by Peter Popham
At the weekends, Suu and Kim sometimes visited Noriko and Sadayoshi at their place in the countryside overlooking Lake Biwa, and during the months in Japan Noriko witnessed a transformation come over her friend. At the university she encountered Burmese exchange students who treated her with a mixture of deference and vague yet intense expectation that was quite novel to her.
“She and Kim were staying in International House, Kyoto University’s residence for scholars,” Noriko said, “and there were young Burmese scholars staying there, too, nice, clever boys. Their attitude towards Suu was totally different from other people, because of the respect in which they held her father.”
Yoshikazu Mikami, Suu’s first biographer, noted a similar effect. “In Japan she had her first encounter with Burmese students,” she wrote, “and they were all talking about the country in the same way—nostalgia, nationalism, respect for her father . . . She came to Japan to follow her father’s shadow—but then the image became clearer and became imbued with reality. And her sense of mission began to grow.”34
Noriko remembered one student in particular: In Japan he was nicknamed Koe-chan. “Koe-chan was one of the boys who respected her. Then he went home to Rangoon and at the airport he was surrounded by soldiers and they took a pistol out of his bag and he was sentenced to seven years in Insein Jail.
“He had a weapon illegally: That was the reason they gave.” But for Noriko and Suu it was ridiculous, unbelievable, scary. “Koe-chan was a serious student, he was studying classical Japanese literature. Firearms are totally banned in Japan—even we Japanese cannot obtain a pistol or any such thing in Japan, it’s totally illegal. So maybe a soldier put a pistol in his bag, to incriminate him.” The dark suspicion she and Suu shared was that the students at International House were being spied on by one of their number, and Koe-chan was punished for being friendly with Suu.
In Britain, Burma would always feel like a faraway, exotic country, its problems and realities having little bearing on everyday British life. But in Japan, the country which had maintained the closest diplomatic and commercial ties with Burma since independence, and which had been Ne Win’s most consistent sponsor, she was back in the same parish. There were Burmese spies here; more to the point, there were Burmese students who knew exactly who she was and why it mattered.
Noriko said,
She became aware of the mixture of respect and expectation with which they regarded her. Koe-chan was one of them. He was such a clever, promising boy. It’s quite difficult to get a PhD at Kyoto University. I think she felt some responsibility or guilt when she heard what happened to him. And her thinking about her life and her potential role began to change.
That is one of the reasons why she went into politics. It’s a very interesting coincidence: Aung San stayed in Japan, and Suu stayed in Japan, and both father and daughter went on to have the same experience, both had a revolution to fight. It’s a coincidence, isn’t it. But I really felt that that is what Suu was feeling.
At Christmas Michael and Alexander flew out to join Suu and Kim in Kyoto. Christmas is a non-event in Japan, but New Year is the biggest festival in the calendar, and on New Year’s Eve the whole family went out into the country to see their friends from Oxford.
“We took them to a nearby Buddhist temple where they all rang the big temple bell in the Japanese tradition called joya no kane,” Noriko remembered. “The next day I had a vivid insight into how much Suu missed Burma. I had heard of a temple not far away with a Burmese Buddha on the altar; I mentioned it to Suu and she asked if we could visit it. The gate was locked because of the holiday so I went round the back and asked for advice.”
A caretaker opened up the temple for them.
There on the altar was the Burmese Buddha with a gentle and delightful smile. Suu said “Ooooh!” then fell silent. Although she had always been very careful with money, she offered the priest 5,000 yen to say a prayer service, then prostrated herself on the earthen floor in front of the Buddha and went up and down any number of times, her hands together, chanting in Burmese.
It dawned on me that Suu and I had only known each other in England and Japan, never in Burma: I had only known her as a foreigner, with all that involves. Now, in a rustic village in Japan, coming face to face with a Burmese Buddha, suddenly she revealed her Burmese heart.
I had an intuitive feeling that she could only really fulfill herself in Burma. Would it be better for Suu to spend her whole life in comfortable Britain? Whatever the dangers and difficulties, would she not be happier immersing herself in her own country again?
Michael and Alex flew off, Kim went back to school and Suu resumed her research, but a seed had been planted. “One day towards the end of her stay in Japan she came to see me again, bringing some of our favorite manju cakes to eat with green tea,” Noriko recalled. Noriko was in the habit of speaking bluntly with her friend:
Over the tea I said to her, “Suu, if I were you, I would go back to Burma. Your country needs you. There are lots of things you could do there—your English ability alone would be very valuable. Michael could get a research job at some Indian university so you would not be far apart, you could put the children into boarding school . . . don’t you agree?”
Normally Suu was lightning quick with her replies, but now she merely stared down and said nothing. But I knew the answer.
Eventually Suu looked up. “Noriko, you’re right,” she said.
Two years later, for reasons that had nothing to do with politics, she found herself back there. And the rest of her life began to unfold.
