The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  Attacks like that could be shrugged off; they were routine, and often laughable—as when Khin Nyunt claimed that the communists had first tried to promote Suu’s mother Daw Khin Kyi as the leader of the 1988 uprising, overlooking the fact that the lady in question had been in a hospital bed and close to death since March.

  What was far more worrying was when, in early December, Aung Gyi himself started to repeat the allegations: In perfect harmony, both Military Intelligence and the retired, supposedly anti-junta general claimed that eight members of the party’s thirty-three-strong Central Committee were communists. Was it possible that Aung Gyi was still in cahoots with Ne Win? Could he be scheming with Number One to weaken or split the new party, or even destroy it?

  If he had restricted himself to raising the alarm about reds under the bed, Aung Gyi might have damaged the party severely. But when he began publicly downplaying the importance of Suu in the party, he went too far, fatally underestimating his colleague and the support she enjoyed. At a dramatic meeting of the committee on December 3, 1988, his leadership was put to the vote. He lost, and had no alternative but to step down, taking some of the other baung-bi chut with him out of the party. Fortunately, however, several of the most capable ex-army men on the committee, including Tin Oo and Kyi Maung, stuck with Suu and the civilian intelligentsia, and were to be crucial to the party’s later success. Tin Oo, the former Minister of Defense, replaced Aung Gyi as chairman.

  *

  Her stroke had precipitated her daughter’s return home and thereby changed the country’s destiny; for months now she had lain semi-paralyzed in her room on the ground floor of 54 University Avenue as a great popular movement came into being around her. Then on December 27th, at the age of seventy-six, Suu’s mother, Daw Khin Kyi, finally died, and her strongest remaining link to her father was broken.

  If she had died six or seven months earlier, before Suu’s Shwedagon speech and all that stemmed from that, her death would have had a very different resonance. It would have been a final, punctuating event in Suu’s life: The painful duty that had torn Suu so brusquely away from her family would have been concluded and, however conflicted her feelings about the turmoil in Burma, there would have been no understandable reason for her to prolong her absence from the family home in Oxford.

  But now not only Suu but also Michael and the boys understood that the situation had changed definitively. In her final illness, Daw Khin Kyi had been a bridge for Suu: She had passed over that bridge, and on the far shore had found another duty, just as pressing as the need to care for a sick mother, and far more unpredictable in its consequences. Now her fears of separation had been realized, and there was no going back.

  For all sides in Burma’s churning national crisis, the death of Daw Khin Kyi marked a caesura, a break point, though one with different meanings and possessing the seeds of different hopes.

  The regime could yet dream that Suu’s entry into politics was a mere fling, a caprice, an aberration, and that now her mother was gone she would pack her bags and depart. They granted Michael, Alexander and Kim, who had returned to England in September, visas to come back, banking perhaps on the emotional tug of home to drag Suu away when they departed.

  For the masses of people who had struck for weeks and weeks in the summer and who had been traumatized and silenced by the massacre of thousands of their fellow citizens, the death was by contrast their first opportunity since the events of September 18th to take to the streets en masse and show their solidarity with Suu—and, by implication, their hostility to the regime. Twenty thousand of them flocked to University Avenue after her mother’s death to express condolences. Far more were ready to follow the hearse to the mausoleum.

  The scene was set, in other words, for another bloody clash. Yet mercifully, this time around it didn’t happen like that. For their part, SLORC made no attempt to relegate the funeral of the widow of the nation’s founding father to the capital’s shabby margins: In accordance with Suu’s request, they sanctioned the lady’s burial in a ceremony tantamount to a state funeral, at the mausoleum close to the Shwedagon where the remains of Supayalat, King Thibaw’s consort, of U Thant and of Aung San himself were interred. They even paid some money, more than 1,000 dollars, towards the funeral expenses, and approved the building of a new monument to house the remains.

  These gracious concessions were further enhanced when the regime’s new strong man, General Saw Maung, visited University Avenue the evening before the funeral to sign the condolence book, accompanied by Khin Nyunt, the intelligence chief who was also the Minister of Internal and Religious Affairs. They stayed for tea; referring to the massacres perpetrated by the army between September 18th and 20th, the president told Suu that he was distressed that his karma had resulted in him presiding over “this blot” on the army’s honor, adding that he had no wish to cling to power.17 What Suu said in reply is not recorded, but it was the closest to a meeting of minds that would ever occur between the two of them.

  The public also behaved well. The regime had warned chillingly that the funeral could lead to “another round of disturbances”—words that could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then Suu stepped up to put the matter in more dignified terms. Two days after her mother’s death, she issued an appeal for calm, published in the Working People’s Daily (the regime’s English-language newspaper) on December 29, 1988. “As there will be a very large crowd of people at my mother’s funeral procession,” she wrote, “I humbly request the people to be calm and disciplined in sending my mother on her last journey . . . so that the funeral ceremony may be successful.” She added, “I would also like to request the people to abide by the funeral committee’s arrangements and security arrangements.”

