,” she said. “It is also true that I am married to a foreigner. These facts have never interfered and will never interfere with or lessen my love and devotion for my country.” For the first time, two minutes into the speech, applause erupted; the actor Htun Wai at her side beamed and clapped, and Suu paused in her flow.
Love and devotion, however sincere, did not explain her presence on the stage. Unlike the democrats and communists who had spent the decades of one-party rule languishing in jail or fighting Ne Win’s troops on the border, Aung San Suu Kyi had been far away from Burma and apparently uninterested in what was happening there. So what had brought her back? “The answer,” she said, “is that the present crisis is the concern of the entire nation. I could not as my father’s daughter remain indifferent to all that was going on. This national crisis could in fact be called the second struggle for national independence.”
This was to step up the attack further. Here was a direct challenge to Ne Win: The standard-bearer of independence, the man who had for so long traded on his closeness to Aung San and who claimed to be his rightful heir, this man—she never named him—was now in her estimation no better than the colonial oppressor, to be resisted and evicted (so it was implied) like the British.
How could she justify such a call to arms? Now she raised the file clasped in her hands and leafed through it to read from a text written by her father. “We must make democracy the popular creed,” she read out. Otherwise, “Burma would one day, like Japan and Germany, be despised.” Democracy, Aung San had declared and now her daughter repeated, was “the only ideology which is consistent with freedom . . . an ideology that promotes and strengthens peace.”
Deafening applause rolled across the stage. The expression on Htun Wai’s face veered between elation and wonderment—with the odd flicker of fright as the speech’s incendiary subtext sunk in.
But she had not finished with the army yet. At her secret meeting with the Justice Minister two days before, U Tin Aung Hein had enjoined Suu not to attack Number One, and not to incite the crowd to attack him. She had agreed, and she remained true to her undertaking—though perhaps not so true to the spirit of it.
“I would like to say one thing,” she went on, with the first hint of circumspection in her voice. “Some may not like what I am going to say. But I believe that my duty is to tell the people what I believe to be true. Therefore I shall speak my mind . . . At this time there is a certain amount of dissension between the people and the army . . .”
For the first time in the speech, Suu was open to the accusation of understatement: After all, staff at the hospital where her mother had once worked believed the army had killed 3,000 civilians in cold blood—a far greater massacre than any for which the former colonial ruler was blamed.36 She could not have been unaware that she was now trespassing on the most delicate and at the same time most vital question confronting the people: not what political system the country might adopt, which after all was a question for the coming weeks and months, but the nightmare of murder and mutilation that the country was living through right now, day after day. It could not be ignored.
And again her hands moved to the documents she had brought with her, leafing through to the words she needed. Again the great Aung San, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, pointed his dread finger at his sanguinary successor. “The armed forces are meant for this nation and this people,” she read out, “and it should be a force having the honor and respect of the people. If instead the armed forces should come to be hated by the people, then the aims with which this army has been built up would have been in vain.”
“My first impression was that she was just another general’s daughter,” said Nita Yin Yin May, the British Embassy’s information officer at the time, “because I’d never met her personally. And then she started talking to the people and I was overwhelmed by her speech. I was shocked: This was the one we were looking for! She was the true leader!”37 She wiped away tears of emotion at the memory. “I was very much impressed. I thought she was very sincere, very charming, very beautiful, very outspoken. It really hit all of us. It really touched all of us. And then I decided, I’m going to support her no matter what.”
There was much more: The crowd listened with keen attention and by the end they were chanting her name. She told them of her “strong attachment” to the army, how soldiers had cared for her as a child. She vowed that she would never be a stalking horse for politicians of the past; echoing her father she exhorted the people over and over again to “unity” and “discipline.” She spelled out, naming the hapless Dr. Maung Maung (who was to survive in power for less than a month), her belief that a referendum was not required. “We want to get rid of the one-party system,” she said. There is “no desire at all for a referendum . . . free and fair elections [should be] arranged as quickly as possible . . .”
General Ne Win was of course not present at this meeting, and it is not known if he was subsequently given a recording of Aung San Suu Kyi’s maiden speech; but if so it is a fair bet that by this point he had switched the machine off, possibly hurling it at the wall. Not only had Bogyoke’s daughter come out of nowhere to make a nuisance of herself; not only did she bear a startling resemblance to the man honored as the father of the nation and of the Tatmadaw. But in pronouncing very particular words uttered by the dead man, she had ripped away what shreds of legitimacy Ne Win and his clique could still lay claim to. It was a declaration of war.
