by Peter Popham
We were looking for the human Burma, that mysterious entity of which each individual Burman . . . is on an infinitesimal scale a manifestation and a representative, which is a norm subsuming all their individual activities, and which represents all that is vital and enduring in this country as we know it; the partnership, as Burke puts it, between the dead, the living and those yet to be born . . .
For the Burma that we hope to assist in building is like some old pagoda recently unearthed and in course of restoration . . . [It is necessary] to clear away cartloads of rubbish. We have carefully to set in order the foundations and the whole building brick by brick, but I for one firmly believe that if the Burma of the future is to be a lasting fabric, it must be built up on the old foundations.22
Suu commented, “In such views can be seen the seeds of a renaissance: The urge to create a vital link between the past, the present and the future, the wish to clear away ‘cartloads of rubbish’ so that old foundations might become fit to hold up a new and lasting fabric. But it was a renaissance that did not really come to fruition.”
Written shortly before her return to Burma in 1988, with her encounters with Burmese students in Japan and their hopes for her so fresh in her mind, it is clear that the essay was more than the dissection of some dusty old intellectual movements. Whether consciously or unconsciously or somewhere between the two, Suu was limning her own task and her challenge: what someone with her parentage, education and knowledge of the world might dream of achieving. It had culminated in the High Noon of Martyrs’ Day, in calamitous defeat, detention, humiliation, dispersion. But beyond those awful experiences, and in a strange way through and thanks to those awful experiences, she glimpsed a way out. And it all began with meditation.
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That intellectual and spiritual journey is a large part of the story of the past twenty years: how and why she remained relevant and inspiring to her people—and to millions more beyond Burma’s borders—despite everything its rulers could do to render her irrelevant, alien and extraneous. In the process she has at least made a start on creating a new Burma “built on the old foundations” as Furnivall put it—one built on the truths of Buddhism, but not in the old, mechanical, reductive version for which Burma became notorious—“acquiring merit” to assure a more auspicious reincarnation—but living the religion’s values in one’s everyday life. “When people have been stripped of all their material supports,” she wrote during her first years of detention, “there only remain to sustain them the values of their cultural and spiritual inheritance.”23 The generals had stripped “all their material supports” from the best and brightest in Burma, and reduced Suu herself to a walking shadow. Now the only way forward was back.
2
LANDSLIDE VICTORY
ON Sunday May 27, 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi, still under detention in her home, cast her vote in her country’s first free general elections for thirty years. The ballot paper was put into an envelope which was sealed and taken from her home by a regime official.
To most foreign observers, it looked like a futile gesture. For weeks the international media had been scrutinizing Burma’s upcoming poll and concluding that it was bound to be rigged.
The military junta had done everything in their power to ensure a good result—a win for the National Unity Party (NUP), the junta’s tame proxy party, as the BSPP had been rebranded.
The top leadership of the NLD had been put out of action, with Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest since July 20th. U Tin Oo, the retired general who was chairman of the party and who had been detained the same day, was sentenced to three years’ hard labor in December and taken to Insein Jail. Most of their closest colleagues had been jailed and would not re-emerge for years. The party was now run by a skeleton staff of those who remained at liberty, led by U Kyi Maung, aged seventy-two, the tubby, wisecracking former colonel who had been one of the first people to join Suu two summers before.
In January the regime sought to neutralize the threat posed by Suu’s personal popularity by barring her from standing as a candidate because of her marriage to a foreigner—a new rule. Her image was everywhere in the NLD’s campaign, on banners, T-shirts, posters, badges and scarves; cassette tapes of her campaign speeches were sold from market stalls. But the lady herself was firmly locked away.
General Khin Nyunt, head of Military Intelligence (MI) and the second most powerful man in the junta, in two long speeches drove home the message that Suu’s party was a menace to the country’s future. On August 5th, he repeated the now-familiar claim that the NLD had been infiltrated by communists. The following month, at a press conference where he spoke for seven hours, he made the diametrically opposite allegation that Suu and her party were at the heart of an international rightist conspiracy involving powerful foreign countries. The speech was later published in a 300-page book with the catchy title The Conspiracy of Treasonous Minions and Traitorous Cohorts.
Emasculating the NLD, however, was only part of the task of manufacturing a good result. SLORC now set about tackling the remaining challenges with military thoroughness.
Other enemies of army rule were put under house arrest, including former prime minister U Nu.
The regime identified city neighborhoods with a high proportion of opposition supporters and broke them up. In the months leading up to the election at least half a million people around the country were forced to abandon their homes in the cities and move to crudely constructed and malaria-ridden new townships far away.
