The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  But from what took place on the evening of September 18th and the days that followed, it is clear that those in power saw things very differently. Ne Win was the army and the army was Ne Win: An attack on one was an attack on all. The army would not be divided: It had gained too much from a generation in power—too much privilege, too much wealth, a dominant position over the rest of society comparable to the hated British—to risk having it all ripped away. As they saw it, Suu had declared war not on the overweening power of a dictator but on all of them and on everything they had worked so hard to plunder. And now the armed forces responded in kind, with a declaration of war.

  *

  Sunday, September 18th, was another day of mass demonstrations—the new normality in free Burma. The strike that had begun early in August then spread across the country still held firm. Rangoon’s forty-odd daily and weekly newspapers were on sale, brimming with news, rumor and uninhibited polemic. At Rangoon University, students impatient with Dr. Maung Maung’s foot-dragging announced that they had formed an interim government—student nonsense intended to prod the president into action. No riots occurred, no beheadings were recorded that day; the capital, its government in limbo, continued to tick over. As Martin Morland recalled, “The city of Rangoon, and indeed the whole country, ran disturbingly smoothly without Big Brother.”19 Over at University Avenue the dozens of students and others who had taken up residence in Suu’s house continued to thrash out with “big sister” their vision of the nation’s future. It was not all glamorous: Nyo Ohn Myint recalled, “My first job was buying fried rice at the restaurant nearby. And then I was driving. And every day we had so many meetings . . .”20

  The first sign that today would be any different came at 4 PM when a male voice suddenly broke in to the state radio’s afternoon music program. “In order to bring a timely halt to the deteriorating conditions on all sides all over the country,” the announcer said, “and in the interests of the people, the defense forces have assumed all power in the state with effect from today.”21

  Martial law was back with a vengeance. With immediate effect, the man said, a curfew was in force between 8 PM and 4 AM. And during the hours of daylight the following activities were now banned: “gathering, walking, marching in procession, chanting slogans, delivering speeches, agitating and creating disturbances in the streets by five or more people, regardless of whether the act is with the intention of creating disturbances or of committing a crime or not.”

  But over the past month the people had become used to defying the army, and they did so again. “It had started drizzling shortly after the brief radio announcement,” Bertil Lintner wrote, “and the late-afternoon sky was now heavy with dark rain clouds. Once again, throughout the city, people began felling trees and overturning street-side wooden stalls to make barricades as they had done in August. Their faces were downcast and the atmosphere electrifyingly tense . . . Electric wires were cut and street lights destroyed to hamper the movements of the troops everyone was expecting to appear at any minute.”22

  Terry McCarthy, a correspondent for the Independent who had arrived from Bangkok the previous day on a fake tourist visa, wrote:

  Walking through Rangoon was an eerie experience. Most roads were blocked at every intersection with trees, concrete pipes, wooden gates and blocks of concrete. Only a few of the major roads were still passable . . . At every barricade there were young men with an assortment of weapons, including wooden spears, knives, catapults that fire sharpened bicycle spokes, bottles of acid mixed with gravel, billhooks and Molotov cocktails.

  The change in atmosphere in the space of a few hours was frightening. Earlier in the day, opposition leaders were talking buoyantly of an interim government being in reach . . . Intermediaries were regularly conveying messages between the opposition and the civilian government of Maung Maung, and students were jubilant as they marched through the streets, calling for democracy.23

  Now all that was over. Bertil Lintner wrote:

  Some people began banging pots and pans inside their houses in a desperate show of defiance. Others took to the streets with their crossbows, swords and jinglees [the sharpened bicycle spokes mentioned by McCarthy, fired from slingshots] ready for a fight with the army . . . Bands of thousands of enraged demonstrators . . . surged down the streets in the eerie evening twilight. Waving banners, flags and crude home-made weapons, they shouted at the tops of their voices “Sit-khway aso-ya phyok-cha-yay!” “Down with the dog government!”24

  The thunderous rumbling, when it finally came, could be heard from afar: Late in the evening hundreds of army lorries, cranes mounted on trucks, armored personnel carriers and Bren carriers left the military cantonment in the north of the city and headed in convoy downtown. And this time there was to be no standoff, no games of chicken, no polite waiting for the crowds to disperse. In July Ne Win had issued his grim warning—“when the army fires, it shoots to hit”—and this time his troops were to obey it to the letter.

