by Peter Popham
SLORC decided to pretend that nothing had happened in the intervening year. On July 16th, reverting to the mode of icy protocol last glimpsed on the eve of Daw Khin Kyi’s funeral, they sent round an invitation to University Avenue, politely requesting Aung San Suu Kyi’s presence at the Martyrs’ Mausoleum, near the Shwedagon, for the usual annual event. Also included in the invitation was U Soe Tint, an old friend of Suu’s family, the principal of Rangoon’s State School of Fine Arts and Daw Khin Kyi’s regular escort at the event in years past.
The leaders of Suu’s party convened to consider the invitation. “After CEC meeting,” wrote Ma Thanegi, “Ma Suu decides she will not attend. She will march with her followers later, after the official ceremony, when the mausoleum is opened to the public.” She was sticking to the party’s plan, come what may. “NLD was quite sure it could control the masses—but SLORC almost accused NLD of planning a mass revolt,” Ma Thanegi wrote. One Burmese journalist, a veteran stringer for Agence France-Presse called U Eddie Thwin, desperately tried to obtain the regime’s assurances that it would not slaughter the marchers as long as they remained peaceful. “He was at the daily press conferences of SLORC and kept asking questions to find out if we would be safe if we simply marched and did nothing else.” After great persistence he was rewarded with a reply in the affirmative. “Finally he got the reassurance, I think on the evening of 18th,” she wrote. “He called me and I told Ma Suu about it.”
But at almost the same moment SLORC sent army trucks with loudspeakers round the city to send out a very different message. There was to be no marching: People were free to pay their respects to the nation’s martyrs on July 19th as usual, but only in ones and twos. A new martial law decree, number 2/89, laid down that any groups approaching the mausoleum consisting of more than five persons would be subject to three years’ imprisonment, life imprisonment, or death, sentences that could be imposed by army officers on the spot, with no need for a court hearing.
That evening, too, Burma’s brief experiment with glasnost came to an abrupt end. The last accredited foreign correspondent to leave Rangoon was Reuters reporter David Storey—perhaps the first and last correspondent to be deported from the country despite having his visa in order. “I was picked up at my hotel at night on the 18th, after curfew, although I had a valid journalist visa,” he recalled. “I was treated firmly but politely and it was clear that they did not want any journalist to cover the events that followed. I was taken to the airport in a jeep, guarded by a section of the troops, and had to spend the night on a cot on the floor in the departure lounge. The following morning I was put on the first flight to Bangkok.”16
So subscribers to the Reuters wire service were not to learn what happened late on the evening of July 18th: The thousands of fresh troops rumbling into the city, including battalions that had been used to crush the protests the previous August; the road blocks set up on main roads and the barbed wire stretched across them; the hundreds of what Military Intelligence deemed to be troublemakers picked up; the particularly ugly detail of the city’s hospitals being told to prepare for an influx of casualties. Telephone and telex lines to the outside world were cut, and Burma went back into its shell.
*
It was at dawn on Wednesday, July 19th, Martyrs’ Day, that Suu and her colleagues learned of the army’s preparations.
“I arrived at Ma Suu’s home around 7:30 am,” Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary. “By tradition a food offering for monks took place at the party’s headquarters at dawn on the 19th of every month. Present at the offering was a party member called Soon Kyway who had arrived on foot from Tharkayta, a satellite town. She told Daw Aung San Suu Kyi that she saw many checkpoints on the streets and feared for Ma Suu’s safety. Others, too, urged Suu to reconsider her plans.”
The dreadful massacres of September 18th and 19th, 1988, which had also been preceded by army warnings, were still a garish memory. There was no reason to suppose the army would behave any differently this time.
“Daw Aung San Suu Kyi then decided she would not march out,” Ma Thanegi went on. “She wrote out a message, which she had someone type up on wax duplicating paper, saying that in order to protest people must stay home and boycott the ceremony. She signed it, then hundreds of copies were printed and people sent off immediately to distribute them all over town.” Explaining the decision, Suu told her party colleagues, “We do not want to lead our people straight into a killing field.”
