The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  Lunch at Kalaw. Trip uneventful to Bawbye. Lovely guavas: Ma Ma said normally she doesn’t like guavas but these were huge sweet and crisp. On the way from Bawbye to Kalaw I had eaten a whole guava, a huge one, much to everyone’s astonishment, but I think with all the slices Ma Ma ate would be more than one.

  The Irrawaddy Delta, which they had already visited, was to be the greatest source of tension during the campaign, and some of the party’s members there had already been jailed. But while they were on the road heading home, good news arrived. “We had news that the Irrawaddy Division people have been released. They are out on bail. Much rejoicing.” At Bawbye, the army reacted to their arrival by extending the curfew, so the students in the party felt they had to challenge it, “strolling and talking loudly in front of SLORC’s office until 9:55.

  “Nice dinner. Ma Ma had double bed to herself with shocking pink lacy mosquito net complete with lacy ribbons.” It was the sort of romantic mosquito net targeted at newly married couples. Neither of them took a fancy to it. “I said I would be damned if I would marry any man who supplied me with something like this, I would have to burn it. Ma Ma, lying flat on the bed, said that if she were the bride she would be asking what she had done to deserve it . . .

  “February 19: Pale grey outfit demure longyi. At end of long day Ma Ma said it was thoughtless of her to wear such a pale color on a long trip, said she looked dirty, actually she didn’t.”

  At the town of Yaydashe they learned that some members of the former ruling party, now called the National Unity Party, had adopted the dirty tricks first uncovered on the eve of Suu’s Shwedagon speech, cranking out semi-pornographic libels against her. “Young NLD people in Yaydashe waylaid us and said they had important matters to discuss. Found out that it concerned dirty anti-Ma Ma propaganda leaflets distributed by the NUP—the people responsible had been caught red-handed and would be prosecuted the next day.”

  Ma Thanegi recorded, “We all love Yaydashe NLD young people, no fuss no flowers no cameras.” She was in such a good mood that she felt moved to help one of Suu’s elderly admirers.

  One photographer in his late-70s seemed like a gay old dog, he wanted Ma Ma’s photo so I told him to lie in wait and ambush her when she came up. Told me proudly that he had asked her to look this way and she did. He dragged me off to his house opposite NLD office to show me a framed photo of Ma Ma he’d taken during our first trip up country. Caption said, Aung San Suu Kyi, lady builder of democratic nation, daughter of Aung San, architect of Burma. Held my arm in vice-like grip until I had admired the whole effect profusely enough for his satisfaction.

  As they neared Rangoon, the pressure of both popular expectation and official hostility began to rise again. The town of Dukgo gave them a reception to remember.

  Wonderful sight at Dukgo: As we entered the town the local NLD had issued red NLD caps and we marched in singing a democratic song which was also blared out from one car. We pushed in front of the MI’s videos and still cameras. Ma Ma had been saying for days how she was on the brink of losing her voice but it came on full, clear and strong as she started to talk at the NLD office, amplified out into the road, and she sounded darn mad.

  While Ma Ma was talking, people crept up to listen at the side of the road. Police and soldiers told them to get back but we told them to come up and listen. Planned for Ma Ma to walk to jail to visit prisoners but when she came out of the NLD office such a large crowd followed her that we were afraid the police—who hurried to the police station and closed the gates—would say we were invading it and shoot us down. So many kids and women in the crowd that we decided just to pass the police station and jail by.

  We walked out of town, crowds following, and I was afraid we would be walking all the way home. But at last, with the last goodbye, Ma Ma got into the car.

  Had engine trouble all the way: water pipe broke late afternoon. Stopped for a while at Jundasar at a rice mill. Also we had to stop near a stream just before Dai-oo. Large pack of stray of dogs—one of the boys shouted at them about 2/88, SLORC’s rule banning groups of more than five gathering together . . .

  It was their longest and most draining—yet exhilarating—trip to date, lasting ten days and covering over 1,200 miles, and it was nearly over.

