The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  Traditional Burmese society had plenty of faults and problems: People of non-Burman nationality were discriminated against and even enslaved, banditry was common even in the heartland, and it was rigidly hierarchical. But within those parameters there was, for the Burman majority, a broad measure of equality, and the Five Precepts of Buddhism—not to take life of any sort, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to lie, and not to take intoxicants—were generally observed. And in a country blessed like Burma with fertile soil and plenty of sun and rain, the result for the Burman peasant was simplicity, stability and a general absence of want. George Scott wrote in The Burman:

  The Burman is the most calm and contented of mortals. He does not want to grow rich. When he does make a large sum of money, he spends it all on some pious work, and rejoices in the fact that this will meet with its reward in his next existence . . . If any one has escaped the curse of Adam it is the Burman . . . When his patch of paddy land has been reaped, his only concern is how to pass the time, and that is no very difficult matter, where he has plenty of cheroots and betel-nut . . . And so an uneventful life passes away: the greatest ambition to see the village boat successful at the Thadingyut races, and the village champion cock or buffalo triumphant over all others . . .6

  The downside of the Burman’s easygoing contentment, as Suu had pointed out, was a pervasive lack of intellectual ambition. “Traditional Burmese education did not encourage speculation,” she wrote, because Burmese were convinced that “Buddhism represents the perfected philosophy. It therefore follows that there was no need either to try to develop it further or to consider other philosophies.”7

  Far away from the peasant in the fields, in the almost unimaginable court, beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, ruled the king, the “Lord of the Celestial Elephant,” who if not the son of the previous king—if that king had died without issue—was identified by soothsayers much in the way that child reincarnations of the great lamas of Tibet are identified. “The king,” Scott tells us, “emphatically rules by what is called in the Western kingdoms the right divine.”8 But to ensure that right was not infringed upon often required drastic measures: Any potential rivals to power—any latent opposition, to use the language of democracy—had to be got rid of in the most decisive manner.

  When Burma’s last king, Thibaw, came to the throne, he was persuaded by his mother and consort that “he would never be safe till the princes were put out of the way,” Scott writes. “Seventy of the royal blood, men, women, and children, were murdered in the next three days, and buried within the palace, in a long trench dug for the purpose. The eldest prince . . . died shrieking for mercy at the hands of his own slaves, whom he had often tortured . . . The poor old regent of Pegu . . . had his nostrils and gullet crammed with gunpowder, and was thus blown up.”

  The massacre of Thibaw’s rivals was widely reported in foreign newspapers and its bestiality helped the British build the case for ending the Burmese monarchy and imposing their rule on the whole country. But from the Burmese point of view, the clearing away by a new monarch of rivals to the crown was a familiar and prudent custom. “Many Burmans defend it warmly,” Scott pointed out, “on the plea that it secured the peace of the country.” Otherwise there would always be the risk of those snubbed by the soothsayers staging a rebellion when they felt strong enough to do so.

  Burma’s royal massacres were startling on account of their scale, but nowhere in the world does a king cut a deal with pretenders to his crown; in traditional monarchical systems, the only place for a royal rival is in exile or under the ground. Burma’s tragedy, one which Suu was acutely aware of before she went home, was that history had given the country no opportunity to discover that there were ways in which power could be both asserted and shared.

  On the far side of Burma’s northwestern border lies the world’s largest democracy. India was no less feudal and monarchical than Burma when the British marched in to usurp its history, but it emerged from centuries of colonial subjection with a democratic system that has survived for more than sixty years. Why was India able to sustain such a system while Burma, despite being encumbered with far fewer social problems than India and with a higher standard of living and rate of literacy, relapsed into tyranny after a mere decade of democratic experiment?

  It was a question which Suu had long pondered, and the result was the most mature piece of writing of hers yet to see the light of day: an essay entitled “Intellectual Life in India and Burma under Colonialism,” written while she and Michael were in Shimla in 1986.