  “Through loudspeakers mounted on the military vehicles, the people were ordered to remove the barricades,” Lintner reports. “If the order was not heeded, a machine gunner sprayed the nearest house with bullets . . . If the protesters themselves had not complied after the first salvo of machine-gun fire, cranes moved in and dismantled the flimsy road blocks.”25

  Anybody out on the streets was in breach of martial law and fair game. “Any crowd of people in sight was mowed down methodically as the army trucks and Bren carriers rumbled down the streets in perfect formation, shooting in all directions,” Lintner records. “The dead who were left in the street were trucked away by the army during lulls in the shooting. Sporadic gunfire could be heard here and there in Rangoon throughout that night.”

  Among the principal targets of the invasion force was Aung San Suu Kyi. For her and her colleagues in the ad hoc opposition movement, the military crackdown had come out of a clear blue sky. A spokesman for Tin Oo commented, “This is a coup d’état by another name. This ruins everything.”26 Suu, Tin Oo and the third member of their triumvirate, Aung Gyi, held an emergency meeting after they had digested the radio announcement, but offered no comment when it broke up. Late the same evening dozens of soldiers and an armored personnel carrier with a .275 machine gun mounted took up position outside Suu’s home in University Avenue. No one was allowed to enter or leave, and the phone line was cut.

  “All through the night we were kept awake by the noise of machine gun fire,” Nyo Ohn Myint, one of the many trapped inside the grounds, remembered.27

  Suu told the students and others in her compound to offer no violence to the army. “It is better that I should be taken off to prison,” she told them. “It is better that we should all be taken off to prison.”28 But Nyo Ohn Myint and the rest quietly ignored her admonitions, and like other activists prepared as best they could for the coming confrontation.

  “The machine gun was pointed straight at the front gate,” he recalled. “We were very nervous because we only had slingshots to defend ourselves. There were two 14-gallon tanks of paraffin in the cellar, so we made Molotov cocktails with as many bottles as we could find. Our security inside the house depended on self-defense.”29 They made these preparations furtively, without informing Suu, knowing that she would disapprove if she found out. “She didn’t know about them,” Nyo Ohn Myint remembered. “She was kind of like a mother—when she saw one of the guards with a slingshot she said, don’t touch it again . . .”

  But Nyo Ohn Myint and his comrades were desperately afraid for Suu. And the young lecturer conceived a cunning plan to save her from arrest or worse—if necessary against her own will.

  “The compound next door was the property of Tass, the Soviet news agency,” he explained. “And the military was not in that spot. The Russian correspondent for Tass spoke to us over the wall, we conversed in broken English and I told him the regime is very dangerous, they want to kill her. So he offered to give her refuge because his house was the property of
the Soviet Union, so it was extra-territorial.”

  Nyo Ohn Myint raised the idea with Suu. “I requested her to leave if the army started to fire on us. But she said, no. You boys must do nothing to resist, I will talk to the army and I will get arrested. This is the best way to save our lives.

  “So I said to my friends—she was very stubborn, we wanted to get her out—I said, let’s smack her on the head, knock her unconscious and slip her over the wall to the Tass agency house. Because our focus was on saving her life, and we didn’t know if the soldiers would shoot her or not.” In the event the siege, which lasted seventy-two hours, ended without violence on either side, and with Suu still conscious, and in her own home.