PART FOUR
HEIRS TO THE KINGDOM
1
ALONE
ON the day they placed me under arrest,” Suu told an American journalist who visited her at home in 1995, “this garden was still quite beautiful. There were lots of Madonna lilies, fields and fields of them, and frangipani, and fragrant yellow jasmines, and gardenias, and a flower from South America that changes its color as it matures and is called ‘yesterday, today and tomorrow.’”1
But after she was detained Suu did not want to look out on flowers any more, and she did not want their scent in her nostrils.
On July 21, 1989, a SLORC spokesman announced that Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo, the NLD chairman, were to be confined to their homes for a minimum of one year “because they have violated the law by committing acts designed to put the country in a perilous state.” They had been detained under the new rules enacted earlier in the year permitting summary justice by the military without recourse to the courts.
That was bad enough. But all Suu’s closest comrades, the forty-odd men and women, including her friend and companion Ma Thanegi, who had spent Martyrs’ Day at her home together as the army once again clamped the capital in an iron grip, had been taken off to Insein Jail. Only she and Tin Oo had been left on the outside.
Suu demanded to be taken to join them in prison. When the regime refused, she went on hunger strike. She would eat nothing, she said, unless they agreed to her demand and put her in jail with the rest. In the meantime she would take only water and fruit juice.
Alex, now sixteen, and Kim, eleven, were with her at home—Michael had sent them on ahead while he attended to essential business following his father’s death—but now they found themselves spectators to a battle of wills that had nothing to do with them, and that they must have struggled to comprehend.
When news reached Michael of his wife’s detention, he set out to join his family as quickly as he could. Fortunately he already had a valid Burmese visa in his passport, so he was able to leave almost at once, informing the authorities that he was on his way. But when he landed at Rangoon’s Mingaladon Airport on July 24th, he discovered that he had arrived in the thick of a major crisis.
“As the plane taxied to a halt,” he wrote, “I could see a lot of military activity on the tarmac. The plane was surrounded by troops . . .”2 Aris would not have been human if he had not been a little apprehensive: The a
ssassination of Filipino opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr., shot dead on the tarmac of Manila’s airport as he returned from exile, was only six years in the past. But no violence was offered him. Aris was escorted away by an army officer, forbidden to make contact with the British Embassy, and told that he could join Suu and the boys if he agreed to abide by the same terms of detention as Suu. He consented promptly and was driven from the airport to University Avenue, where he found the house surrounded by troops. He wrote later:
The gates were opened and we drove in. I had no idea what to expect.
I arrived to find Suu in the third day of a hunger strike. Her single demand was that she should be allowed to go to prison with all her young supporters who had been taken away from her compound when the authorities arrested her. She believed her presence with them in prison would afford them some protection from maltreatment. She took her last meal on the evening of July 20th, the day of her arrest, and for the following twelve days until almost noon on August 1st, she accepted only water.3
It was another Danubyu, another stand-off, in the series of confrontations that have punctuated Suu’s political career, but for the first and only time her husband found himself thrust into the role of go-between. It was clear that the authorities had no intention of agreeing to her demand. So either the family could sit there and watch their wife and mother waste away and die, or they would have to find a compromise.
Dying, he insisted to her, would do no good to the imprisoned students or anybody else. So under her husband’s persuasion, Suu agreed to moderate her conditions: She would agree to stay where she was and break her fast on condition that she was given the regime’s solemn word that the NLD members who had been locked up would not be maltreated in prison.
The house no longer had a working telephone—to Suu’s and the boys’ amusement, some soldiers had turned up with a large pair of scissors and snipped the cord after her detention began—so Michael passed on his wife’s terms to the officers who came to the compound regularly to look in on Suu. They listened to what he had to say, then went away: Clearly the matter was beyond their competence.
Meanwhile Suu was dwindling away. Already back in February she had been “fragile and light as a papier-mâché doll,” according to Ma Thanegi’s diary. Throughout the self-imposed ordeal Suu was “very calm,” Aris wrote, “and the boys too. She had spent the days of her fast resting quietly, reading and talking to us.” But Aris himself was at his wits’ end. “I was less calm,” he confessed, “though I tried to pretend to be.” Finally the agony of waiting was broken and he was summoned to a full-dress meeting of senior army officers at Rangoon City Hall to present Suu’s demands, recorded by the military’s video cameras for posterity. And on August 1st, a week after his arrival and twelve days after the start of her fast, the tension was broken.
“A military officer came to give her his personal assurance, on behalf of the authorities, that her young people would not be tortured and that the cases against them would be heard by due process of law,” he wrote. “She accepted this compromise, and the doctors who had been deputed to attend her, whose treatment she had hitherto refused, put her on an intravenous drip with her consent. She had lost twelve pounds in weight. I still do not know if the authorities kept their promise.”4
She had lost one set of boys—the NLD’s student members—and now she was about to lose the other ones: her family. They had a full month together after the beginning of her house arrest. Michael’s visa was about to expire but the authorities agreed to extend it so he and his sons could return to Britain together. “Suu recovered her weight and strength in the days ahead,” he wrote. “The boys learned martial arts from the guards. We put the house in order.”5 Then, September 2nd rolled around, school beckoned, and the three of them departed—never to be reunited as a family again.