  Democracy was able to sink roots in India, she argued, because the British had deliberately set out to create an intellectual elite educated in English to run their Indian administration. This elite was able to throw off the restrictions of traditional vernacular education and open themselves to international influences, while remaining in touch with their own traditions. The result was people like Gandhi. “Gandhi was of a practical turn of mind that looked for ideas to suit the needs of situations,” she wrote. “In spite of his deeply ingrained Hinduism, Gandhi’s intellectual flexibility made him accept those elements of western thought which fitted into the ethical and social scheme he considered desirable.”9

  Burma was colonized more than two centuries after Bengal, and when the British cast around for a native elite to help them administer the colony, the Burmans were both outnumbered and outclassed linguistically by the Indians and Chinese to whom the British had opened Burma’s door—“peoples,” as Suu pointed out, “so much more experienced in dealing with westerners and their institutions.”

  Then much later, when the British tried to create the University of Rangoon by amalgamating two existing colleges, raising the academic standard and making them residential, they were met by violent protests: “There was . . . in the Burmese mentality,” writes Suu, “an ingrained resistance to elitism: . . . education of a national character should be made available to as broad a section of the population as possible.” But this salutary motive meant that it was very difficult for Burmese equivalents of the giants of colonial India—people like Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Gandhi and Nehru, all members of the English-speaking elite—to emerge.

  The intense frustration of this failure radiates from an article written by Aung San in the 1930s while still a student. “We are fully prepared to follow men who are able and willing to be leaders like Mahatma Gandhi,” he wrote. “. . . Let anybody appear who can be like such a leader, who dares to be like such a leader. We are waiting.”10

  It was of course Aung San himself who emerged to lead. But while he was able to lead his country to the threshold of independence, he could not transform its political culture: That was a task beyond the capacity of a single individual, however charismatic, or of a single generation. It was a transformation that, at independence, remained unfulfilled.

  The party Aung San headed at his death, and which constituted Burma’s first independent government in 1948, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), was not recognizably a party in the Western sense. Rather it was “a loose confederation of political parties and local influential leaders and strong men,” according to the American Burma expert David Steinberg. “Its membership ran the gamut of left to left-center positions that were socialist to some degree. More important, the AFPFL included a broad array of individuals reflecting the essential personalization of power; each leader had a power base and his own entourage, and sometimes armed supporters.”11 This “personalization of power,” the absence of an ideological coherence that could hold the party together, led to the League eventually splitting into two opposed camps based not on policies but on personalities—which in turn allowed the army to take its first bite of power, four years before the final takeover.

  Burma had not digested the concept of a loyal opposition, or of power that could be shared or delegated through society’s different strata. As in many other traditional societies, writes Steinberg, “power was conceived as finite.” T
o share power, “from center to periphery, between leaders, etc,” was to lose power: It was a zero-sum game. “Loyalty becomes the prime necessity, resulting in entourages and a series of patron–client relationships. Those outside of this core group may therefore be considered potential adversaries—a ‘loyal opposition’ thus becomes an oxymoron.”

  Gustaaf Houtman cites three reasons why the concept of “opposition” has failed to gain any traction in Burma. First, “the centralization of power lying with a king or general” means that “the regime views opposition with suspicion and is unwilling, perhaps even unable, to allocate it a place in its political scheme.” Secondly, “expressions of opposition are . . . equated with confrontation, and therefore armed force.” And thirdly, “opposition is seen as threatening to ‘harmony’ and ‘national unity.’ Indeed, the overarching emphasis on national unity means that the idea of opposition is literally equated with the ‘destruction of unity.’”12

  In her speech at the Shwedagon, Suu had repeatedly invoked the need for “unity,” as her father had done. Yet from the perspective of Ne Win and his cronies, Suu and her new party embodied a fearful assault on the mystical concept of national unity, and a mortal challenge to their rule—all the more menacing because it was launched in the name of the very man, Aung San, whose achievements were the basis of their own claims to legitimacy.