  Despite the blood already shed, the defiant strikers returned to the streets on Monday morning, and the ruthless army response continued. Primed by months of unrest and bloody repression, the outside world was finally paying attention. “At least 100 people—and perhaps four times that number—were shot dead in the streets of Rangoon yesterday,” McCarthy reported in a story carried by the Independent on its front page, “as the city was plunged into terror a day after the Burmese army seized power . . . As the day wore on, with gunfire echoing all over the city, casualties started to crowd into Rangoon General Hospital. A witness said the scene was unreal. ‘There are bodies everywhere. Sometimes it is hard to know who is dead and who is alive.’”30

  McCarthy went on:

  Although most of the confrontations between the students and the military were brief, with the students retreating quickly when the soldiers opened fire, several pitched battles were reported . . . In one incident, reported by several sources, a crowd in the Tanwe district of Rangoon stormed an armed truck and, although suffering heavy casualties, eventually killed the seventeen soldiers and took their weapons. There are also reports, which have been confirmed by official Burmese radio, that two police stations in Rangoon were stormed by demonstrators . . .

  As McCarthy’s list of crude, homemade weapons underlines, those demonstrators resolved to make a fight of it were pathetically ill-equipped; and most were armed with nothing more menacing than a portrait of Aung San or a peacock flag. But the soldiers behaved as if they were confronting the Vietcong. Bertil Lintner wrote:

  No one in the large column that marched down past the old meeting spot near the City Hall and Maha Bandoola Park saw the machine-gun nests on the surrounding rooftops. As the marchers turned left, [they found themselves] entrapped between three fire points, the troops at the three rooftop positions opened fire simultaneously. No warning was given. Several demonstrators fell bleeding to the street.

  Files of soldiers goose-stepped in perfect formation out from different side streets, followed by Bren carriers. At a barked word of command, the troops assumed the prone firing position, as if they were facing a heavily armed enemy . . .31

  “The Burmese Red Cross was working furiously to gather the wounded and dead from the streets,” McCarthy reported. “After one incident in the east of Rangoon, they even asked a Western embassy to send them vehicles to transport the wounded to hospital. ‘They have been showing tremendous courage,’ a diplomat said.”32

  It is hard to find the correct word to describe what happened on September 18th. It is usually called a coup d’état, but as one disgusted Western diplomat responded, “What coup d’état? The same people are in charge!” Yet it was far more than just another crackdown: There was none of the hesitation displayed by the army in its previous attacks on demonstrators. Nor were there any more indications of wavering loyalties like those that had appeared during the preceding weeks. The troops took up position and fired their guns the way troops are supposed to, without emotion, like well-programmed automatons.

  The difference between the army attacks of August 8th and those of September 18th and 19th was like the difference between the first approximate firing of an artillery round and the second, third and fourth firing, when the gunner has recalibrated his sights. In the little town of Phekhon, Pascal Khoo Thwe, practicing his oratorical skills as one of the leaders of the democrats, saw what was happening at the time. During the public meetings, he said, “police mingled with the crowds to observe us, having prudently abandoned their uniforms. We ought to have realized that they were playing their traditional game of letting the leaders surface so that they could be picked off later . . .”33

  Now the army began putting all the intelligence it had gathered to good use—and thousands of activists, fearing what was to come, fled to the border areas to avoid being picked up or killed. Aung Myint was one who sought refuge in the Karen-held areas on the Thai border. “We fled,” he said, “because we realized that this time it was different; not a random massacre as in August. It was meticulously planned and the targets well selected. Because everything had been out in the open during the August–September demonstrations, all the leading activists were known—and the army were looking for us specifically.”34 Now many of those who had stood on improvised stages and urged their fellow students to struggle for democracy turned their backs on all that. Despairing of the nonviolent path, they threw themselves on the mercy of the ethnic armies that had been fighting the Burmese state for years, some of them since before independence. They asked for food, training and guns, and pledged to fight alongside them.

  *

  By Tuesday night the fight was over; the streets were clear of protesters, the corpses had been carted off, the blood hosed away, might had prevailed again. Ordinary Burmese who wanted to know what had happened were once again thrown back on foreign radio reports: One of the first consequences of the crackdown was the forcible closure of all Burma’s newspapers, including the increasingly insubordinate regime mouthpiece the Working People’s Daily, which only returned to the news-stands, duly castrated, weeks later. But anyone listening to the BBC would have discovered that, since the army takeover, perhaps one thousand people had been killed in Rangoon alone. It was probably an underestimate. Michael Charney wrote, “Suppression associated with the coup led to between 8,000 and 10,000 deaths.”35 It was the worst massacre of civilians in Burma’s blood-soaked modern history, and one of the worst anywhere in the world in the postwar era.

