by Peter Popham
The NLD mishandled it. When Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest, the party was decapitated. They were all arrested, Ma Thanegi, U Win Tin, all the smart people in the leadership. So the initiative went to the second rung in the party, people like U Kyi Maung, a nice old man, a retired army colonel. Kyi Maung was strong enough to keep the whole thing together and lead it through the election to victory. But then he said, now the military has shown some goodwill by letting the election happen and making sure the vote goes fairly, so we have to show some goodwill too and not push things.
They didn’t lose their nerve, they just miscalculated. By saying okay, they’ve shown some goodwill, we have to show some goodwill, they gave enough time for the military to re-group and strike back.
U Win Tin, founder member of the NLD, during his nineteen years in jail.
Instead of marching en masse to University Avenue and setting their leader free, the NLD erected a large blackboard outside its headquarters to keep the public abreast of what was happening—a homely version of the vote-athon apparatus of modern TV news channels. It stood there for weeks as the results continued to arrive from distant corners of the country. Every time a new result came in it was chalked up on the board. In the early days the crowds watching the board spilled from the pavement onto the road, hundreds strong, and every time a fresh NLD win was written up, they sent up a cheer of approval.
But then after a few days, with many seats left to declare but with the NLD on track for an overwhelming victory, the novelty wore off and the numbers began to dwindle. It was all very fine, people said to each other—but what did it mean exactly? What was supposed to happen next?
In mid-June, more than two weeks after polling, SLORC admitted that, with many constituencies still to declare results, the NLD had already won an absolute majority. In the end they won 392 of the seats they contested, slightly more than 80 percent of the total. But in fact the scale of their victory was even greater than that: Their allies in the ethnic states, running under the umbrella of the United Nationalities League for Democracy, the UNLD, won 65 seats. Their ally in the Shan States, the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, became the second biggest winner nationwide, with 23 seats. Overall the NLD and its allies won more than 94 percent of the seats. The United Nationals Democratic Party of U Aung Gyi, the former general who had been Suu’s colleague at the head of the NLD before turning on it, won a single seat. The NUP, despite (or rather because of) its backing by the army and its decades in power under the BSPP avatar, won a mere 10 seats.
Compounding the shock for SLORC and adding an extra element of paranoid unease was the fact that several constituencies where serving soldiers constituted the majority of voters, such as Dagon township in Rangoon, had elected NLD MPs.
The political landscape of Burma was turned inside out, and even the army could not deny that something had happened. But in mid-June they clearly had no idea what to do next, frozen in the headlights of hostile public opinion.
“The final result is expected within the next week,” reported Terry McCarthy and Yuli Ismartono in the Independent on June 15, 1990.
But the military has so far refused to be drawn on how power will be transferred to a civilian government, when this might happen, or when they intend to release Aung San Suu Kyi . . .
The military, confident up to a week before the elections that there would be no clear winner and that it would easily be able to manipulate the Assembly, is now left without a master plan, and the old paranoia is starting to creep back in.4
A spokesman for the regime, asked about SLORC’s plans, sounded as if he was discussing the aftermath of a nasty ambush in guerrilla country rather than a victory for democracy in the sight of the world. “We don’t know who is our enemy and who is not,” he told the Independent, “so we have to tread very carefully.”5 Asked whether SLORC would be dissolved after a transfer of power, the spokesman, Colonel Ye Htut, told the paper, “Yes, but as you know, SLORC is the army itself. SLORC will be dissolved, but the army will continue to exist . . .”
It was not until July that SLORC was ready with a coordinated response. It was a textbook example of the tendency of authoritarian regimes, following Orwell, to say that two plus two equals five. The elections were not, as the foreign press had mischievously reported, for the purpose of electing a government, they said. All that was a misunderstanding. There was no constitution, so how could there be a government? First there must be a constitution, then a government. So what those 485 people—or a fraction of them, to be selected by SLORC, plus a supplement (in the event it turned out to be a very large supplement, 600 percent of the elected quota) of army officers to advise them—had been elected to do was write a constitution. Only after the constitution had been written and ratified could a civilian government take office. Until then—SLORC remained in charge.
It was not an entirely new theme. At the beginning of May, McCarthy had reported, “The army is indicating that the elected body will not be a national assembly from which a government will be chosen, but rather a constituent assembly, empowered to write a new constitution for the country.”6 The need for such an assembly before power was handed over had in fact been repeatedly voiced by Khin Nyunt, the ambitious heir apparent, the man “who breathes through Ne Win’s nostrils” as the Burmese put it.7
But Khin Nyunt had been contradicted repeatedly by General Saw Maung, the head of the junta, who had said after the crackdown of September 1988 that he would “throw flowers in the path of the government” and that the sole task of SLORC was to pave the way for the new, elected government. On January 9, 1990, he reiterated, “It is our duty to hold an election so that a government can be formed. Once the election is over, it will not be the Defense Forces’ responsibility to see that a government is formed . . . ”8 On polling day itself he said it once again: As the Economist reported on June 2nd, “While he was casting his vote, General Saw Maung, the leader of the State Council, told a journalist that he would hand over power to whichever party was victorious. Various spokesmen from the army and the foreign ministry have said that a newly elected government could ‘move as quickly as it likes to take power.’”