  The people, 100,000 of them according to Reuters, did as they were told. The junta helped out by not attending, and by keeping the army in barracks: As so often in the long and strange interaction of the Burmese people and its armed forces, the masses swarmed through the capital in a temporary vacuum of visible force, kept in order by student marshals wearing the same red armbands as during the strikes of August and September. Students sang anti-government songs and waved the NLD’s peacock flag. The coffin was carried from Inya Lake in a flower-strewn hearse, led by monks and followed by Suu and the family and a substantial group of foreign diplomats, a walk of two hours under the hot sun. At the end of it the people dispersed peacefully. Suu’s relief was immense. “I hope this occasion has been an eye-opener,” she told the Independent by phone. “If we have cooperation and understanding we can do things peacefully. The people are not out for violence for violence’s sake.”18

  Already her thoughts were turning to the future: not Oxford, in the depths of another English winter, but her next campaign tour. Michael, of course, would not be able to accompany her: Even if his visa had permitted such a long stay, his presence was required to look after his sons as they returned to school. So as a second best he suggested to Ma Thanegi, Suu’s personal assistant, who spoke such excellent English, that she might like to write a diary of the campaign, to keep him in the picture. Ma Thanegi was happy to agree.

  A page from the campaign diary kept by Ma Thanegi, Suu’s friend and companion. On the campaign trail Suu’s fans developed a penchant for spraying her with cheap perfume. Here, Ma Thanegi quotes Suu telling her, “You know, Ma Thanegi, I’ve gone up in the world—they sprayed me with Charlie instead of Concord!”

  5

  OPEN ROAD

  THE junta’s policies made no sense. General Saw Maung had promised multiparty general elections within three months, had insisted that he would not stay in power long and promised that he would hand over power to the winning party in the election. Dozens of new political parties had registered. Yet it was effectively illegal to conduct an election campaign. Assemblies of more than five people were still banned. Rangoon was still under martial law. All newspapers except the purged and dreary Working People’s Daily had been closed down. Television,
still black and white, stuck just as doggedly to the party line.

  How on earth was a political party to get its message out?

  Aung San Suu Kyi tackled this challenge in the simplest and most direct manner possible, by merely ignoring the junta’s rules and going out on the road to meet the people. She had seen little of her native land other than the major cities, and those she had not visited for many years. And her people, as she was beginning to think of them, had never seen her. With elections due any time—the timetable was in fact very vague—the sooner she got started the better.

  It was a form of political action inspired by Gandhi, who like Suu had spent decades in foreign parts but after his return to India devoted years to criss-crossing the subcontinent, to the impotent fury of the British, and these journeys were to become the hallmark of her career. It is tempting to think of them as a series of jaunts, and Ma Thanegi’s diary, which is full of humor and acute observation, tends to reinforce that impression. Yet these journeys were always perilous, because every mile of the way Suu and her party were challenging the writ of the regime. On two occasions she came close to being killed. That was a hazard she was keenly aware of from the outset. As Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary about one excursion, “Gandhi is Suu Kyi’s role model and hero. Everyone knew it was going to be dangerous: Some of the students had the Tharana Gon sutra chanted over them to prepare themselves for sudden death, a mantra recited in Buddhist ritual over the body of the deceased. Some became monks or nuns for a few days in preparation.”

  Suu’s attitude was comparable to that of the sannyasin, the Hindu renunciate. Her mother and father had passed away. She had forsworn both the duties and the pleasures of family life for this cause. Burma’s democratic future was no longer for her some abstract issue, worthy of her support: It was the cause she was living for and that defined her life, the cause she now identified with totally, whatever might be the consequences.

  Everywhere she went, she and her companions were met by huge, ecstatic crowds which had often taken great risks to come out and greet her, defying the orders of the authorities to stay away. And as she moved across the country, to Tenasserim in the south, across the Irrawaddy Delta south and west of Rangoon on repeated trips, to the old capital of Mandalay and points in between, to the Shan States in the northeast, finally right up into the mountains of Kachin far to the north, her party’s support ballooned; it was as if she was absorbing the country into her own person, and the country was absorbing her. And every trip she survived, every new crowd that hailed her, the junta’s power and prestige shrank proportionately; because, as we have seen, power in Burma is a zero-sum game.

  Bertil Lintner captures the mood of those early meetings.

  She was coming to open a new NLD office in a suburb on the outskirts of Rangoon. It was scorching hot, April, before the rains. I went out there in a taxi and thousands of people were waiting in this scorching sun for hours—children, old women, people of all ages.

  Suddenly you could see a white car somewhere in the distance trailing a cloud of dust behind it, then the car arrived—she had been given the car by the Japanese, a white Toyota, to travel around the country—and the cheers were incredible. And she got out, very relaxed, surrounded by her students, her bodyguards, and smiled at everybody and was garlanded, and she went up on stage and started talking.

