The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  Robin Christopher, who later became a diplomat, said of his relationship with Suu, “It wasn’t a romance. It was an utterly genuine friendship. But we were very close as friends—she came and spent Christmas with my family, down in Sussex. It was a lovely friendship. We worked together mornings and afternoons and very often had lunch together. I’d see her virtually every day.”15 Suu was close enough to have, Christopher said, “no inhibition about criticizing my choice of girlfriends.” But that did not, it appears, mask an ambition to displace them.

  In the same summer that she discovered the joy of cycling, Suu had a very different experience which, in the longer perspective of her life, was to be much more significant.

  A vitally important figure in Suu’s life, almost a guardian angel and certainly a role model, was a middle-aged Burmese woman called Dora Than É. A striking beauty in her youth, and an acclaimed singer, she became nationally famous in the 1930s as one of Burma’s first recording stars. When Aung San came to London to negotiate independence, Ma Than É had become friendly with him, and at his request sang at the farewell reception thrown by the Burmese party in England. Also at his request she selected and purchased on his behalf souvenirs for him to take home to Rangoon. When she met Suu many years later she was pleased to learn that the large doll she had chosen for her was still in good shape.

  After marrying an Austrian documentary film-maker, Ma Than É moved to Europe, and in the second half of her career had a succession of jobs with the United Nations. The first was in Delhi, where she managed the UN Information Center and became close to Daw Khin Kyi and her family. Then she was transferred to newly independent Algeria, where she set up a similar center in the capital.

  She was living in Algiers while Suu was at Oxford, and Suu flew out to meet her there in the summer of 1965, arriving a few days after President Ahmed Ben Bella had been ousted from power in a bloodless coup. The authoritarian backlash to colonial rule that had occurred in Burma after Suu and her mother moved to India was now unfolding before her eyes among the date palms and sand dunes of the Mahgreb. Suu had just turned twenty, and if the dusty texts on politics which she was required to read at Oxford did not inspire her, the striving and suffering she saw all around her in Algiers were a different matter. Here was the politics of liberation, being enacted before her eyes in all its passion and difficulty. For the first time in her life her sympathies and energies were fully engaged, however briefly, as a participant in the sort of struggle that she was to find waiting for her in Burma twenty-three years later.

  Suu “was much more interested in getting to meet Algerians and in what was happening in the country than in the many parties to which she was invited,” Ma Than É wrote later. “We got in touch with an Algerian organization which ran several projects to help those affected by their long struggle.”16 Volunteers were needed to help build houses for the widows of freedom fighters, she learned. Suu joined other volunteers from around Europe and North Africa laboring on the project at a large camp and stuck with it for several weeks.

  Back at Oxford, her student life resumed. But it was not working out well. She was committed to a course of study that did not really interest her, imposed by her mother. “She didn’t want to be doing PPE,” said Ann Pasternak Slater, “she tried to change, she wanted to do Forestry, which would have been useful for Burma, and the stupid Oxford authorities wouldn’t allow her.”17 Then she wanted to do English, which she would have loved and which (Pasternak Slater is sure) she would have got “a perfectly good Second for,” but they wouldn’t allow that, either. In the end she obtained a third-class degree, which is perhaps an indication of the extent to which she had lost interest in the subject: Her friends are in no doubt that she could have done much better. (As she told Alan Clements many years later, “I would study hard only when I liked the teacher or the subject.”)

  But she was also living and making new friends, and towards the end of her second year she fell in love. “She got to know a young Pakistani student by the name of Tariq Hyder, who went on to join the Pakistani Foreign Service,” Shankar Acharya remembered. “He was in Queen’s College. We knew each other but were not chums.”18 Mr. Hyder, who recently retired after a distinguished ambassadorial career, and now writes on foreign affairs in the Pakistani press, declined to be interviewed for this book. As Suu has never spoken publicly about the affair, it is hard to know how much it meant to her; but it is clear that her affection for him lasted a considerable time, and that, at least in the end, he did not requite it. One university friend mentioned that she was still talking about him “at least a year after she left Oxford.”19

  Some of her Indian friends did not approve of Hyder.20 “He was a bit of a sleazeball,” said one. “Not a terribly nice guy. Let’s put it this way, we weren’t terribly happy that Suu was going around with him. He just didn’t come across as someone you’d want to be very friendly with.” Whether the antipathy was partly a reflection of the ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan, who had fought their second war since independence in 1965, is not clear.