A silkscreen depicting Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father. It decorated the stage during her debut speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda and is now on a wall in her house.
3
FREEDOM AND SLAUGHTER
IT is not true that recent Burmese history is an unending catalogue of oppression. Any Bu
rmese over the age of thirty-five can remember a time of perfect liberty, when a free press flourished and trade unions and political parties sprang up like mushrooms after rain.
Unfortunately the Burma Spring lasted less than one month—twenty-six days to be precise. It ended as abruptly as it had begun.
Yet within that brief span in August and September 1988 Aung San Suu Kyi, backed by a shifting and so far nameless coalition of students, intellectuals, old politicians and veteran army officers, succeeded in persuading the regime to push through three reforms which ensured that Burma would never be the same again.
The first was what ushered in the spring, the decision by the Justice Minister to lift martial law—a prelude to and, in Suu’s view, a basic precondition, for her public debut at the Shwedagon pagoda: She wanted the regime’s assurance that nobody who came to listen to her would risk being shot. On August 24th, the request was granted.
The second reform changed Burma’s political matrix forever, even though, more than two decades later, it has yet to produce any of the benefits for which it was promoted: the regime’s commitment, not to the referendum advocated by Dr. Maung Maung but to general elections leading to multiparty democracy.
The third was hardly less momentous: the disestablishment of the BSPP, effectively bringing down the curtain on twenty-six years of one-party rule. Burma would never be the same again. And it was Aung San Suu Kyi—the “governess” as she has been labeled, the Burmese “Mary Poppins,” the “Oxford housewife,” the political ingénue—who brought them about.1
*
The effect of the lifting of martial law was immediate. Troops and riot police disappeared from the streets. All over the country people could suddenly do and say exactly what they pleased. Strikers surged through towns and cities throughout the country, no longer defiant, merely euphoric. Twenty-six years before, in the interest of order and discipline, General Ne Win had fastened a straitjacket on the nation. Now it was flung off, and the urges that had been building since March—to laugh, to swear, to scandalize, to join hands, to dream and plan for a future dramatically different from the past—burst forth in all their jubilant diversity.
The regime’s indigestible daily rag, the Working People’s Daily, until the day before full of articles about ambassadors presenting their credentials and generals opening sewage plants, was suddenly publishing daring political comment pieces and pages of photographs of the demonstrations. An unruly crowd of new papers sprang up to offer competition: Scoop, Liberation Daily, New Victory, Light of Dawn—their titles alone told of the mood of wild optimism sweeping the country.
Not all the news they published could be relied on: One paper called Phone Maw Journal, named after the student whose killing by the army in March had ignited the revolution, informed its readers that a cemetery in a Rangoon suburb where the bodies of many of the victims of army shootings had been unceremoniously buried was now noisily haunted—and that the ghosts were chanting pro-democracy slogans!2 The spirits had also formed a closed shop, barring entry to the mortal remains of members of the ruling party: Anyone brave enough to go close could hear them wailing, “Corpses of BSPP members not to be buried in our cemetery! Stay out! Stay out!”
The movement, which at the start had been the monopoly of students, now drew recruits from every part of society. Martin Morland, British ambassador in Burma at the time, remembered the euphoric mood.
“The Rangoon Bar Association took its courage in both hands and issued a signed protest calling for change,” he recalled.3 “The Medical Association followed suit. The street marches multiplied, with banners identifying the state organization marching. By early September every ministry had joined in. Even the beggars had their march. On the last Sunday before the army struck back even the police band went over to the side of the people and played outside City Hall.”
It was the same all over the country. In the little town of Phekhon, in the Shan States in Burma’s disputed northeast, a student recently returned from Rangoon called Pascal Khoo Thwe was caught up in the excitement; like many others, it was to determine the course of the rest of his life.4 He wrote many years later:
When Aung San Suu Kyi made her great speech . . . on August 26th, she instantly became our leader and inspiration. In the evenings we would listen to the BBC and hope for guidance from our goddess. We formed committees for security, for the food supply, for information, for connecting the different ethnic and religious groups.
Although I busied myself with all this, I knew there was a pompous and officious aspect to it. It also had a dreamlike quality. Only weeks before, to speak in open opposition to the regime would have been unthinkable. Now the whole of Phekhon was talking about the future, about what sort of constitution Burma should have, about the place of the minority peoples. People who had been silent for twenty-six years now wanted to shout, or at least endlessly to debate.
