The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  The BSPP government was still notionally in power, but the central strike committee in Rangoon called for it to resign and for a neutral interim government to take its place, capable of supervising the free, multiparty democratic elections that were now the goal everyone had in mind. The call was taken up across the country. But President Maung Maung refused to take this step, instead announcing a second emergency conference of the ruling party for September 12th.

  The outbreaks of lynching underlined the fact that, if the military had pulled in its claws and the BSPP was on the point of collapse, the democracy movement had yet to take a definite shape or coalesce around particular leaders. The movement’s challenge was to prove that the military dictatorship was not merely enfeebled but that it could be superseded. But it was a challenge that it was slow to meet.

  The students were the first to make a stab at it. A charismatic biology student called Baw Oo Tun had become their de facto leader in many protests, taking the nom de guerre of Min Ko Naing—“Conqueror of Kings.” In late August they set up the All-Burma Students’ Union under his leadership—an initiative weakened by the fact that a quite separate organization with the same name already existed.

  Next to throw his hat in the ring was the great veteran of Burmese democratic politics, the first and indeed only prime minister elected under the old multiparty system, eighty-two-year-old U Nu, who had held office until the coup of 1962. At the end of August he defied the constitution by announcing the establishment of Burma’s first independent political party in twenty-six years, the League for Democracy and Peace (Provisional). But on September 9th, he critically overplayed his hand, telling the world that he had now formed a parallel government, and calling for general elections. In a press conference to relaunch a career that he had renounced years before in favor of religious devotion, he claimed that Burma’s only legal constitution was the one passed in 1947, according to which he was still in charge. “I’m still the legitimate prime minister,” he insisted.

  If anything was designed to give the democracy movement a bad name, this was it. The announcement stunned U Nu’s political friends and enemies alike. “Preposterous” was the verdict of Aung Gyi, the general who had written dissenting letters to Ne Win earlier in the year, while at a press conference in University Road Suu rejected it just as firmly. She was “astonished” by U Nu’s claim, she said, adding “the future of the people will be decided by the masses of the people.”9

  This was the theme she had hammered home at the Shwedagon: Burma’s future lay in a multiparty democracy; the only way for the country to emerge from the nightmare of military tyranny was for the people to have the opportunity to choose their rulers. And the very next day, in the second important victory she won before even declaring her intention of entering politics, her wish was granted.

  The occasion was a second extraordinary congress of the still-just-about ruling BSPP, following the one in July when Ne Win had spoken of his intention to step down. President Maung Maung’s offer of a referendum on single- or multiparty systems was still on the table, but as tens of thousands of protesters chanted outside, the congress threw it out, opting instead for “free, fair, multiparty elections.” Under Suu’s urging and that of millions of other Burmese, the party that had ruled the country very badly for a generation had now written its suicide note.

  But it was jam tomorrow, not jam today. The regime, however battered and bruised, clung to what little remained of its authority. There was to be no interim government to see the election process through.

  *

  The history of Burma is littered with “ifs,” and one of the biggest of them looms over the events of the subsequent week.

  The democracy movement that had begun obscurely in March—that had been hardened under army fire in which thousands died and that was now groping towards the attainment of some clear political shape—was continuing to grow. With army and police still absent from the streets, the strikers’ demonstrations grew larger, more vocal, more militant, more ambitious. So much had already been wrung from the tyrants: One more heave, it seemed, and the rotten superstructure of army rule would come crashing down. What was needed now was for the army itself, or significant portions of it, to switch sides. And with the daughter of the army’s founder ever more prominent in the revolt, that was no longer a pipe dream.

  Aung San Suu Kyi’s emotional appeal for disillusioned members of the armed forces was already apparent. Maung Thaw Ka, the ex-naval officer who had stood alongside her during her speech at Rangoon General Hospital, was one of them. And now other senior figures closely associated with the armed forces were coming over to her side.

  Suu with NLD cofounder U Kyi Maung.

  U Kyi Maung was to become one of the central figures in Suu’s early political life in Burma, the chairman of her party who led it to triumph in the election when Suu and all the other top leaders were in jail or detention. A plump, quizzical figure approaching retirement age with a biting wit and a phlegmatic approach to the terrors visited on him and his colleagues by the regime, he was as devout as he was irreverent: His pithy formulations of how to apply the simple truths of Buddhism to solitary confinement had a powerful influence on Suu herself.10

  A career soldier, Kyi Maung had reached the rank of colonel before being sacked from the army for opposing Ne Win’s coup. He had spent a total of eleven years in jail for his hostility to the dictatorship and had just emerged from a brief third term when he got the message that Suu wanted to see him.

  “I thought to myself, let’s see what this lady is up to,” he said later.11 “Now is the time, a revolution is stirring . . . I was a veteran jailbird and well over twenty years her senior. Later on I learned that she was watching people, looking in all directions for people who could be trusted—candidates, you know, for the struggle. She was born with revolution in her blood but she needed all the help possible to see it through. So from then on we began to meet frequently.” At their first meeting he remembered telling her, “Suu, if you’re prepared to enter Burmese politics and to go the distance, you must be tolerant and be prepared for the worst.” She listened, he said, “attentively.”