  A problem was slowly crystallising for Suu, and her lingering and unhappy love affair with Hyder points it up: Her path ahead was by no means clear. For her friends from the civil service elite of the subcontinent, by contrast, it was plain sailing. The careers of two of them are exemplary.

  After obtaining a good degree at Oxford, Shankar Acharya went on to do a PhD at Harvard, which led to an important post at the World Bank. Eleven years later he returned to Delhi, where at the climax of his career he was appointed chief economic adviser to the government—one of the most important civil service jobs in the country. Malavika Karlekar returned to India after graduating from St. Hugh’s, where she took up important university positions and edited the Indian Journal of Gender Studies. Both of them married Indians who had shared their experience of study in Britain. Back home they slotted neatly into the stimulating and comfortable life of the Indian ruling class.

  For other friends like Ann Pasternak Slater the future was even easier to map out. Born and raised in Oxford, she married a fellow student, Craig Raine, who went on to become one of Britain’s best-known contemporary poets. Both she and Raine became dons at the university, and today they still live in the house where Ann grew up, five minutes’ walk from St. Hugh’s.

  But no such straightforward course presented itself to Suu. She went back to Rangoon more than once during her undergraduate years, and given her age and beauty and bloodline there was great excitement about finding her a suitable mate. But whether because of Mr. Hyder or for other reasons, the chemistry was not there.

  Her school friend Tin Tin was tangentially involved in one attempt. “She would discuss these things with me when she came to Burma,” she said.

  They were trying to make a match for her with someone from the university, I’m not going to mention names. Unfortunately he was a bad one, and I said, “Oh no, don’t think of marrying him, he’s an idiot!” His brother was in our class and he was quite intelligent, but a girl is supposed to marry someone older than herself and his elder brother was not so intelligent. I said, “You will be bored, you know,” and she said “Okay, okay,” because she wasn’t in love or anything. I said, “That’s my honest opinion but it’s entirely up to you . . .”21

  Suu was in full agreement.

  Compared to her friends at Oxford, the choices for Suu were both stark and unappetizing. Soon after coming to power Ne Win had begun closing down Burma’s links to the West, banishing the Ford Foundation and the British Council and other similar organizations, banning the teaching of English in schools, making it more and more difficult for Burmese to travel abroad and for foreigners to visit Burma—in every possible way turning the clock back a hundred years to what some sentimental nationalists conceived as the Golden Age of Burmese isolation, before the British turned up and blew the doors off. These policies led slowly and inexorably to the tensions that resulted in the uprising of 1988. But in the meantime the
y had a more immediate impact for the likes of Suu: They made a return home, after the richness of her experiences in India and England, deeply unappealing.

  Yet Burma was once again where the home was, if not the heart: In 1967, the year Suu graduated, Daw Khin Kyi decided to retire as ambassador to Delhi. She was not recalled to Rangoon, but the lack of sympathy between her and the regime made it more and more difficult for her to represent her country. On her return she was served with a tax bill for 40,000 kyats, even though serving diplomats, who were paid risibly small salaries, were exempt from tax. It was a typically petty act of vengeance by the dictator she had spurned.

  A diplomat to her fingertips, Daw Khin Kyi never spelled out the true reasons for her decision to retire, but it is likely that, in the developing policies of Ne Win, she saw the steady erosion and betrayal of her husband’s legacy. At the same time the ever more extreme political positions taken by her fugitive and estranged brother Than Tun, leader of the outlawed Burma Communist Party, under the influence of Beijing’s Cultural Revolution, may well have increased tensions further.