Practically all conventional forms of campaigning, including rallies, door-to-door lobbying and media interviews, were banned. Criticism of the military was a criminal offence. Gatherings of more than five people remained illegal under martial law rules, though each party of the ninety-three registered for the poll was allowed to hold a single rally, on condition that seven days’ notice was given. Each was also permitted a single, pre-approved ten minute statement on state television, and fifteen minutes on state radio.
To make sure the heavens were on their side, the regime made sure to pick a good day: May 27th contained a plethora of lucky nines, two plus seven for the day itself, plus the fact that it fell in the fourth week of the fifth month.
An offer from the US to send election monitors was tartly rebuffed, and all foreigners were banned from the country for weeks before the election.
On the eve of polling, the generals could be well pleased with their handiwork: Myanmar, as she now was, had been through the wringer in the past twenty-four months since Ne Win’s crass decision to demonetize the currency then throw a spanner into the constitutional arrangements by raising the possibility of multiparty elections. But since the locking up of “that woman” as Ne Win referred to Suu (he refused to pronounce her name), the situation had improved all round.
The socialist ideology which had conditioned policy for a generation was consigned to the waste bin along with the BSPP, and Burma reopened for business. Some Western countries may have found it awkward dealing on normal trade terms with a country that had slaughtered thousands of its unarmed citizens in cold blood, but Thailand, Singapore and South Korea had no such inhibitions, snapping up contracts to extract timber, jade, precious stones and seafood at bargain prices.
A South Korean company, Yukong, became the first foreign company to be allowed to explore for oil onshore, rapidly followed by Shell, Idemitsu, Petro-Canada, and finally the American oil firms Amoco and Unocal. When the army roared into downtown Rangoon on September 18, 1988, the nation’s foreign exchange reserves had been less than $10 million. Now they were between $200 and $300 million.
Tight security prevented any significant demonstrations to mark the anniversaries of the great uprising of 8/8/88 or the military crackdown of the following month. Meanwhile, in a further sign of America’s softening approach, the generals and Coca-Cola signed a deal to bottle its drinks in Burma. To demonstrate to the general public and the world at large that SLORC knew a thing or two about good governance
, a major clean-up campaign was launched, reminiscent of the operation by Ne Win himself in 1958 under his caretaker government, and Rangoon’s public buildings gleamed with fresh paint.
The governments of western Europe and the US remained dubious, unwilling to forget how SLORC had come to power. But an election run with military efficiency, producing a solid working majority for the NUP—or with the votes shared between such a plethora of parties that the army would be fully justified in retaining control—would surely bring them round.
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The regime might have been more circumspect about the election—might have booted it far into the mists of the future, claiming that they needed to wait until true stability had been achieved—if they had seen what Suu saw as she traveled round the country with her party.
The concept of democracy had been much bandied about in Burma since Ne Win’s momentous speech. But what did the Burmese really know about the subject? Those over the age of forty-four would have vague memories of the last free election in which they were entitled to vote, which U Nu had won with a large majority. But anyone under that age, brought up in a one-party dictatorship which shut the country off from the outside world, would be hazy about it.
Knowledge may have been thin, but as Suu went on the campaign trail in the first half of 1989 she found insatiable interest. “More than a quarter-century of narrow authoritarianism under which they had been fed a pabulum of shallow, negative dogma had not blunted the perceptiveness or political alertness of the Burmese,” she wrote in an essay during campaigning:
On the contrary . . . their appetite for discussion and debate, for uncensored information and objective analysis, seemed to have been sharpened.
There was widespread and intelligent speculation on the nature of democracy as a social system . . . a spontaneous interpretative response to such basic ideas as representative government, human rights and the rule of law.
The people of Burma view democracy not merely as a form of government but as an integrated social and ideological system based on respect for the individual.1
The state media might scorn imported concepts such as democracy and human rights as somehow “inimical to indigenous values,” but Suu maintained that they cohered fully with the faith system which was at the root of Burmese culture. “Buddhism . . . places the greatest value on man . . . Each man has in him the potential to realize the truth through his own will and endeavour and to help others to realize it . . . The proposition that the Burmese are not fit to enjoy as many rights and privileges as the citizens of democratic countries is insulting.”
But with all the top leaders now out of action and the party facing heavy intimidation by the junta, getting the NLD’s message about its program to the voters was complicated: Grassroots party workers had to go about their work like drug dealers, sidling up to potential supporters and discussing what was on offer under their breath. But at least they had a manifesto to work from.2
It was a resoundingly reasonable document. Burma today lacked a constitution, it pointed out. The new one would be written in collaboration with all the other parties whose representatives won seats in the Pyitthu Hluttaw or “national assembly,” as the parliament was called. The powers of executive, legislature and judiciary would be separated. National sovereignty would be vested in the parliament, to which all other organs of state, including crucially the army, would become accountable. The conflicts that had raged around Burma’s borders for decades would be ended by giving the “ethnic nationalities” greater autonomy than the 1947 constitution allowed them, including “the right to self-determination with respect to . . . politics, administration and economic management in accordance with the law.” Education, health care and social welfare, so brutally cut back under army rule, would be given far greater attention than before. The economic liberalization that SLORC had started to introduce would be pursued, though the interests of Burma’s farmers would be protected.