  Even more ominous to the regime was the arrival at Suu’s side of a man who had been one of Burma’s most senior and distinguished soldiers before falling out with Ne Win.

  Bony and bespectacled, U Tin Oo stood out among the professors and journalists swirling around Suu like a commando at a cocktail party. A decade after being sacked and jailed by Ne Win, there was still a parade-ground gleam in his eye and the abrasiveness of the battle-hardened soldier in his manner.

  Suu, U Tin Oo (third right) and other members of the NLD’s Central Executive Committee outside Suu’s house in early 1989.

  “From the age of seventeen until nearly fifty, my life was a struggle,” he later explained.12 “I had a very rough life. I had to stay many years in dense jungles during the war. I’ve been wounded in battle numerous times . . . I lost my father, and my son died at a young age. After being promoted to chief of staff I was betrayed, sacked and imprisoned. I lacked politeness, and felt aggressive.”

  One of the first recruits to Aung San’s Patriot Burmese Forces in 1943 when he was only sixteen, Tin Oo rose rapidly through the ranks. He was twice decorated for valor in battle and was a popular hero of the regime when he was made Minister of Defense in 1974. But during the abortive uprising of that year, his was the name shouted by the crowds calling for Ne Win to step down and be replaced. Two years later, accused of involvement in an abortive coup, he was sacked and jailed.13

  On coming out of prison, he spent two years as a monk, then took a degree in law. As the democracy revolt erupted around him, he was reluctant to get involved: “My [old army] colleagues urged me to address the public. At first I declined. I wanted to continue living quietly practicing vipassana [insight] meditation. I think I was a bit attached to the tranquility and peace of the practice. But my colleagues would not give up, and after many di
scussions we agreed to form the All-Burma Patriotic Old Comrades’ League. Nearly all the retired officers from all over the country came to our headquarters, which was my house, to offer their services.”14

  Tin Oo himself, after much arm-twisting, followed in Suu’s footsteps and made a public speech to a “huge, energetic crowd” outside Rangoon General Hospital on August 27th. But although he represented a formidably prestigious sector of this highly militarized society, Tin Oo recognized that the old soldiers could not stand alone. “Although our group was large, consisting of military personnel and some portion of the population, I knew that I could not lead the entire country along with the ethnic races,” he said. “We needed a leader, a strong leader, who could lead the whole show . . . We needed somebody who understood democracy, who had really lived it.”

  A colleague played him a tape of Suu’s speech at Shwedagon. “Her words were strong and clear,” he recalled, “and there was no hitch at all. Some people who live abroad a long time can hardly speak Burmese when they come back to Burma, but she spoke fluently and with daily Burmese usage. She was clearly a very rare person. I realized that the people were eager for democracy, and that they were thinking that she was the unifying force that could lead the movement. We didn’t say ‘leader’—she was the lady who could try . . . to guide our people to what they desired so much.”

  The old soldiers in Tin Oo’s League decided that the only hope for the revolution was for the different opposition groups that had sprung up to band together under a single figure. Increasingly Suu was seen as the only plausible candidate. “We agreed that I would meet her,” he remembered, “and that I would go alone. . . . When I came to her house she was sitting on the corner of the sofa in the main room. She was alone. I paid my respects . . .”15

  The old soldier and the daughter of his first commander talked over the desperate straits their country was in. “The way she talked, her complexion, her features and gestures were strikingly similar to those of her father,” he said. “She resembled him in almost every way. I thought that she was a female replica . . . I said, ‘I listened to your first public speech. We cannot make it alone. We need unity within the struggle for human rights and democracy.’ She agreed. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘fine, let’s go forward together and work together.’ That’s all.”

  It was an encounter of military terseness and efficiency, worthy of Aung San himself, famous for his economy with words. Both were holding in their emotions, but as the general headed for the door, Suu blurted out, “Did you meet my father? Did you know him?”

  Tin Oo replied, “Yes of course, I knew him well.” Suu asked him how that came about. “I told her that I had known him from my days as a cadet and an officer in his Patriot Force. I said, ‘The last time I met your father was at Maymyo, he was the Deputy Chairman of the Governor’s Executive Council, and I, a lieutenant. At that time your father was visiting with the Chief of Yawngshwe state . . . And I saw your mother too. That was the last time I saw your father alive.’ So she asked, ‘Did you notice at that time a small girl being carried by somebody?’” Tin Oo confessed that he had not, but the coincidence further strengthened the bond between them. The general told her how sad it was that Aung San had not lived to bring his work of nation-building to a conclusion. “Now I have to serve and cooperate with you,” he told her, “so that you, his only daughter, may enjoy the great fruits of Burma’s independence.” More than two decades and many years of detention later, Tin Oo remains the most stalwartly loyal of all Suu’s colleagues.