  The man who had made an economic success of the army’s first bite at power, from 1958 to 1960, was General Aung Gyi—the same Aung Gyi who was to become the first to go public with biting criticism of the regime in 1988, later briefly becoming Suu’s colleague at the head of her new party.

  Aung Gyi had been a subordinate of Ne Win’s in the 4th Burma Rifles during the war, and when the army seized power permanently in the coup of 1962 he was given the job of Minister of Industries, overseeing what was intended to be Burma’s rapid industrialization.22 A moderate socialist, he was in favor of keeping a private industrial and trade sector going in tandem with the nationalized industries.

  But Ne Win came increasingly under the influence of another of his former junior officers, Tin Pe, the so-called “Red Brigadier,” who favored a far more radical, communist-inspired approach to the economy. In 1963 the Revolutionary Council, which now ran the country, issued its answer to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, entitled The System of Correlation of Man and his Environment, “a mixture of Marxism, historical dialecticism and Buddhism” according to the historian Michael Charney, which spelled out the conditions for creating a socialist Buddhist paradise in the country—though, in deference to the Buddhist doctrine of anicca, impermanence, it was conceded that this would not be a final but only a provisional paradise.

  This document has baffled generations of Burma scholars and is usually described as an indigestible hodgepodge. But its principle message could not be plainer: It parrots the far-left truisms of the People’s Republic of China next door—for, as a famous Burmese maxim has it, “When China spits, Burma swims.”

  Charney summarizes the document’s thesis:

  The only reliable classes were those who contributed to the material needs of society, such as the peasants and the industrial workers . . . As these productive forces attempted to change the economic and social system, those whose greed was satisfied by the existing system oppressed the material and spiritual producers. This oppression was responsible for class antagonisms. To abolish these class antagonisms, the conditions that created them must first be abolished. Only then could a socialist society without exploitation be established . . .23

  With the publication of The System . . . the writing was on the wall for “capitalist road-ers” like Aung Gyi: Tin Pe’s economic notions gained more and more prestige, Aung Gyi’s various posts were stripped from him, and in June 1965, while Suu was laboring under the Algerian sun as a volunteer, he was arrested.

  The way was clear for Tin Pe to enact the sort of root-and-branch communist reforms that had already taken place in China, nationalizing the domestic rice market, the import and export trade and all private companies, from large to tiny: The bitter joke in Rangoon was that even the little noodle carts on the street were ripe for being taken over by the state. Burma’s course was set for economic disaster—though of course it did not look like that at the time. Two years later, thoroughly fed up, Daw Khin Kyi headed home from Delhi.

  On graduating, Suu could have rejoined her there. But given the way Burma’s academic world had been eviscerated, she would have had no prospect of capping her university studies with an appropriate academic career. Or she could have taken the even less attractive course of allowing a matchmaker to find her a suitable boy and buckling down to life as an Asian wife, in what was becoming an increasingly stagnant Asian backwater.

  Probably her mother hoped that she would follow one of these two courses. Instead she decided to do something completely different. She may well have encountered opposition: In a letter written years later, she indicates that her mother and brother considered her to be often “wayward” in her choices.24 But if that was the case now, Suu was grown-up enough to have few qualms about defying the formidable Daw Khin Kyi. And instead of going home she decided to follow the example of her beautiful and charismatic friend Ma Than É, the woman she came to describe as her “emergency aunt,” who despite her fame in Burma had left home and made a life abroad, and see what happened.

  4

  CHOICES

  SOME people know exactly where they are going in life, and go there; for others, life is more of a puzzle. Suu’s elder brother, Aung San Oo, who was studying electrical engineering at Imperial College in London while Suu was at Oxford—“he has all the angles of his father and none of the charm of his sister” was the tough verdict of a London acquaintance—was one of the former: He proceeded to a career and marriage (to a Burmese woman) in the United States with speed and dispatch, renouncing his Burmese citizenship in favor of American along the way.

