The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  But harsher voices insisted on ratcheting up the pressure, and they were to prevail.

  *

  The party set about undermining the regime at the most fundamental level: by hijacking the calendar. March 27th was Armed Forces Day, the annual occasion for a Kremlin-style parade of military hardware through the center of Rangoon. This year it also marked General Ne Win’s return to the spotlight, his first public appearance since his explosive speech to the party the preceding July. But the NLD succeeded in stealing the show, despite Number One’s cameo: They told the world they were renaming the event Fascist Resistance Day—the name given it by Suu’s father—and making it the occasion for popular demonstrations against the “fascist” army. In the first major demonstrations since the September bloodbath, thousands of students took to the streets of Rangoon and Mandalay.

  Two weeks earlier the NLD had sprung another constitutional ambush on the regime by declaring March 13th Burma Human Rights Day—the first anniversary of the killing of student protester Maung Phone Maw, the outrage that precipitated the uprising. More new holidays were to be declared as the year wore on. Every nation is defined by the holidays it marks; it is the way the story of the nation punctuates the passage of time. By proclaiming these new or revived national holidays, the NLD tried to wrest that function away from the regime, further weakening its legitimacy.

  Then there was the question of religion. As her threat to the regime increased, Suu’s enemies continued to claim that she was surrounded by communists. In Burma’s simplified political landscape, the opposite of a communist was a Buddhist, and the best way to prove that your enemies lied was to play up your piety. In fact this came easily to the NLD. Everywhere they went the monks provided hospitality. They also accepted Suu’s alms and turned out in sizeable numbers to listen to her speeches, steadily building a spirit of fraternity and complicity between the party and the sangha.

  The monks had been central to the legitimacy of the Burmese kings: The palace sustained the sangha in material ways, paying for the building and maintenance of their pagodas and monasteries; conversely the sangha, by receiving alms from the court and performing ceremonies and rites at the king’s behest, endorsed his right to rule. That was the rock on which the pre-modern Burmese state rested.

  The destruction of the monarchy by the British smashed that symbiotic, sanctified model of governance—which is the main reason the monks were in the vanguard of protest throughout the colonial period. Burma’s first prime minister, the pious U Nu, had strongly revived the bond with the monks—but the self-consciously “modernizing” Ne Win had spurned it as an anachronism, leaving a fine vacuum for the NLD to occupy.

  Then there was the whole question of what democracy might involve. When SLORC had announced multiparty elections in September 1988, it seems to have been acting on two assumptions: One, that the mass of people would vote for the only party they had ever heard of, the BSPP, rebranded the National Unity Party (NUP); and two, that the votes of those that didn’t vote NUP would be so divided that they would have no weight. General Saw Maung, the regime’s new figurehead, promised that after the elections the army would return to barracks and have no further political role; and when he saw that 235 political parties had registered for the election, he must have congratulated himself on the success of his plan. Burma could emerge from this democracy charade with international esteem—and with the army still in charge behind the scenes, as before.

  But during Suu’s epic journeys in April and May 1989, that prospect began to change. The NLD began to consolidate its position, building bridges with other parties and ethnic groups that threatened this comfortable scenario. Aung San Suu Kyi, wrote Gustaaf Houtman, “had such success making alliances between many political and ethnic groups, much like her father . . . that it looked as if she had the ability to unify the opposition in a manner that would leave no political role” for the army.7

  On every front the army was getting squeezed. It was time for it to fight back.

  *

  For the regime, Aung San was now the problem. Fundamental to the creation of a modern Burmese identity in the preceding half century, he had now been hijacked by his daughter and her followers. Far from being a benign symbol of military rule, he was becoming the rallying cry of the revolution. It was time to unhitch Burma from Aung San. That this was an urgent necessity became clear from the One Kyat Note fiasco.

  Practically all currency notes in Burma since independence bore Aung San’s image—just as every town had its street and square named after him, every public office had its framed portrait of him, every schoolchild had his or her head full of his courage and wisdom. But when the regime introduced a newly designed one kyat note in 1989, the designer showed his anti-regime feelings in a very delicate manner.8

  The note was to bear a watermark with Aung San’s image—the usual high cheekbones, pursed lips and chilseled jaw of the national hero. But by subtly softening the lines of the jaw and making slight modifications to the nose, mouth and cheeks, the father’s image morphed into the likeness of his daughter.

  The note was printed and in circulation before this elegant act of subversion came to the regime’s notice: All around the country people hoarded the notes, whispered about them, and pointed out how the designer had also incorporated the figures 8/8/88, the date of the general strike, into his design of concentric petals on the watermark. As soon as the scandal was discovered the note was withdrawn from circulation—and from then on no Burmese banknotes ever bore Aung San’s image again.