  This was how the Ne Win regime chose to greet the emergence of Aung San Suu Kyi as a rival for power; it was her baptism of fire. How did the “Oxford housewife” react?

  Terry McCarthy spent many hours with Suu in the immediate aftermath of the crackdown and in the days that followed. “I went up there with a couple of other journalists and we had a long chat in her living room looking over the lake,” he remembered. “Michael [Aris] was there as well—the two boys had been sent back to school in England some weeks before. I found her so compelling that I went back to her house almost every day after that.

  “While we were there the first time the shooting started up—the Burmese army use very large caliber guns, they made a lot of noise and it was clear they weren’t shooting at birds. But Suu didn’t flinch at all. She was incredibly composed.”36

  At that first meeting she told the Irish journalist that she had been expecting to return to Britain in the autumn, but that the events of the past few months had changed her mind: Now she expected to stay in Burma, “but I would prefer not to remain in politics if I can avoid it.”37 Yet the next moment she acknowledged the impossibility of that. “You can’t pick up something and then drop it,” she said. “You have to see it through. I realized that after the August shootings.

  “. . . It’s very different from living in academia in Oxford,” she conceded, a touch ruefully. “We called someone vicious in a review for the Times Literary Supplement. We didn’t know what vicious was.”

  *

  The events of September 18th were preceded by the most savage purge of the Burmese government since 1962. On the morning of that day President Maung Maung had been summoned to Ne Win’s home and sacked. At the same time, all administrative organs of the state, from the State Council and Council of Ministers at the to
p down to local authorities throughout the country, were abolished or suspended. They were replaced, not by the neutral, interim administration the people wanted but by the army officers who had been in charge until replaced by a simulacrum of civilian rule in the mid-seventies. The masks of socialism and parliament discarded, the army now confronted the population with its naked power.

  Maung Maung’s replacement was General Saw Maung, the army’s chief of staff, quite as much a creature of Ne Win as the two presidents he had succeeded. When the bodies of the dead had all been burned and the blood hosed from the streets, he took to the airwaves and told the nation that the army had merely been doing its duty—and when that duty was complete, the political evolution of the nation would resume.

  The army’s immediate job, he said, was to restore law and order and rebuild the state’s administrative machinery. Then it would be the responsibility of corporations, cooperatives and “private concerns” to “alleviate the food, clothing and shelter needs of the people.” Once these jobs were done, multiparty elections would be held as promised and the Military Council would not interfere with the Election Commission in any way. “We do not wish to cling to state power long,” he insisted. On the contrary, he spoke of “handing over power to the government which emerges after the free and fair general elections.” “I am laying the path for the next government,” he said, and “I will lay flowers in the path of the next government.”38

  But the Burmese were not fooled: Ne Win, they decided, was merely repeating himself through Saw Maung. “It’s going back to the 1962 formula,” a man near the Sule pagoda in central Rangoon told McCarthy. “Nothing different.”39 After the intense excitement of the past six weeks, a couple of days of hyper-violence had restored the status quo ante. Number One was back on top.

  “During the day he carries a revolver,” Terry McCarthy wrote of Ne Win, “and sleeps with a submachine gun on the pillow beside him . . . He is moody and erratic, given to fits of anger followed by periods of weeping. He rarely leaves his compound in Rangoon, issuing orders to the military by radio-telephone. His staff are terrified of him. Just as Burma has been cut off from the outside world, so he is cut off from his own people.”40 A former aide told McCarthy: “He thinks killing is routine, in order for reason to prevail—but not our reason, his reason.” Another former adviser compared him to a viper. “He is not even like a cobra or a rattlesnake,” he said. “They give a warning before they strike.”