Before the age of Facebook it was not simple to call off a major rally at the last moment. And, anyway, after days of feverish preparation, many students were unwilling to fall into line.
“Thousands of students disregarded Suu’s message,” Ma Thanegi wrote. “For days now they had been hyped up over the march. They did not meet at the football field as planned but marched out from their own meeting places.”
The army stopped them from approaching the mausoleum. “Many beaten up with batons and many thrown in jail,” she wrote. “All through the morning we got news of students being chased and beaten up on their way to the mausoleum.”
A surprising number succeeded in evading arrest. “About 10:30 AM Moe Hein came running to Ma Suu’s house to tell her about how many had managed to escape from the army by running away. Her only comment was, ‘Why did they run? Why didn’t they sit and take it?’ before stalking off into her office. I thought, she’s thinking about Gandhi and the salt march.”
No deaths were reported on July 19, 1989—in contrast to the thousands massacred exactly ten months earlier. Suu’s hastily duplicated flyer had helped to avert a bloodbath. But the real confrontation still lay ahead.
*
Nobody could be sure what was going to happen next, but it was clear that it would be nothing good: The rift between the two sides had gone too far to be mended. Many people in the movement were already in prison. The rest would not have long to wait.
“The next day Aung Aung [Suu’s head of security] called me very early,” wrote Ma Thanegi, “saying it was not wise to come, things looked bad. I said in that case I should be there.
“When I got to the house, Ma Suu told me that the previous night she could not sleep until she had decided that she should be arrested.” If that was to be the fate of her colleagues, Suu was determined that she would share it. “Then, she had a good sleep and she had just told Aung Aung to call the local authorities to tell them to come and arrest her [. . .] The party’s Central Executive Committee arrived for a meeting around 9 AM and by 9:30 the compound was surrounded by troops and no one was allowed in or out. I heard that U Nu, Burma’s first democratic prime minister, came to the gate in his car but was turned away by the soldiers.” An inveterate opportunist, the man who a year before had insisted that he was still the legitimate prime minister had turned up wearing a rice farmer’s bamboo hat, the NLD’s electoral symbol.
Into this moment of high drama stumbled Suu’s two sons, visiting their mother for the first time since Christmas—without their father, who had had to stay behind in Scotland where his own father had just died. They brought a surreal air of boyish normality with them. “Ma Suu had a lunch meeting with the CEC,” wrote Ma Thanegi, “while I ate with Kim and Alexander. I kept Kim company, playing Monopoly with him.” It was the family’s favorite game, and had been the occasion for Suu and Michael’s rare clashes of temper (for which reason they had given up playing).
“The army allowed the CEC to leave around 2 pm,” she went on, “and after that we sat around chatting while some of the boys [the student bodyguards] took naps.” The surreal mood persisted; a perverse, infectious mood of gaiety stole up on them. “We all agreed that Suu would not be put under house arrest,” Ma Thanegi recalled, “as people might march up and rescue her.” Nonetheless, that Suu would be arrested was now taken for granted.
We wondered where she would be taken to. No one seemed at all worried; we chatted amiably and cheerfully, cracking jokes. Suu asked us who would stay with her and everyone said t
hey would. I said I would, I only needed to have my art materials brought in for me.
Around 4 PM an army officer came to the gate and asked permission to see her. We all walked out to the gate, Ma Suu and I first dabbing on some perfume which I had with me in my holdall. We said to each other that we refused to be arrested without French perfume.
She and her sons were escorted into the house and the rest of us into the large bamboo shed at the end of the garden used for classes and meetings. We sat around, and one MI asked Ko Myint Swe to make a list of who would like to stay in the house. He did so, but we knew that was not going to happen. It grew dark; we could see moving bright lights in the house and knew they were taking videos.
We were then herded out onto two large trucks parked near the front of the house. I went inside to take my bag of clothes that I keep under my desk, and my holdall. Ma Suu ran to fetch lavender soap and a large tube of toothpaste for me plus her expensive leather sandals which she said were very good for trekking. I told her I doubted if I would be walking anywhere but she insisted. We hugged and told each other to take care. Neither of us had a look of sadness, despair, or fear on our faces.
