The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  But despite the similarity of the general repression, several things were starkly different from the Ne Win coup of 1962. For one thing, that first coup was practically bloodless. For another, Ne Win was now seventy-seven, and on record as saying that he wanted to retire. His proxy, General Saw Maung, had endorsed the commitment of the Maung Maung government to multiparty elections, to be held within three months, even while his troops were murdering civilians in the streets.

  If paying lip service to that commitment was seen as a way to buy off the outside world, it failed utterly: On September 23rd the United States announced it was cutting off all aid in protest at the massacres. Europe and even Japan, long the junta’s most reliable supporter, were soon to follow America’s cue. But the commitment to elections was also a perverse way to justify the coup: For elections to be held, first order must be restored, which was why the army was obliged to intervene—as the midwives of democracy! Hence the name that the soldiers gave themselves within less than a week of the massacre: the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC—forever after to be compared to SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency in the James Bond films.

  The regime’s pledge to hold elections was bizarre. But amid the terror, the bloodshed, the exodus of students, the general despair, it provided a rare chink of light: There could be a way forward, despite it all. Perhaps that chink could best be appreciated by someone who had spent nearly half her life in England, a country where the words “Glorious Revolution” refer to an event, exactly three hundred years before, in which no lives were lost and which set British democracy on such a big, fat keel that it has been gliding forward ever since.41

  So it was on Saturday, September 24, 1988, as SLORC was rising from the ashes of the BSPP, and before Ne Win could change his mind, that Aung San Suu Kyi and her allies announced that they were forming a political party.

  4

  THE FUNERAL

  AMONG the hundreds of thousands who witnessed Aung San Suu Kyi’s first major speech at the Shwedagon pagoda was a petite forty-one-year-old woman with bright-red lipstick and a piercing gaze called Ma Thanegi. Recalling the day, she wrote:

  August 26, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi makes her first mass public appearance outside the Shwedagon Pagoda, West entrance. Her name is magic: Because she is General Aung San’s daughter, there was no one out in the streets who was not curious to see her. The morning was wet and windy, with the field in front of the Western entrance rapidly turning to a mud bath, as I sat with my friends on plastic sheets. The grass had just been cut and we saw small frogs hopping around in panic under our feet. She was three hours late. People who came with her crowded onto the stage behind and around her “to protect her”; but mostly because they wanted to be seen by her side . . .

  For Ma Thanegi, who is descended from courtiers in the Mandalay palace and has become one of Burma’s best writers in English, it was the start of an intense involvement in the democracy movement.

  “Due to a bad sound system we could hear nothing,” she wrote of that day. “But even if they could not hear, people instantly took her into their hearts without question, for she was fair-skinned, she was beautiful, she was articulate, and her eyes flashed as she spoke. Above all, she was our General’s daughter . . . We were glad to have a symbol, a leading light, a presence bringing hopes and dreams that her father did not have the chance to fulfill . . .”

  Before becoming a writer, Ma Thanegi devoted most of her energy to painting. Enthused by Suu’s speech, she and her fellow painters began turning out wall posters supporting the democracy movement. When she took samples to show Suu she was quickly recruited to her staff of volunteers.

  “About two days after her Shwedagon speech I went to see Daw Suu with my colleagues in the painters’ organization, to give her some posters we had produced,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir of those days. “She discovered that I could speak English, so soon after this first meeting she asked me to join her personal office staff, as I would be useful in dealing with the foreign media people.”

  Ma Thanegi began spending long hours at Suu’s house, as the new opposition party slowly and chaotically took shape in rooms adjoining the improvised sickbay where Suu’s mother, Daw Khin Kyi, still gravely ill, spent her days in bed. She recalled precisely the layout of the house and the people who were then occupying it:

  As one entered there was a staircase going upstairs on the left side of the lobby. A round marble-topped table stood in the middle of this entrance. On the left there was a narrow, closed-in veranda, off which was Suu’s office, which had once been the dining room. In fact she used the circular dining table with the Lazy Susan as her desk and as a conference table. Beyond were the bathroom, the kitchen and a store room.

  To the right of this office was a small room, and beyond it the larger one where Daw Khin Kyi lay in bed. A back corridor connected this room to the kitchen as well. There was a back door and back stairs, rarely used and fallen into decay.

  On the other side of the lobby was the parlor that Daw Khin Kyi kept for her visitors, with sofas, tea tables and a piano. This room, which opened onto the side veranda through French windows and which also opened onto the sick room, was kept locked.

  I would arrive at the office around 8 AM and I stayed until 5:30 PM.

  But the general strike and the uprising meant that commuting was often a challenge. “By now, some of the roads were blocked with fallen trees so no buses were running and few cars were on the road. Some cars thought to belong to the Military Intelligence had been burned. My house was a few miles away. Sometimes I came on foot.

  “At the start two younger women artists in our group helped with the files but both left, one for the US and the other to marry, and I was left very short-handed.”