  Ma Ma sat in car and asked if I didn’t feel a sense of unreality about all we are doing. I said, dealing with stupid people can get us caught up in weeks of stupidity, no wonder it makes us all feel weird . . .

  Got home very late about 8:30. Told Ma Ma how I had always hated to travel in crowds and never did so and now I am traveling with a circus, lots of monkeys. Ma Ma said also a few elephants, because some of the boys are really large.

  Back in University Avenue at last, Suu “played piano a bit. No bath. Said she must tune piano and play again. Bedtime remark: If my feet are dirty, they’re dirty, so what? Said that now she was back in Rangoon she would rest. I very much doubt it, and told her so.”

  6

  HER FATHER’S BLOOD

  ON March 23, 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi turned to Ma Thanegi and said with a wan smile, “I must admit, Thanegi, that I am a bit tired.” “I said,” her friend wrote in her diary, “that must be a gross understatement.”

  Things were happening so fast: good things, bad things, terrible things. On that very day, for example, Min Ko Naing, the third-year Rangoon University Botany major who had become the charismatic leader of the militant students, was arrested. Five days earlier Aung Gyi, the former general and crony of Ne Win who for a couple of months at the end of 1988 had shared the leadership of the National League for Democracy before being expelled, had renewed his attacks. In a letter released internationally by his lawyers, the regime’s former critic repeated his earlier accusation that “eight above-ground communists . . . are dominating in the leading positions of the League,” and claimed that Suu and her allies in the party “lied” when they said the ex-general had resigned voluntarily from the party.1 He maintained that they had expelled him, and had not followed “the provisions of the party constitution” when they did so. The man they now suspected of having cut a deal with SLORC was determined to give the party as much trouble as he could.

  It was pressure they really did not need. Thrown together in haste, the NLD had no clear ideology. Some of the founding members had left-wing backgrounds, as Aung Gyi alleged—the intellectuals, people like the veteran opposition journalist Win Tin and his protégé Daw Myint Myint Khin, the leading lawyer—though there has never been any evidence that the party was subjected to “entrist” attack by communists. Then there were the former senior army officers who had long ago fallen out with Ne Win, biding their time for years to take revenge, who were steeped in the conventional, conservative values of the armed forces. In any mature democracy, the intellectuals and the old soldiers would have belonged to different parties. Within the NLD they always made awkward bedfellows.

  Then, most disruptingly of all, there was the yeast of the movement, the students who had launched the revolution one year before, who had paid for it by the thousands with their lives in August and September and who now provided the movement with its marshals and bodyguards and poor bloody infantry. Many thousands of them had escaped to border areas after September 18th and were now training in guerrilla warfare with the regime’s ethnic enemies. Inevitably, many of those who remained inside the country were full of sympathy for their vanished comrades, and wanted Suu and the NLD to follow the hardest line possible against the regime.

  But from the start of her involvement in the revolt, one thing had been very clear to Suu: Nonviolence was a must. She had expressed it on the very day of the crackdown, September 18th, remonstrating with the students in her house not to try to meet the army ranged outside the gate with force. Partly it was Gandhi, partly it was Buddha, but it was also common sense. The military regime had decided to treat the democracy movement as a military threat, the equivalent of the Karen or communist insurgencies on the border: The rebels were to be
gunned down, eliminated, exterminated. The moral advantage Suu possessed, like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., in other times and places, was that she and her followers would never meet violence with violence. This was immensely difficult to sustain in a movement boiling with rage, grief and resentment. Already, in the past months, rebels had resorted to drumhead trials and decapitations. If Suu had given even a hint that she endorsed violent tactics there would have been a surge of righteous delight within the movement—but subsequently SLORC would have found easy justification for any action it chose to take against it; while the party’s international prestige, that precious, invisible commodity that perhaps only the well-traveled, cosmopolitan Suu really understood and appreciated, would be forfeit.