  Nothing was said about it, there was no Moscow-style airbrushing of the past, but Aung San’s legacy began to fall into disrepair like an abandoned pagoda. The museums dedicated to the hero were no longer kept up. While Aung San Suu Kyi was attacked as a vassal of the colonialists and a sexual libertine whom her father would have disowned or killed, the museums in the village of Natmauk, in the restored house where he was born, and in the grand house at 25 Tower Lane, the family’s Rangoon home at the time of his death, were allowed to run down. Every year in the run-up to July 19th, Martyrs’ Day, the date of his assassination and the biggest national holiday of the Burmese year, Rangoon University professors used to fan out into the city’s schools to give lectures on the meaning and achievement of the hero’s life. But not this year, and not ever again.9

  So in the absence of the founding father, what did SLORC have to offer? It was a subject that was clearly preying on the generals’ minds—and on May 30th, less than a week after Suu’s return from the far north, they hit on something original.

  On that date they set up a twenty-one-member “Commission of Enquiry into the True Naming of Myanmar Names.”10 Though notionally a scholarly body, all but four of its members were from the military. If Aung San had forged an identity for the nation in the chaos of the Second World War, the challenge for the generals was to go much further back—by building a bridge to the line of kings that the British had deposed.

  All over South Asia the postcolonial era has seen the rejection of names associated with the imperialists: Ceylon became Sri Lanka, “Holy Lanka,” Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, Calcutta Kolkata and so on. Often these changes were promoted by populist tub-thumpers, but the governments that enacted them were democratic ones, and the decision followed a period of study and debate.

  Not so in Burma: There was no consultation, no attempt to test the people’s mood on the subject—and precious little time for the commission to do its work. Less than three weeks after it was set up, the “Adaption of Expressions Law” came into force, changing Burma to Myanmar, Rangoon to Yangon and so on for every town and village in the country.

  The change made very little difference to Burmese people themselves: The words “Bama” and “Myanma” have both been used by Burmans for their country for centuries. The change was intended for international consumption: It was a way of saying that, far from being a transitional set-up as originally conceived, SLORC planned to stay in pow
er and had every right to do so because it was rooted in the ancient past, in the proud era of kings, long before the land was contaminated by the colonialists. It was a way to insist on international respect and recognition—and five days later, despite the rushed process, the UN (and the New York Times) duly recognized it.

  *

  All the while the repression of the democracy movement continued as hundreds more activists and protesters were locked away. By the end of June the number was said to be 2,000—by the end of July it had escalated to 6,000. The mood of confrontation was building rapidly.

  The question for Suu was, how to combat it? How to oblige the regime to stick to its promise of elections, ensure that they were free and fair, and then guarantee a handover of power?

  Yet in the increasingly frenzied atmosphere, that goal—which would have required the regime and the party to be on speaking terms—was lost sight of. Perhaps it was taken for granted that the elections would be a farce. Perhaps it was merely that the rapidly increasing rate of arrests, and the growing mood of mutual recrimination, made talks of any sort between the two sides out of the question.

  And so rather than moderating her side’s expectations, Suu chose this moment to up the ante further.

  As dialogue was impossible, this was a war in which slogans had become the ammunition. All over the country SLORC began erecting huge signs with Orwellian calls to discipline and patriotism; they dot Burma’s towns and cities to this day. The NLD retaliated during the water festival with their competition to produce the most pungent anti-regime slogans anyone could think up. Now, Suu announced, her party’s defiance of the regime would be enshrined in all its literature, in a permanent call to nonviolent resistance.11 Speaking on June 5th, she inaugurated what she called her party’s campaign of civil disobedience. The campaign’s slogan, exhorting the Burmese public to “defy as of duty every order and authority not agreed by the majority” would be printed in all the party’s literature starting the next day, June 6th. The right of the regime to command obedience would be denied at every turn.

  It was a move that some of her colleagues had resisted. The campaign, originally suggested by U Win Tin, the veteran anti-regime journalist on the party’s Central Executive Committee, was under discussion, Ma Thanegi remembers, but notes in her diary that “before it was decided on another CEC member called U Chan Aye presented a paper saying the NLD should instead try to work with SLORC. I heard that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was thinking about it. But then some of the students in the party asked her if she was afraid—and she discarded the idea of dialogue at once. It is very easy to push her buttons.”

  The civil disobedience campaign was a watershed for the party. After that, said Ma Thanegi, “Everyone knew it was going to be dangerous. Some students living in Ma Suu’s compound had monks chant a special mantra for the deceased over them, in preparation for sudden death. Some of them became monks or nuns for a few days.”

  Some people in the party’s office who did not want to face the consequences melted away, and quietly severed their ties with the party. “But,” said Ma Thanegi, “almost all of us around Daw Aung San Suu Kyi felt it would not be loyal to abandon her in the face of danger.”

  The regime’s reaction was furious and instantaneous: On June 6th they threatened action against any printers who followed the NLD’s instructions, and soon afterwards launched a countrywide blitz on NLD publications. A week later 800 printers and publishers were summoned to a compulsory meeting and warned unequivocally to toe the SLORC line. “Decisive action” would be taken, they were told, against any of them who “slandered” the junta or the army.

  Both sides were painting themselves into their respective corners. A military spokesman said martial law would remain in place even after elections had been held, and that it would not surrender power until a new constitution had been agreed by parliament. Suu countered by saying that the NLD could not participate in elections “until the question of the transfer of power is resolved.”