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And pigs would fly: The NLD might dream and scheme all they liked behind their prison bars, but it seems with hindsight that the military had no intention of ceding power, whatever the election result. And they were confident that the people, their people, so used to being “water in the cupped hands” of the army, comfortably familiar with the forms and foibles of the old BSPP, now the NUP, would in the privacy of the polling booth turn their backs on dangerous novelty and show due gratitude to the force that had kept them safe from foreign machinations all these years.
So confident were the generals that they began to relax a little. They admitted a handful of foreign journalists and television news crews to watch the Burmese line up and vote. As polling day approached, martial law restrictions were partially lifted. The soldiers thronging Suu’s villa were temporarily replaced by police in plain clothes. Army and uniformed police disappeared from the streets. It was the usual Burmese vanishing trick, as seen on the day of Suu’s mother’s funeral, another manifestation of the “zero-sum” attitude to power, where the army is either overwhelmingly present or totally absent—but even if absent, everyone knows they are not far away. The NLD took advantage of the pull-back to take to the streets in their pick-up trucks, imploring the people of Rangoon to be sure to give them their vote.
In the end the people needed no imploring. The lines began forming outside schools and government offices where voting was to take place early on the morning of May 27th. The army was again conspicuous by its absence: The voting was overseen by civilians, as if Burma’s conversion to civilian rule had happened by magic, overnight. People put on their Sunday best to perform this important and extremely rare civic duty. As in India, every registered party was symbolized by an icon depicted on the voting slip. These included a beach ball, a comb, a tennis racket and an umbrella. Powerfully evocative symbols such as the peacock were banned, but the NLD had cannily chosen the kamauk, the farmer’s straw hat, to symbolize their party—making it easy for their supporters to indicate their preference while appearing to wear normal rustic costume.
Nationwide, more than twenty million people were eligible to vote. In seven constituencies where the army was fighting insurgents, polling was cancelled altogether; in many other border areas, only a fraction of registered voters managed to vote because of the violence. But in most of the country the turnout was heavy, with some 72 percent casting their votes in total.
The most glaring anomaly about the election was that it was held in a constitutional vacuum, the old 1974 constitution having been dissolved in the so-called “coup” that brought SLORC into being in September 1988, and not replaced. It was assumed by the NLD and other parties that the first, vital task of the winning parties would be to draft a constitution. But how that would happen had not been spelled out.
Late on the night of polling the Chinese news service, Xinhua, was the first foreign news agency to report the first result of Burma’s first election for thirty years: The NLD candidate for Seikan Township in Yangondaw, a woman called San San, obtained over half the votes cast.
That result was followed by a flood more. And to the shock and horror of the military, the overwhelming majority of results went the same way. Voters did not care for the Evergreen Young Men’s Association, the National Peace and Comfort Party, U Nu’s League for Democracy and Peace, nor for the army’s favorite, the NUP. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party was sweeping the board.
Results continued to dribble in over the coming days, and practically all of them tended the same way. The junta had said it would take three weeks for all results to be known, but it became clear within twenty-four hours that Suu’s party, all of whose top leaders were in jail or detained in their homes, had won a landslide victory. And nobody knew what to do next.
This, according to Bertil Lintner, following events as closely as he could from Bangkok, was when the NLD missed its best opportunity to change Burma for ever—without a shot being fired in anger. “At the last minute the regime had allowed the foreign media in,” he pointed ou
t—and this gave the NLD a rare and precious weapon, one which they totally failed to use.
This was before electronic media and so on, but nevertheless the world media came in, including television networks, for the actual election day. Once they had seen the way things were going the government searched for ways to delay and delay and delay the counting of the votes, saying, oh, we have to bring the ballot boxes to Rangoon and count them here and things like that, and it would take a long time. But it was already clear that the NLD had won.
What the NLD should have done at that point [before all votes were counted but when it was clear that they had won] was to declare victory: to hold a press conference at the party headquarters in Rangoon, invite the entire media, and say, we’ve won the election and therefore it is ridiculous that our leader is under house arrest. At three o’clock this afternoon we are going to go and liberate her. And then they could have sent out a lot of speaker vans around Rangoon to tell everyone to go to University Avenue at three o’clock. And millions of people would have shown up. They could have lifted off the gates and carried her off to the television station and she could have been put in charge and called for calm and the loyalty of the armed forces and all the rest of it. It would have been all over in forty-eight hours.3
But nothing of the sort happened: the reason being, Lintner, says, that the party was now essentially leaderless.