  Yet at the same time Suu needed to keep the students on board. On February 22nd, Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary, “The NLD youth have been in a ferment for days. They want to form a separate party because they say they need freedom of movement. Ma Ma and the Central Executive Committee promised them more freedom but they want a separate and perhaps in their minds a more powerful status . . .” With fierce arguments—one of the students “burst into protest” after Suu shouted at him—and by adroit use of her own prestige she had succeeded in talking them out of splitting away. But it was hard going. “I don’t believe in armed struggle,” she told a journalist during these difficult days, “but I sympathize with the students who are engaged in armed struggle.”2 That was the tightrope she had to walk.

  But then there was the good news. Despite all the official harassment, Suu and her colleagues were continuing to travel, and everywhere they went tens of thousands of new members flocked to the party: By the spring of 1989, press estimates of membership ran as high as three million, in a total population of around fifty million.3 The regime was sticking to its promise to hold elections: At the beginning of March it had published the election law, though Colonel Khin Nyunt, the intelligence chief, continued to be evasive about the date, insisting that three conditions would have to be met—the restoration of law and order, regularization of public transport and an improvement in living standards—before they could be scheduled.

  And if international opinion was to be a crucial factor in the respective strengths of the two sides—and the army’s deliberate shooting of foreign photographers during September’s atrocities suggested that the regime was acutely aware of and anxious about its international image—things were looking up. Suu, despite her strange name and the obscurity of her country, was beginning to make her mark.

  Terry McCarthy of the Independent had got on friendly terms with her back in September, and his paper had scooped the world with an important article she wrote the same month. But the first sign that she was beginning to attract wider attention came in January.

  Steven Erlanger of the New York Times had first introduced American readers to Suu on January 9, 1989: “the charismatic forty-two-year-old daughter of the country’s independence leader,” he wrote, “symbolized” the NLD. He reported:

  Two weeks ago, after only her second political trip outside Rangoon, to Moulmein in Mon state, thirteen local organizers of her party were arrested. Before the visit, the populace was ordered by loudspeaker not to come into the street to see Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, not to cheer, give her flowers or shout the traditional Burmese “good health.” The warnings proved to be futile, however, as large crowds gathered and inundated her with blossoms.

  “The authorities are still trying to deceive themselves,” Suu told Erlanger when he visited her at home. “If they’re able to face the truth, they must know that this is a great upsurge of popular feeling against an oppressive regime. Yet they keep going on about a communist conspiracy. There is no such thing. The utter lack of confidence in the authorities is very sad. But it is a reflection of how badly people have been treated. Once the waters of a revolution start flowing, you can’t push them back for ever . . .”

  Two days later Erlanger returned to the subject in the long New York Times piece that probably did more than anything else to put her on the world map.4 “She gave the impression of a sensible politician,” he wrote, “articulate and straightforward.” If that was a little patronizing, by the end of the piece he was a signed-up fan. She was “charismatic, decisive, altogether admirable,” he gushed, “but also very lucky.” How so? He quoted an “adviser” to Suu pointing out that “everyone talks about democracy, but this is Asia, and what many people think of her has little to do with democracy. It’s like Benazir Bhutto or Corazon Aquino.”

  Suu laughed at the remark, he said. “I’ve always accepted that,” she replied. “I don’t pretend that I don’t owe my position in Burmese politics to my father . . . I’m doing this for my father. I’m quite happy that they see me as my father’s daughter. My only concern is that I prove worthy of him.”

  Suu seemed to understand well, Erlanger wrote, that “Burma’s military must be preserved as a united institution if the country is to achieve democracy of any sort.”

  She told him, “I know a split army is against the interests of the nation. In the end we need their cooperation to get where we want, so the people can get what they want with the least amount of suffering. We just want what my father wanted: a professional army that understands that a really honorable army doesn’t engage in politics.” She was to remind people in many different forums that her father had set his nation a fine example when he resigned his army commission—from the army he himself had founded—to fight independent Burma’s first general election, refusing even to take his army pension.