Ma Thanegi and her colleagues were taken to prison. Aung San Suu Kyi was put under house arrest for “endangering the state,” Section 10(b) of the penal code.
Nine months later, despite the fact that all its senior leaders were under lock and key, the NLD won the general election by a crushing majority, gaining 392 of parliament’s 485 seats. Overall, parties opposed to SLORC and army rule won more than 94 percent of the seats.
But Suu remained in detention, and the army remained in power.
She was not to emerge for nearly six years.
PART THREE
THE WIDE WORLD
1
GRIEF OF A CHILD
BUDDHISM teaches that nothing is permanent, nothing is fixed, all is in flux. If Aung San Suu Kyi had metamorphosed within a year from an Oxford housewife into her nation’s longed-for leader but was now a prisoner in her family home, her earliest days were no less mercurial. Raised the child of the most honored family in the country, she had been born a fugitive.
A photograph in Suu’s short biography of Aung San shows her father as Minister for War in Japan’s puppet Burma government in 1943. Shaven bullet head, tunic tight on the Adam’s apple, lower lip thrust out, what one would have to call a fanatical gleam in his eye: a model servant of the God-Emperor.
Yet the picture is misleading: Like his colleagues in the Burma National Army, which he had founded, Aung San was already discovering that, as one of his followers put it, “If the British sucked our blood, the Japanese ground our bones.”1 “He became more and more disillusioned with the Japanese,” wrote William Slim, commander of the Allied Fourteenth Army. “Early in 1943 we got news . . . that Aung San’s feelings were changing. On August 1, 1944, [as the Japanese and the British were still fighting it out for control of central Burma] he was bold enough to speak publicly with contempt of the Japanese brand of independence, and it was clear that, if they did not soon liquidate him, he might prove useful to us.”2
“Liquidation” was a lively danger, even though Japanese resistance to the Allied counterattack was rapidly disintegrating. Then in March 1945 Aung San’s Burma National Army (BNA) defected to the Allied side, surprising and killing some Japanese officers, and Slim responded by providing Aung San with arms and supplies and bringing his small but useful force into the Allied scheme.
The collaboration seemed to be working when, on May 16, 1945, with the aplomb he showed all his life, Aung San presented himself to Slim in person. There followed an interview so extraordinary that Slim felt it worth recording verbatim in his memoirs. He wrote:
The arrival of Aung San, dressed in the near-Japanese uniform of a Major General, complete with sword, startled one or two of my staff. However, he behaved with the utmost courtesy, and so, I hope, did we. He was a short, well-built, active man in early middle age, neat and soldierly in appearance, with regular Burmese features in a face that could be an impassive mask or light up with intelligence and humor. I found he spoke good English . . .
At our first interview, Aung San began to take rather a high hand. He was, he said, the representative of the Provisional Government of Burma, which had been set up by the people of Burma through the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League . . . He was an Allied commander, who was prepared to cooperate with me, and demanded the status of an Allied and not subordinate commander.3
Slim’s eyes were surely widening in amazement. “I told him that I had no idea what the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League was or represented . . . I pointed out that he was in no position to take the line he had. I did not need his forces; I was destroying the Japanese quite nicely without their help, and could continue to do so . . .” He went on to remind Aung San that he was wanted on a civil murder charge, for which there were witnesses, and that Slim was being urged to put him on trial: During Aung San’s progress through southern Burma with the Japanese in 1942, it was alleged that he had personally executed a village headman he accused of betrayal. “Don’t you think you are taking considerable risks in coming here and taking this attitude?” he demanded with some heat.
“No,” Aung San replied.
*
While Aung San in newly liberated Rangoon was giving a textbook demonstration of chutzpah, dozens of miles to the west, taking refuge in the simple, huddled villages of the Irrawaddy Delta, his wife Ma Khin Kyi was heavily pregnant. Protected by five soldiers in Aung San’s Burma National Army, she, her sister and her two toddlers had fled Rangoon in March, all disguised as poor civilians, as her husband prepared to defect to the Allies: If any Japanese forces remaining in the city had identified her and her children, their revenge could have been terrible. There, on June 19, 1945, in the tiny village of Hmway Saung, Aung San Suu Kyi—her name, she explains, means “strange collection of bright victories”—was born.