  By this time Suu had a small but committed and semipermanent staff. There was an assistant called Ko Myint Swe who paid the bills, ran errands and tracked down books for Suu. Formerly a librarian at Rangoon University, he was “passionate about books,” Ma Thanegi recalled.1 His wife Daw Nwe, a poet, would sometimes stay with him; later the two of them would run the party’s public relations section from a shed at the end of the garden. When Suu began making frequent public appearances, her personal assistant Ko Myint Swe would be close at hand with emergency provisions.

  The two volunteers with whom Ma Thanegi worked most closely were two brothers, “almost like family to Suu,” who had moved into the house and now slept in the main downstairs room. “They were the sons of an ex-army officer called U Min Lwin,” she wrote.

  We got along extremely well.

  Ko Maw, the elder, was short and wore thick glasses, and talked far too much in a fierce and angry voice. Under his very grouchy exterior he had the kindest of hearts. The younger, Ko Aung, was tall and never spoke unless he was in a good mood. His hooded eyes roved constantly and missed nothing. As time went on, Ko Aung and I learned to work well as a team in any situation—a glance was all we needed to inform each other about something. We relied on each other to get things done—we soon found out that a number of the volunteers preferred the reflected glory of being near Suu to doing any real work. Being extremely bright and street smart, and totally unemotional, Ko Aung was indispensable.

  As time went on, more and more shops and offices were shut down by strike action. In the absence of public transport the city became harder to negotiate, with the result that 54 University Avenue at times became a sort of island. “Sometimes tensions would run high in the city and none of us would be able to leave the house for days on end,” Ma Thanegi recalled.

  We heard stories about the beheadings, and people brought us newspapers with gory photos of heads displayed on spikes.

  One time, when every shop in the city was closed, Suu remarked that she was getting tired of seeing the long hair on everyone. I knew how to cut hair, so I was delegated to be in-house barber. Ko Aung refused to let me touch his shoulder length hair, but the others, including Dr. Aris and Ko Myint Swe, had
to suffer the indignity of hair shorn so short that, as Suu remarked afterwards, they looked like convicts.

  Ma Thanegi was in the house on the Sunday when military rule announced its return with a bloodbath.

  Late in the morning of September 18th, Ko Maw came into the house looking worried. It was a Sunday, so there were no meetings or visitors. “Something’s going on,” he said. “They are broadcasting military songs nonstop on the radio.”

  Ko Aung went to fetch a radio which he placed on Ma Suu’s round table—the one with the Lazy Susan in the middle—and left it turned on. I made several calls but could not confirm anything, but we all suspected the army was moving in. Sure enough, at 4 PM we heard the announcement that the army was taking over to control the anarchy and that no one was to march in the streets. A curfew was imposed from 8 PM to 4 am. Government employees were told to report back to work or face dismissal.

  Despite the ban on marching, some groups marched out the next day; many were shot and killed. The corpses were quickly taken away and the streets washed of blood.

  Ma Thanegi stayed home during the days of shooting and bloodshed when University Avenue was under siege. When calm returned to the streets and she went back to work she found the house in an uproar over how to react to General Saw Maung’s promise of multiparty elections.

  “There was great excitement in the office over whether we should form a political party. One evening, when there were no other visitors in the house and we were alone, Suu came to me as I was bent over my work to ask if I would want to be involved in party politics. She said she was thinking of getting young people like Ko Myint Swe more involved, by bringing them onto the Central Committee.”

  Ma Thanegi treated Suu’s approach warily: She had played no part in the democracy movement before, and was temperamentally averse to joining organizations. In the end she chose to remain at arm’s length from the party, but she was to become intimately involved with Suu as her personal assistant over the coming months as the party came from nowhere to become the most significant political force in the country.

  Suu on August 17, 1995, with her friend and assistant, Ma Thanegi. Despite the broad smiles, the friendship would soon end in bitterness.

  After many meetings and much discussion, the founding triumvirate, Aung Gyi, Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo—Aung-Suu-Tin as they were known for short—announced the creation of the National United Front for Democracy, changed soon afterwards to the National League for Democracy (NLD), the name it retains today. The name change became necessary in late September when the former ruling party, the Burma Socialist Program Party, re-branded itself the National Unity Party—a name too similar for comfort. “All effort is now being put to establish the National League for Democracy, of which Suu is Secretary General,” Michael wrote home on September 30th. “There are still troops and checkpoints in all the streets, but they have stopped indiscriminate shooting it seems. Not a word about negotiations with the opposition . . . After the Malaysian [ambassador] had left, Suu went out to register her party with the Election Commission.”2

  The party’s flag was red, with a white star and a stylized golden peacock, head lowered and fan spread—the “fighting peacock.” Burmese armies had fought under a flag showing a peacock with a fully opened fan throughout the Konbaung Dynasty, which began in 1700. In the days of the monarchy, “the throne was painted over with representations of the peacock and the hare,” according to George Scott, writing under the nom de plume Shway Yoe in his book The Burman, His Life and Notions, first published in 1882, “typifying the descent of the king from the solar and lunar races.”3 In the 1930s the peacock also became the emblem of Burma’s militant students, who included Suu’s father Aung San: He was editor of the student magazine Oway, which is the Burmese word for the peacock’s harsh cry. Rejecting the bellicose suggestion of the name, Suu preferred the party’s emblematic bird to be known as “the dancing peacock.”