  “In Burma,” writes Houtman, “those who declare themselves opponents to the regime are either extremely courageous or extremely foolish—there is little in between.”13 As Aung San Suu Kyi set out to carry word of her new party and its democratic promise to the corners of the country, she would soon discover exactly how courageous she and her colleagues would need to be.

  *

  If Saw Maung’s promise of elections within three months—before the end of 1988—was to be fulfilled, the NLD had no time to waste. Yet almost at once it was embroiled in the factionalism that has been the besetting sin of Burmese politics since the time of Aung San. In this case it was an outbreak of hostilities between the baung-bi chut, the former military men, and the intelligentsia. Almost inevitably it developed into a fight between right and left.

  Brigadier General Aung Gyi was the odd man out in the party’s leadership. Formerly a close ally of Ne Win and his subordinate in the 4th Burmese Rifles—the regiment that provided all the military elite throughout the Ne Win years—in 1988 he had been the first figure from the military establishment to attack Ne Win’s policies openly. He had been purged from the junta twenty-five years before, in 1963—yet he was unblushingly open about his continued affection for the army, and careful to avoid attacking his old boss in person. In the speech he made at the Shwedagon the day before Suu made hers, he urged his audience to heed the words of the new, “moderate” president, Maung Maung. Shortly before the crackdown of September 18th he had “guaranteed” that there would be no army coup, and vowed to commit suicide if he was wrong. It was rumored that he remained on close terms with senior figures in SLORC.

  He was in other words a very ambiguous figure to lead the nation’s most promising opposition party, and when the rift at the top became open, Suu acknowledged that she had made a mistake in bringing him on board. “I went wrong,” she told U Win Khet, one of her close assistants, privately, “but not without a reason. I held a personal grudge against Aung Gyi, but when I started to work for my country I decided to set personal grudges aside.”14

  The general and Suu eventually parted company, but not before Aung Gyi had caused serious trouble to the fledgling party. He had left Rangoon in late September or early October, ostensibly for a “holiday in Maymyo,” the British-built hill station northeast of Mandalay. “But on his way there he stopped at every town in between,” Ma Thanegi wrote, “held meetings and announced that anyone contributing 30,000 kyats to the National League for Democracy would become a candidate in the election.”15

  This idea, which would have brought in useful funds at the cost of branding the party as an association of the (relatively) rich, would have been anathema to Suu and the rest of the party’s leadership. But they only found out about it weeks later, when Suu had to clear up the mess in his wake.

  Life in Burma was returning to a sort of blighted normality by the end of October as Suu and her closest colleagues, including Ma Thanegi, set off up-country, defying martial law to hold the first mass political meetings of Suu’s career. The general strike which had begun on August 8th collapsed on October 3rd, workers returning to their posts under threat of mass dismissal. Two weeks later Rangoon’s banks reopened for the first time since the start of the uprising. SLORC appealed to the 10,000-odd students who had fled to border areas to return, opening reception camps in border areas under government control and promising to treat them not as insurgents but only as “misguided youth”—sending them home to their parents—if they surrendered by November 18th. In an indication of the regime’s credibility problem, very few took up the offer, and there were reports that some of those who did were imprisoned, tortured and even executed.

  Suu set off from University Avenue with her team on October 30th in a convoy of cars. She traveled in a cream-colored Japanese Saloon owned and driven by Myo Thein, her preferred driver, nicknamed “Tiger.” On either side of her in the back were two of the young men with whom Ma Thanegi shared her office duties, Ko Aung and Ko Myint Swe. In the shoulder bag carried by Ko Myint Swe—which to a Burmese identified him as the literary man he was when off duty—were Suu’s water bottle, headache pills, smelling salts and tissues, plus a few sweets in case her voice threatened to give out.

  It was the first time an opposition political party had set off on the campaign trail in more than a generation, and in this first foray they visited the four states of Magwé, Bago, Sagaing, and Mandalay in the flat and hot Burmese heartland north of Rangoon, meeting the staff of the NLD branch offices which had already begun springing up across the country. But everywhere they went Suu was obliged to correct the picture Aung Gyi had left behind when he had visited a few weeks before.