Aung San’s improbable gambit with Slim succeeded: He won his trust, and even his affection. He had had the temerity to claim equality with the Allied army commander despite being a Japanese collaborator who was wanted for murder “because you are a British officer” as he put it, a reply that made Slim laugh. Aung San had a shrewd idea that the Allies would want to make use of his force; he also showed remarkable insight into British psychology. Slim wrote:
He went on to say that, at first, he had hoped the Japanese would give real independence to Burma. When he found they would not, but were tightening the bonds on his people, he had, relying on our promises, turned to us as a better hope. “Go on, Aung San,” I said. “You only come to us because you see we are winning!’
“It wouldn’t be much good coming to you if you weren’t, would it?” he replied, simply.
. . . I felt he had scored again, and I liked his honesty. In fact I was beginning to like Aung San.4
With the shattered and scattered remnant of the Japanese Army trying to flee east into Thailand, the Allied forces aided by the BIA had retaken Rangoon without a fight, entering the city in the first days of May. And now with charm, daring and exquisite timing, Aung San had established himself in the good books of Burma’s newly returned masters—after nearly four years fighting for the other side. Soon after Suu’s birth he had a note hand-delivered to his wife: All the Japanese were gone and the city was again at peace. The family was reunited in Rangoon.
The home in which Aung San Suu Kyi started life was 25 Tower Lane, a large but plainly decorated villa in its own grounds, built some fifteen or twenty years before for a Chinese or Indian merchant, located in the salubrious suburbs of the capital north of the commercial center and a mile from the Shwedagon pagoda. Here Suu learned to crawl, then to walk, then to read; she discovered the meaning of friendship and of physical courage and also—twice before the age of nine—the meaning of grief.
For many years it was possible to explore Suu’s first home, because after the family moved out, in 1953,
it became the Bogyoke Aung San Museum. But the slow and surreptitious unhitching of the regime from the person of Aung San, described in the previous chapter and which began with the scandal of the “Aung San Suu Kyi” One Kyat Note, has now reached its apogee: The house is still standing, just, but when I visited in 2010 I was waved away by a man in the grounds; the family in residence took shelter indoors to avoid being filmed. The garden is overgrown and the house is in the last stages of disrepair. A man in the tea shop nearby told me it opens only once a year, on July 19th, Martyrs’ Day—the last remaining vestige of the national cult.
Suu came to consciousness in what must have been a warm, bustling, loving, stimulating home. Her brothers Aung San Oo, the eldest, and Aung San Lin, were aged two and one respectively when she was born. A second daughter, Aung San Chit, was born subsequently but died after only a few days.
Tower Lane was the first, proper, permanent home the family had enjoyed, following a series of temporary lodgings. Peace had come; independence was surely on the way, and Aung San, the undisputed leader of the nation, who soon resigned his commission in the army to concentrate on politics, would be a shoo-in for prime minister. Important visitors thronged in and out, debating the issues of the moment with Aung San in the big reception room downstairs. But Suu’s mother was no purdah wife, lurking deep indoors polishing the silver: Ma Khin Kyi was articulate, well-educated and strong-willed, heir to the Burmese tradition of robust, emancipated women. The domestic tasks were taken care of by Indian Christians, who continued to work for the family for decades.
Aung San must have been a fleeting presence in the family during these feverish days, the broadly smiling but distracted man who flew out to his chauffeured car in the mornings, laden with files and burst back into the house in the middle of the day for a high-speed family lunch; till late at night the children in their beds upstairs—the eldest, Aung San Oo, was only four when Aung San died—would have sniffed the cheroot smoke of his important guests and heard the urgent, impassioned murmuring of adult voices as the nation’s future was discussed and dissected downstairs by the Burmese men in whose hands it would shortly repose.