  Suu became general secretary of the new party, Aung Gyi, the retired general, was chairman and Tin Oo vice-chairman. Members of the Central Executive Committee included Win Tin, the turbulent journalist, Kyi Maung, the chubby ex-army officer, and Daw Myint Myint Khin, a woman barrister who was head of the Rangoon Bar Association.

  “In addition to Suu, three of them were civilians,” Ma Thanegi recalled. “The others were ex-military men, derisively known to the intelligentsia in the party as baung-bi chut or ‘men-out-of-trousers,’ referring to the fact that they had switched back from army uniform trousers to longyis.

  “There was mistrust between the two sides from the beginning,” she went on. Yet in those grim days of late September there was also great determination and great hope: hope founded on the promise of democratic elections held out by the new generalissimo, and on the “magic name” of Aung San Suu Kyi. Within less than a year almost all those men and women would be silenced, either under house arrest or in jail.

  *

  What did the very different people now banded together under Suu’s name hope to achieve?

  Announcing the formation of the party, Aung-Suu-Tin stated that “the basic objective of this organization is to achieve a genuinely democratic government” for which purpose the party was prepared to take part in the elections announced by Saw Maung. A few days earlier, in an article published in the Independent, Suu had written, “I am working . . . to achieve the kind of democratic system under which the people of Burma can enjoy human rights to the full. . . . Every country and people must search for a political and economic solution tailored to their unique situation.”4

  So what was Burma’s “unique situation,” and how might democracy, a concept invented and refined in the West, be tailored to fit it?

  The modernization of Burma was a question over which Suu had been wrestling for years, long before she was drawn into the maelstrom in the summer of 1988.

  As she told the crowd at the Shwedagon, towards the end of his short life her father made clear that he believed Burma should become a democracy. With the downfall of the Axis powers, fascist dictatorships went out of fashion. The other ideological model, communism, had won a convert in Aung San’s uncle Than Tun, who became head of the Burmese Communist Party. But the pitilessly materialistic perspective of Marxism held few charms for the deeply religious Burmese, even after the Chinese over the border turned Maoist. And on attaining independence in 1948, a democracy was what Burma became, and remained until the army takeover.

  But what did the word “democracy” mean in the Burmese context?

  Inherent in the term as used in the West is the concept of the “loyal opposition.” Political parties compete for the votes of the people, which translates into power. The losers in the election remain loyal to the state while putting up steadfast but peaceable opposition to the actions of the elected government in parliament.

  Readers will excuse this re-statement of the basic principles of parliamentary democracy because in Burma, as in many other countries outside Western Europe, they originally appeared highly exotic.

  Until 1948 Burma had had no experience of democracy or anything like it. The highly autocratic and capricious rule of the Burmese monarchy had been replaced by the diktats of the British in Calcutta, enforced by the gun. The British were eventually supplanted by the Japanese who, despite their sweet words about a “co-prosperity sphere,” proved to be every bit as dictatorial as all the others who had ruled the country.

  And there was a specific problem with the concept of “opposition.” In 1874, King Thibaw’s predecessor, King Mindon, on being informed that William Gladstone’s Whigs had lost the general election in Britain, remarked, “Then poor Ga-la-sa-tong [Gladstone] is in prison I suppose. I am sorry for him. I don’t think he was a bad fellow.”5 “It never occurred to [Mindon],” wrote Burma scholar Gustaaf Houtman, “that, when a political opposition party loses the elections, it might not end up in prison. Indeed, political opposition, unless it is sufficiently strong to extort respect, would appear to necess
arily imply exile, imprisonment or death.”

  As Suu herself observed, the fine social achievements of Burmese Buddhism had tended to close the minds of her co-nationals to the possibility that, in the political sphere, the rest of the world might have anything useful to teach them. “A sound social system,” she had written, “can go hand in hand with political immaturity.” Burma owes most features of its social system to its experience, stretching back over a millennium, of Theravada Buddhism. There is no room for a caste system in Buddhism: In striking contrast to Hindu practice, the notion that all men are born equal is not only preached but to a large degree practiced. The Burmese had a monarch who ruled over them more or less capriciously, guided and advised by Brahmin astrologers and Buddhist monks, and a chasm of wealth and privilege separated the palace from the people. But the people were not in a state of misery: All Burman children who were Buddhists—which until the British intrusion meant effectively everybody—went to monastery schools where they learned to read and write, and for many centuries Burma had been one of the most literate countries in the world.

  It was also infused with religious teaching to an unusual degree: All Burmese boys were inducted into the sangha in early childhood, and for several weeks or months or longer if they chose they lived as monks alongside the adult ones, setting out each morning to collect food donated by local villagers, learning to meditate and read and recite the sutras and perform the many different complicated ceremonies of the temple.