  “I have a rapport with the army,” she told Erlanger, “I was brought up to regard them as friends. So I can’t feel the same sort of hostility to them that the people now feel. And while I understand this anger, I find it very, very sad.”

  She explained how her involvement in politics had in the end been inescapable. “I obviously had to think about it,” she said, “but my instinct was, ‘this is not a time when anyone who cares can stay out.’ As my father’s daughter, I felt I had a duty to get involved.” The decision was a long time coming: For the first four months after arriving in the country, she told Erlanger, even after Michael joined her from England, she slept alongside her mother in hospital. But with her growing political commitments, that became impossible—which was “the only thing,” she said, that made her wonder if she was making the right choice. “But I’m sure this is what [my mother] would have wanted,” she said. She recalled her mother’s iron self-discipline after hearing that Suu’s younger brother had died in a drowning accident in a pond at the family home. “She stayed and finished her work,” she said.

  That difficult memory brought her round inevitably to the subject she has veered away from in every interview since, and which has long provided fuel of various sorts to her enemies: her commitment to her own family, in particular to her sons Alex and Kim. “Obviously you have to put the family second,” she said. “But the kids are at an important age. Really families need to be together all the time.” She paused, then said, “. . . My mother was very ill,” and here a tear ran down her cheek, “it was important to be here with her.”

  It was the conundrum in which she was caught. Her bond to her mother had brought her running across the world to nurse her. But now a family bond which was even more commanding—the care and nurture she owed her sons, both at crucial, tender ages—had been cast off—in favor of what?

  As Ma Thanegi’s diaries reveal, Suu did harbor doubts in those early days—though if she shared with her friend the agony she felt in being separated from her family, Ma Thanegi, writing the diary for Michael’s consumption, was tactful enough to keep it to herself. But the only way to deal with doubt, if you did not intend to surrender to it, was to live your new commitment to the full, holding nothing back at all. The most terrifying test was yet to come.

  *

  The day after Suu’s rare confession that she felt tired they were off again, once more to the Irrawaddy Delta, which drew t
hem as a flame draws a moth throughout the early months of 1989. Here, in the sodden hinterland of the capital, the expectant crowds were huge—but matched by a fierceness of repression seen nowhere else in the country.

  Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary,

  March 24, left Rangoon 6 AM by boat . . . At Htan Manaing village had to eat lunch in five minutes because someone said he had already told the abbot of the monastery that we were coming and there was no time to waste. Then on to Wa Balauk Thauk village in small boats, along streams winding through swamp-like jungle country, very much like the Vietcong country we have seen in movies. Ma Ma said how Kim would love it.

  Reached Kim Yang Gaung in evening but no one came out of their houses. The whole place deserted, people peeping from deep inside darkened huts, only a few dogs going about their business. Learned that a local man who was democratic-minded was shot dead through forehead by army sergeant or corporal one week ago.

  From there a long cart ride to Let Khote Kon. Easier to have gone on by boat but one of the NLD organizers felt we should visit that place and he was right. Ma Ma made speech in compound of a dainty little old lady named Ma Yin Nu. A very big crowd. I gave Ma Yin Nu a photo of Ma Ma . . .

  Equally long cart ride back to boat, though it felt longer. Soon it became very dark. We never saw such large stars. As usual I pestered Ma Ma, telling her the names of my favorites. Halfway along our cart met a bunch of armed soldiers, five or six, who rudely called out to us, asking who we were, where we were going etc. There were about six carts in our caravan, our boys were traveling behind us but immediately they brought their cart up and parked it between us and the soldiers . . .

  Back on boat at 8:30 PM and found out that we couldn’t leave because it was overloaded with people—NLD people from the villages we had visited had come along for the ride. Damn. And the tide was going out. Our luggage in Kunchangon where we thought we would stay the night. We slept on moored boat, one corner partitioned off with two mosquito nets where Ma Ma and I curled up unwashed.