  And she talked for two or three hours and nobody left. Not even the children left. My Burmese is fairly rudimentary but I could understand what she was talking about, she was using very simple, down-to-earth words. “You’ve got a head,” she said. “And you haven’t got a head to nod with, you’ve been nodding for 26 years, the head is there for you to think.” That kind of thing, and people were laughing, it was a family affair. Then she left . . .1

  The junta felt it bitterly. From the icy courtesy and civilized assurances of January, on the eve of Daw Khin Kyi’s funeral, within a few months they were reduced to spreading libels and issuing murderous threats. They made a desperate effort to take the country back—by renaming it; and General Saw Maung was heading for the nervous breakdown which would see him removed from power.

  *

  On January 20, 1989, Suu and her party set off for the Irrawaddy Delta south and west of the capital, a flat land of endless paddies, dotted with small villages and seamed with wandering rivers, the intensely fertile flat country drained by the British; also the land where tens of thousands were to die in Cyclone Nargis in 2008. It was the first time that Ma Thanegi had kept notes on their progress—and the first time that the right of Suu and her party to move around freely was challenged.

  “Great harassment in Bassein,” Ma Thanegi wrote of their official reception in one town. “Armed soldiers barred the way out of the house we were staying in, only allowing us out in twos or threes to visit friends etc. . . .” The town, one of the biggest in the delta region, had been flooded with troops by the Divisional Commander, one Brigadier Myint Aung, who seems to have taken the NLD party’s arrival as a personal affront. In a letter to her husband, Suu wrote, “Here I am having a battle royal with the notorious Brigadier Myint Aung.” The town’s harbor was “full of troops, most of the streets blocked, sandbagged and barbedwired . . .” The army had forced markets and offices to close, sent teachers out of the town on so-called “voluntary service” and fired guns in the air to deter local people from greeting them.

  The morning after their arrival in the town, they learned that a number of local supporters had been arrested. Suu requested permission to talk to the brigadier: She wanted to register a complaint, she said, and would not leave the town “until I am satisfied there is fair play.”

  Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary,

  Request denied but a lower level meeting permitted, so I said I would go, please put down my name—the army looks down on women and they would think I would be helpless and weak. Ma Suu [throughout the diary Ma Thanegi refers to Suu using the “Ma”—“elder sister”—prefix, either as “Ma Suu” or simply “Ma Ma”] gave permission (“they have no idea I’m firing my first torpedo,” she said). Off I went, wearing a demure dress unlike what I usually wore, and slathered in perfume.

  Looking all shy and sweet I talked to two midlevel officers and they were hearty with me. Their excuse for not allowing us to go around Bassein was that prisoners had been let out of the jail, two of whom were murderers on death row, and that it was dangerous for us with them out in the town. I’m sure they thought I would be terrified by this explanation—they repeated the word “dangerous for us” three or four times. So far I had been listening demurely but at that point I asked firmly, “If they were convicted of murder and are on death row, why were they let out?” [In Burma’s traditional society, women are not expected to ask tough questions of men in authority, army officers in particular.] They gaped at me so I repeated my question. They were furious but could not scream at me as I was talking graciously . . .

  When Suu and her party learned that the cars in which they had traveled from Rangoon had been impounded and that they were effectively bottled up in the town, Suu herself broke the deadlock by walking out of the house where they had spent the night and fraternizing genially with the soldiers drawn up on the street. The upshot of Suu’s charm offensive, according to Ma Thanegi: “The troops were removed the day before we left and we were allowed to move around freely.” It was the first time Suu had come so close to a showdown with the army, but it was not to be the last.

  At the next stop, however, their problems melted away. “The minute that we crossed into Bago Division, all harassment stopped,” she wrote. “Just over the border, we saw trucks and cars and thought that it was more harassment, but it was crowds welcoming us. Ma Suu gave a speech right there, holding the old type of square microphone that we had seen photos of her father using.”

  As they were to discover, their official reception varied wildly from place to place, especially in these early months of the campaign, depending on the whim, or perhaps the pol
itical inclinations, of the local military authority. Suu and her colleagues adjusted their behavior accordingly. Ma Thanegi reports that in one town they visited they “had some trouble,” but in another soon afterwards “the township officer, military, said he was going fishing when he heard we were coming in and did so. So we went in, had lunch, Suu made speeches, and we left: no problem. When there is harassment we try to stay longer or to walk into town singing democracy songs or shouting slogans. If no harassment, just happy to go in quietly in the car and leave quietly.”

  They returned to Rangoon, but less than a fortnight later they were off again, this time to the Shan States, the rolling hill country which is one of the most idyllic corners of Burma, home to the Shan people, cousins of the Thais.

  The Shan States have a special place in the Aung San legend: It was at the town of Panglong, in the far north of the region, in February 1947, that Suu’s father signed a historic agreement between the Burmans, the Shans, the Kachin and the Chins—all the most numerous ethnic nationalities in the country with the exception of the Karen—committing them to membership of the new, independent Union of Burma.2

  The Panglong Agreement was reached immediately after Aung San’s successful conclusion of independence negotiations with the government of Clement Attlee in London, and confirmed Attlee and his colleagues in their belief that he was the right man to take charge of independent Burma. So when Suu and her party colleagues set off there exactly forty-two years later, it was a trip of huge symbolic significance.