Burma was approaching a state of anarchy, but for a while it worked the way anarchists have always claimed society should naturally work once the state’s machinery of repression is sent to the scrapyard, in messy but euphoric harmony. The army had pulled back to barracks and was nowhere to be seen. The feared and hated riot police, the Lon Htein, was likewise invisible. Ministries and government offices had simply closed; the Burmese state had shut down. And the vacuum filled up with people doing their own thing. A young woman called Hmwe Hmwe who had joined the democracy movement in Rangoon traveled to Mandalay to help coordinate strike centers there, traveling by van and pickup truck.5 “Since everybody was on strike, there was no train service or other regular transport and it was difficult to buy petrol as well,” she said. “But spirits were high and we attended meetings all along the way. We slept in the strike centers and there was one in every town we passed through. The people had taken over the local BSPP offices and government premises and managed their own administration . . . There was feverish activity everywhere: people printing leaflets, making posters, publishing their own local newspapers and preparing meetings, rallies and demonstrations.”
Older systems of authority re-emerged to fill the place of those that had vanished. Bertil Lintner wrote:
In Mandalay, the young monks’ organization . . . had resurfaced.6 The monks organized day-to-day affairs like rubbish collection, made sure the water supply was working and, according to some reports, even acted as traffic policemen. The maintenance of law and order was also in the hands of the monks—and the criminals who had been caught were often given rather unorthodox sentences. One visitor to Mandalay in August saw a man chained to a lamp post outside the railway station who shouted all day, “I’m a thief! I’m a thief! . . .”
Yet the appearance of a vacuum of power was itself illusory. The military regime was rocking, it is true; its pseudo-civilian governing apparatus was crumbling. But in the months and years to come, proof emerged of a controlling mind behind what was going on during the weeks of freedom—the same cynical and ruthless military mind that had ruled the country for the past generation.
On the same day that Aung San Suu Kyi gave her maiden speech at the Shwedagon, truckloads of troops poured into central Rangoon and removed 600 million kyats from the Myanma Foreign Trade Bank: to pay the army for the coming six months and ensure its continuing loyalty.
The following day, in a cynical coda to the lifting of martial law, Insein Jail, the Victorian panopticon in a leafy Rangoon suburb that is the nation’s most infamous prison, evacuated its inmates on what the authorities called “parole,” sending them out into the lawless capital with neither money nor food. They were released from the jail after inmates threw in their lot with the strikers outside the walls and attacked the prison guards. The guards replied by shooting the protesters, a fire broke out and it was claimed that 1,000 died and 500 were wounded. Whatever the truth about the riot and its suppression, the mass release of prisoners added a new element of peril and anarchy to the dangerously combustible elements outside. The pattern was repeated around the cou
ntry, leading to the sudden discharge into the community of more than 10,000 footloose criminals.
The result was predictable—and almost certainly anticipated and indeed plotted by the regime. As Martin Morland put it, “The army evidently hoped that things would get so out of hand that the people would have had enough and beg the old regime to come back.”7 Certainly the sudden appearance en masse of the most desperate people in society added an extra element of terror to the unstable situation, an element to which some of the protesters responded brutally. Lintner wrote:
On September 5th, four men and one woman were caught outside a children’s hospital [in Rangoon].8 After a rough interrogation, two of them confessed that the gang had tried to poison the water tank outside the hospital, and they were released. But the remaining three refused to say anything and an angry crowd beat them in the street. A man came forward with a sword, decapitated the three and held up their blood-dripping severed heads to the applause of the mob. Public executions—mostly beheadings—of suspected DDSI [i.e. Military Intelligence] agents became an almost daily occurrence in Rangoon. What had started as a carnival-like, Philippine-style “people’s power uprising” was . . . coming more and more to resemble the hunt for the tonton macoutes in Haiti after the fall of “Baby Doc” Duvalier . . .
But the descent into savagery was strictly localized and, when reported in time, it was strongly opposed. Suu took no immediate steps to capitalize on the success of her performance at the Shwedagon; on the contrary, in her first-ever interviews she expressed reluctance about getting involved in politics. But her home was ever more of a hurly-burly, with throngs of strikers besieging the gates asking to talk to her and think tanks in permanent session in her downstairs dining room-cum-office. Many of the students who had been her escort on August 26th were now camping out in the garden. And when Suu learned of lynch parties at large she repeatedly sent the students to try to restore sanity and calm. Often they succeeded.