  “At every single rally and meeting Suu had to explain and refute U Aung Gyi’s announcement,” Ma Thanegi recalled. “By the time we got to the town of Shwebo she was exhausted about it, saying that she had been able to do no campaigning work for the party because her whole time was occupied explaining that Aung Gyi’s announcement, inviting contributions in return for becoming the party’s candidate, was without foundation. Many people were angry about it.”

  There were other problems, too. Political campaigning was a phenomenon with which people had no familiarity, but the personality cult of Suu had already spread across the country. “At some places, meetings took too long and we got behind schedule because people at NLD offices insisted on reading out long poems or speeches,” she wrote. “This was the same all over the country. Then there were the people who wanted to have their photos taken with Suu, or while they handed bouquets to her, and at the same time not caring if the stalks of the flowers were poking in her face. Others insisted on spraying her with cheap perfume, sometimes spraying it right in her face. Aung Aung”—one of Suu’s young student bodyguards—“and I [Ma Thanegi] had to be very rough with these people.” Some of the many people who wanted to be seen with Suu would crowd onto the stage with her, alongside her aides and bodyguards.

  For a generation the only form of political activity in the country had been that provided by the BSPP; lacking any other role models, the self-appointed leaders of the freshly sprung League branches emulated the former ruling party, Ma Thanegi remembered. “If a township or village had set up a branch of the NLD, its leaders, chairman, secretary and so on, chosen among themselves, welcomed us in expensive style, dressed in silk gaung baungs (a sort of turban) and silk longyis, their wives wearing silks and long scarves, all of them looking exactly like apparatchiks of the BSPP, and with the same haughty look on their faces.”

  But despite all the problems and misunderstandings, it was a brilliant start for the new par
ty. Everywhere they went, Suu and her colleagues drew large, enthusiastic crowds. Party branch offices had sprung up in all the major towns, many of them spontaneously, with no input from Rangoon. There was no doubting the popular desire for change, and Suu had rapidly established herself as the preeminent focus and symbol of it. And although they were trailed everywhere by plainclothes police and agents of Military Intelligence, no one tried to stop their meetings from taking place. On October 26th a small student protest at the Shwedagon was quickly broken up by troops; ten days later an attempted demonstration by monks in the city was also dispersed. But the magic of Suu’s name, combined with the fact that she was always careful to emphasize that her opposition to the regime was strictly nonviolent, appeared to have a mesmerizing effect on her adversaries. So far, at least, they let her get on with it.

  Perhaps they were banking on her giving up and going home to Oxford and her family before too long; perhaps they were hoping that the growing throng of parties which had signed up for the election, who would eventually number 235, would drown out her voice and stifle her influence. And then there was the Aung Gyi factor apparently working in their favor.

  Ever since independence, communism had been the great bogey of Burmese politics. In 1948 the Communist Party of Burma, headed by Suu’s uncle Thakin Than Tun, her mother’s brother-in-law, had refused to cooperate with prime minister Nu’s democratically elected government and had resorted to armed struggle, seizing a large area in the Pegu Mountains northeast of Rangoon and forming an alliance with Chinese communists on the northeast frontier. When Norman Lewis traveled through the country in 1950, large areas were out of bounds because of insurrectionary activity by communists.

  Neither in her writings before returning to Burma nor in her political speeches inside the country had Suu given any indication of communist sympathies. But Ne Win loyalists had already condemned the 1988 uprising as a communist plot, and Suu’s family connection to the Communist Party, and the presence in the NLD’s Central Executive Committee of known left-wing figures such as the lawyer Daw Myint Myint Khin, who had belonged to a Marxist study group in the 1950s, made the insinuation an easy one to make. And the state media, and Khin Nyunt, the bespectacled chief of Military Intelligence, an increasingly influential figure in the junta, made it frequently and boldly. Aung San Suu Kyi was “surrounded by communists” it was claimed; she was “going the same way as her uncle’s Burma Communist Party.”16