  Suu’s estranged elder brother Aung San Oo at the Martyrs’ Memorial, Rangoon, with his wife Lei Lei Nwe Thein in July 2007.

  Aung San Suu Kyi however was one of the latter. Her puzzlement and difficulty can be sensed in photographs taken of her in those years. In one taken in her Delhi home in 1965 she stands beneath a photograph of her father in uniform. She is elegant in longyi and aingyi and already wears a flower in her hair, but her expression is quite blank; she is merely standing there, as requested. Five years later she attends a party at the home of the daughter of UN Secretary General U Thant in New York. It is quite a grand affair and Suu looks spectacular in a starched white aingyi with baggy sleeves; but while her hostess, Aye Aye Thant, beams at the camera with an animated expression, Suu’s gaze, pensive under powerful eyebrows and the famous fringe, is elsewhere, the expression on her full lips almost sulky. She was raised in privileged circumstances, at home in diplomatic enclaves and grand apartments, and she had spent three years in one of the world’s great universities. But this world, her blank expression seems to convey, is not my destiny. She was passing through, picking up clues as she went, but well aware that she was miles from her destination.

  Her Oxford friend Ann Pasternak Slater worried for her. “Fragmentary memories of that period lie like fanned-out photographs—some of them, indeed, real snaps from her letters,” she wrote. “Suu in London, head high in a green armchair, serious, sad, uncertain where to go, all determination and an unknown void to cross . . .”1

  She left Oxford and took her disappointing degree down to her guardians’ place in London, which had been her surrogate home since arriving in England. Lord and Lady Gore-Booth, as they now were, lived in a handsome Georgian house, 29 The Vale, off the King’s Road in Chelsea, in one of the most elegant and fashionable corners of London. Suu had a cozy self-contained flat there under the rafters, and was treated like one of the family.

  She found part-time work as a tutor, and for a spell also worked as an assistant to Hugh Tinker, a Burma scholar who happened to be a friend of the Gore-Booths. It was a useful connection and one that kept her in touch with events at home. But from the perspective of a career it was a way of treading water, no more.

  Pat Gore-Booth, now an elderly lady but still, at the time this book was being researched, deeply engaged in Burmese aff
airs, regards Suu almost as a daughter. “She called me Di Di,” she remembered in an interview with me at her home in London—the affectionate Indian term for “aunty.” “She was a great adapter, and became a full member of the family. She was always the first to offer to wash up, she was very interested in cooking . . . She was a very dutiful honorary daughter, she respected Paul very much for his supposed wisdom, his mixture of Irish whimsy and Yorkshire grit. She bore her third-class degree very well—at home she supervised the kids’ homework, did the crossword . . . She still retained all the traditional graces of her race and yet she was full of charm and fun and very intelligent.”2

  The traditional good manners so essential in Burma can sometimes convey an impression of servility when translated to the West, and the way some of her English acquaintances describe her, Suu runs the risk of coming across as too good to be true. Yet as Ann Pasternak Slater and her other Oxford friends found out, she had a tongue in her head when required, and no inhibitions about using it. When Suu’s brother visited her at her guardians’ home, the froideur between the siblings was palpable. “Why were her relations with her brother so bad?” Pat Gore-Booth mused. “Perhaps he was envious of her charm. His English was not nearly as good as hers. They were polite with each other but no more than that.”

  It was in this period that Suu quietly burned whatever bridges may have remained between her and Burma’s military regime. In addition to being a murderous tyrant, Ne Win was also a hypocrite. He imposed a joyless regime on his people yet at the same time he continued to indulge in the pleasures he had forbidden at home on his frequent trips abroad. He married three times, salted away a considerable fortune in Swiss banks, relaxed in Austrian and German spas, went to the races at Ascot and owned several fine homes abroad, including one in Wimbledon.