  The third veteran to stand alongside Suu in the tense days of mid-September 1988 was U Aung Gyi, the gadfly general who, by publishing his anti-regime tirades in the spring, had broken the taboo against open criticism. Aung Gyi himself had spoken at Shwedagon one day before Suu, though his efforts to persuade the crowd to go easy on President Maung Maung were met with stony silence.

  Now, for the first time, Aung San Suu Kyi, Aung Gyi and Tin Oo, the emerging leaders of the uprising, banded together. They went to meet the election commission that had been set up following the BSPP’s decision to hold multiparty elections, to learn what arrangements were being made to ensure that they were indeed free and fair. But they came away unsatisfied, and in a public letter to President Maung Maung signed by all three they explained why.

  They pointed out that new political parties formed to fight the election would find themselves up against the BSPP, which had had a lock on power for twenty-six years and was still in charge. That could never be a fair fight. Furthermore the BSPP had a massive captive vote bank, consisting of the entire armed forces, all of them members of the party by compulsion, as well as millions of civilian employees of the state. Lacking funding and independent supervision, what kind of a chance would the opposition parties have?

  The only solution, as the Rangoon strike committee and others had been arguing, was for the replacement of the present administration with an interim government “acceptable to all the people” to be sworn in to see the elections through.

  The date was September 13th, a Tuesday.

  What is tantalizing, seen from a perspective of more than twenty years on, is to observe how President Maung Maung, in these tumultuous days, seems to be edging towards the same conclusions as his adversaries in the opposition. In a speech after the BSPP’s extraordinary congress, the president conceded that his party was not up to the present challenges. “The weakness of the party is that it was born as a ruling party and grew up as one,” he told the assembled delegates. “In practice, it lacked the experience of making sacrifices, taking risks and working hard to overcome difficulties.” He appeared to be dictating his own party’s obituary.

  Then, on Friday, September 16th, three days after the publication of the openly hostile letter by Suu and her two colleagues, the regime conceded one of the letter’s principal demands. It was the third victory Suu had wrung from them in less than a month. “On September 16th,” as Burma historian Michael Charney records, “the State Council announced that since government servants should ‘be loyal to the state and only serve the people’ and in keeping with the multiparty system that the government now promised to create, all state employees, including the military, could no longer be members of a political party.”16 That meant they could not belong to the BSPP. Another huge clump of the ruined state’s masonry came crashing down. Optimists, including Michael Aris, were gladly anticipating the revolution’s triumph. “Dear Everyone,” he faxed home on September 15th, “an enormous thank you to you all for helping so much with Alexander and Kim . . . We still have high hopes of bringing them here for Christmas . . . Both of us are convinced that by then peace will have firmly arrived. Even now the final cracks in the edifice of this monstrous regime are appearing. Wish us luck!”

  Meanwhile the 600 million kyats the regime had forcibly withdrawn from the bank to pay the army’s wages appeared to be losing its adhesive power. The regime might discount the arrival at Suu’s side of a figure like Tin Oo, long gone from the army and identified with Ne Win’s enemies for more than a decade. But what about the sixteen privates from the 16th Light Infantry who marched through Rangoon in their uniforms though without weapons on September 7th, chanting, “Our military skills are not for killing the people”? What of the officers of the immigration and customs police, marching through the capital in their uniforms bearing banners to demand democracy? Or the Railway Police likewise in uniform and marching in formation behind a woman officer carrying the obligatory photo of Aung San?

  Small fry, the senior generals might scoff, lower rankers, easily excited but just as easily scared back into line. But what about the air force flyers who started moving in the same direction? On September 9th, 150 airmen of the Mingaladon Maintenance Air Base went on strike followed by airmen from two other units. In the speech in which he pointed out the failings of the BSPP, Dr. Maung Maung had gone on to conjure a hellish image of the barbarous forces of revolt, those determined to “sweep everything aside
, bring everything down, rush in on human waves shouting their war cries to the cheers of outsiders, and establish their occupation.”17 But what of these new recruits to the revolt, marching through the capital behind their drummers and buglers in crisp military order, demanding change?

  At this point in the story the opposed forces seemed almost perfectly matched: A feather would have been enough to bring the scale down on the side of revolution. “Any high-ranking army officer who had taken an armed infantry unit into the capital and declared his support for the uprising would have become a national hero immediately,” argued Bertil Lintner, “and the tables would have been turned.”18 Rangoon, and Burma, held their breath, waiting.

  *

  The terrible events of the following few days raise the question: How did General Ne Win and his cronies view the events that had overtaken the country over the preceding months?

  In her speech at the Shwedagon, Suu had gone out of her way to honor the army her father had founded. “I feel strong attachment to the armed forces,” she had said. “. . . I would therefore not want to see any splits or struggles between the army . . . and the people . . . May I appeal to the armed forces to become a force in which the people place their trust and reliance?” With her long years spent in India and the UK, where the armed forces have an honored place but one that is strictly set apart from the levers of power, Suu was doing what she could to induce the troops to go back to barracks so that a civil and civilized Burma could re-emerge. No threat to the existence or military prerogatives of the army was contained in her message.