  Then, in a speech delivered on June 26th, Suu broke the taboo that had retained its force throughout this year of tumult: She attacked Number One by name, spelling out the charges which could be read between the lines of her address at Shwedagon.

  “General Ne Win,” she declared, “[who is] still widely believed to control Burma behind the scenes, was responsible . . . fashioning the military into a body answerable only to him . . . The opinion of all our people is that U Ne Win is still creating all the problems in this country.” He “caused this nation to suffer for twenty-six years,” she pursued, “and lowered the prestige of the armed forces.”12

  It was a breathtaking assault: the distillation of a lifetime of antipathy, dating back to the effective exiling of her mother when she was sent to be ambassador to India in 1960. Suu could not guess the consequences of these words, but she knew enough about their target to guess that they could be severe. This was the all-powerful dictator who had not hesitated to have civilian protesters murdered in their hundreds and thousands. And even trivial annoyances provoked him to wild, disproportionate violence. One of his several wives had deserted him for good after he hurled a heavy glass ashtray at her in a rage, injuring her. When the peace of his lakeside villa was disturbed by a Christmas party at a nearby hotel in 1975, he had personally stormed round with a platoon of soldiers and taken part in beating up and humiliating the guests and destroying the band’s instruments. When a European woman stood up to complain, he grabbed her party dress, ripped it down the front, and threw her back into her chair.13 And this was the man whom Suu now chose to seize by the horns.

  *

  In the same speech, Suu rolled her party’s siege engine up to the junta’s walls. She introduced Burma’s new calendar of martyrdom. The generals might demand that their country be called by a different name now, but if the NLD had its way they would have to swallow a raft of holidays to commemorate atrocities for which they were responsible: The people’s uprising of 8/8/88, the Saw Maung crackdown of September 18th; Martyrs’ Day, July 29th, with the list of martyrs brought up to date; and the most immediate, and the one aimed most precisely at Ne Win, the twenty-sixth anniversary, on July 7th, of the demolition by high explosives in 1962 of Rangoon University’s Student Union building with an unknown number of students inside, the event which had ushered in Burma’s authoritarian era. Each of these dates, Suu told the press conference, would be marked by mass demonstrations.

  What, besides reminding the world of how the army had treated its own citizens, would be the point of these demonstrations? For SLORC, which continued to believe, or claim to believe, that Aung San Suu Kyi was a puppet of the communists, it was as clear as day: This was the planned revolution. “They [the NLD] planned to start a mass uprising,” General Khin Nyunt, number two in SLORC, told a press conference in early August, “by inciting the people at Shwedagon pagoda as part of the confrontation campaign of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on July 19th, Martyrs’ Day. Should that instigation have failed, they planned to try again on the anniversary of the ‘Four-Eights’ [8/8/88]. Had the mass uprising taken place, they planned to garner more forces from within [the country] to oppose the government while from the outside the members of the Democratic Patriotic Army trained by the Communist Party of Burma would move in. They planned to move politically as well as militarily until an interim government was established.”

  There is no indication that the NLD had prepared such a plan; Suu’s commitment to nonviolence had been so consistent and was by now so well-known—and endorsed by the pacific and disciplined behavior of NLD rallies, even the huge ones—that a violent takeover with Suu at the head was literally unthinkable. “We don’t have any intention to seek a confrontation,” Suu insisted to the New York Times’ Steven Erlanger in a telephone interview. “We intend to carry on peacefully with our rallies. We do not want any trouble.”14 At a rally outside the Sule pagoda in downtown Rangoon on July 3rd, attended by more than 10,000 people, she urged SLORC to agree to hold ta
lks with opposition parties in order to “thrash out existing misunderstandings.”

  But there had never been much talking between the two sides. And this time the regime’s answer came not in words but deeds: the arrest the following day of Win Tin, the journalist who had been there at the creation and who was one of the most combative and articulate figures in the party. It was a blow that stunned his colleagues, Suu included, and from which the party struggled to recover. He was to remain in prison for nineteen years.

  More answers came within days. The army rolled back into town, sealing the university completely to prevent the gathering for the planned commemoration of the destruction of the Student Union building. And lest anyone question the need for that many troops to control a nonviolent movement, bombs started going off, one that same day at an oil refinery in Syriam, killing two refinery workers and badly injuring a third, a second on July 10th at Rangoon’s City Hall, killing three and injuring four. Three young NLD members were picked up and accused of the refinery bombing. “Now it is obvious who is behind the recent bombing,” said Khin Nyunt, “and plans to disrupt law and order.”15 The allegation, given the NLD’s nonviolent track record, was laughable—but menacing. As a foreign diplomat remarked, the bombings could be terrorism—or the work of agents provocateurs, providing the excuse for another crackdown.

  A bare week remained to Martyrs’ Day: The Burmese state’s founding rite was now embroiled in bitter recrimination. The aim of the ceremony was to recall those who had died for Burma’s independence and inspire the country with gratitude and patriotic pride; instead it now threatened to add yet more pages to the martyrs’ roll, and further stain the nation with blood and hatred.