Suu has always been very reluctant to say much about the personal, emotional costs of her choices, and about the ill effect of those choices on her children she has said next to nothing. “As a mother,” she told Alan Clements, “the greater sacrifice was giving up my sons”—but then added immediately what is always the corollary: “I was always aware of the fact that others had sacrificed more than me.”6 Coaxed by Clements to say a little more, she added, “When I first entered politics, my family happened to be here with me tending to my mother. So it was not a case of my suddenly leaving them, or they leaving me. It was a more gradual transition which gave us an opportunity to adjust.”
There will be readers to whom those words may seem unacceptably hard-hearted. But Suu was weighing them carefully. In her long war of wills with the regime, all of this was ammunition. The last thing she wanted to do was give her jailors the idea that she or her family were suffering intolerably, that the slow torture of separation was working.
As has been mentioned earlier in this book, the unique aspect of Suu Kyi’s long ordeal—one which marks it off sharply from the otherwise comparable experiences of people like Soviet dissident Sakharov or Nelson Mandela—was that, as the regime made amply clear to her, she could have brought it to an end by agreeing to leave the country for ever.
One of the things that made it psychologically bearable to remain cooped up alone while her family was on the other side of the world was the thought of them coming out to see her in the school holidays. But the regime was canny and cruel enough to see that, and to sever that heartstring now. Soon after Michael and the boys got back to Oxford, they learned that this would be their last trip to see Suu—or at least the last one they could bank on. The Burmese Embassy informed Michael drily that the boys’ Burmese passports were now invalid because they were no longer entitled—on what grounds was not explained—to Burmese citizenship. “Very obviously,” Aris wrote, “the plan was to break Suu’s spirit by separating her from her children in the hope she would accept permanent exile.” Until 1988, the longest time Suu and her children had been separated was a month. Now it was to be more than two years before they would see each other again.
*
In the flower-scented tranquility of University Avenue, Michael, Alexander and Kim had watched Suu shrink and dwindle and fade, then, once agreement with the authorities was reached, return to her normal state. But meanwhile outside in the city’s streets the State Law and Order Restoration Council set about killing off the democracy movement once and for all.
Suu’s apprehensions about the treatment of her party comrades, the motivation for her hunger strike, were not in the least fanciful. In the year since the crackdown of September 18, 1988, three thousand alleged activists had been jailed; that number doubled in the four months between Suu’s detention and November 1989, and included many of her colleagues in the party. They were summarily tried by the newly empowered military tribunals, but they were also frequently tortured: One month after Suu’s detention began—three weeks after the end of her fast—a declassified American Embassy cable revealed that the torture of political prisoners included burns to the flesh by cigarettes, electric shocks to the genitals and beatings so severe that they caused permanent damage to eyes and ears and sometimes death.7 Hundreds more such prisoners were also punished in a way that was to become routine as the small but brutal civil wars on the frontier dragged on. They were forced to work for the army fighting Shan insurgents in northern Shan State, either lugging the army’s equipment as porters or forced to walk ahead of the troops as human mine-detectors: If they were not blown up, it was safe for the soldiers to follow.
The mobilization of millions of Burmese against the military regime in the past year and a half now elicited a terrible retribution. Suu has always insisted that simply being confined to her home she had far less to complain about than colleagues who lacked the protection of her name and fame, and she is right. “The military regime seeks not only to break down the identity of former political prisoners,” said a report by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, reviewing thousands of cases of abuse since 1988, “but to make them w
alking advertisements for the consequences of speaking out against the regime. Many former political prisoners repeatedly explain that once they are a political prisoner they are always a political prisoner.”
Some of Suu’s most senior colleagues were silenced more or less permanently. Win Tin, the veteran dissident journalist on the NLD’s Central Executive Committee, was sentenced to three years’ hard labor on October 3rd, but his term was repeatedly extended until he was finally set free in 2008, after nineteen years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement. And two days after Win Tin was sent down, the man who had become one of Suu’s first political mentors when she returned to Rangoon to nurse her mother, the writer and war hero Maung Thaw Ka, was given a twenty-year sentence which, given his frail condition, was in effect a sentence of death.
Maung Thaw Ka, his name almost unknown outside Burma, is a good symbol of the awakening that had occurred since the spring of 1988, and of how ruthlessly and vindictively it was now being trampled. It was he, the fifty-one-year-old naval officer-turned-writer, who had given Suu a tour of the places in Rangoon where troops had killed students in the early months of the revolt, long before she decided to offer her involvement; it was he, with his big ears and wedge of a nose and a paunch showing through his striped shirt, who shared the little podium with her when she gave her maiden political speech at Rangoon General Hospital.
Like Tin Oo, the former defense minister, his career spanned the heyday of Aung San as well as that of his daughter. He was serving in the Burmese Navy during the war when the British forces handed the ship on which he was serving, the May Yu, over to Aung San’s command. It was he who led the guard of honor when Suu’s father was piped aboard.