But that was then. Once the NLD had flattened all contenders, it was plain to see that two and two made five.
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The claim that on May 27, 1990, Burma voted not for a government but for a constitutional convention became the junta’s mantra for the next eighteen years, its perennial alibi for hanging on to power, justifying endless procrastination on the road to democracy. Today the claim has attained the status of holy writ among apologists for the regime. In February 2011, Burma scholar Michael Aung-Thwin, professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii, wrote in a newspaper article, “Virtually every credible scholar of Burma has demonstrated that both the NLD and Suu Kyi knew at the time that these were constituent assembly elections, not national elections.”9
The claim was certainly helpful in justifying SLORC’s hanging on to power. But as veteran Burma-watcher Lintner pointed out, it makes no sense. “The election was held to elect the Pyitthu Hluttaw, the national assembly,” said Lintner, who at the time of the election was Burma correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review:
The new Pyitthu Hluttaw was to have the same number of MPs as the Pyitthu Hluttaw in the old one-party BSPP set-up, but with more parties represented. No one suggested before polling day that, of those 485 MPs-elect, 100 would be selected to sit with 600 other people selected by the military to draft a new constitution. That announcement came two months after the election, in July. It was clear that there would have to be a new constitution but that would be up to the parliament to decide, not the military. What’s the point in electing 485 people if you are then going to hand-pick 100 of them? It didn’t make sense at all.
In 1990 the wrong party won. If in 1990 the National Unity Party had won, would they have been arrested and forced into exile? Of course not: There would have been a new government within we
eks. They would have been in parliament right away, the military would have said okay, now you can write the constitution! The wrong party won and that’s the bottom line. The military didn’t expect it.10
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Aung San Suu Kyi’s own thoughts about the election and its strange aftermath were a matter for conjecture. Although she was able to follow events on radio and television, she was forbidden to make any public comments.
And her isolation was about to become even more drastic. Up until July 1990 she had received letters from her family, sent to the British Embassy in Rangoon and brought to her door by SLORC. In fact Khin Nyunt boasted about the fact. At a news conference on July 13th, he said:
We have been very lenient [towards her] . . . [She] is permitted to move about freely . . . We assisted in repairs to her compound and her residence and have been providing weekly medical care and treatment. We even provided orthodontic care at her request to correct her uneven teeth. Her spouse, Dr. Michael Aris, and her sons have been sending her letters, foodstuffs, goods, books and documents from Britain through the British Embassy in Rangoon. We accept responsibility of delivering these letters, goods and foodstuffs to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi without exception . . .11
But when she heard of Khin Nyunt’s boast, she decided to accept none of these “favors” any more: If she could not, as she had demanded, go to Insein Jail with her colleagues, she would certainly not allow herself, locked up in her home, to be portrayed as a pampered beneficiary of army rule. She said later:
[SLORC] seemed to think they were doing me a tremendous favor by letting me communicate with my family. It was in fact my right. I’ve never accepted anything as a favor. So I would not accept any favors from them. Also, I did not think that they had a right to keep me under house arrest for longer than a year. In fact they had no right to arrest all those NLD [members] who had been successful in the elections. So it was a form of protest against injustices they were perpetrating as well as an indication that I would accept no favors from them.12
The flow of letters, goods and services into her home abruptly ceased. And her solitary life became very much harder.
The regime refused to give any estimation of when she might be let out—let alone entertain the idea that she should play a role in the new government. In the same speech in which he vaunted SLORC’s provision of dental care, etcetera, Khin Nyunt addressed that question.
The NLD openly declared that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi must play a leading role in establishing a new democratic state and that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi must lead in the talks with the SLORC . . . Which is more important: obtaining power and the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, or the long-term interests of the country and the people? . . . I believe this is not the time for an individual approach or for a personality cult in insisting that a specific person be included in working for the long-term interests of the state.
Meanwhile, a new phase in Burma’s political game was about to begin: the manhunt for the winning candidates.
3
LONG LIVE HOLINESS
JUST as it is untrue that Burma has never enjoyed an era of freedom—it lasted twenty-six days in August and September 1988—neither is it true that the elections of May 1990 did not produce a government. But instead of being sworn in at Rangoon with all the dignity at the Burmese state’s disposal, it was formed in a malarial camp in the jungle close to the border with Thailand, under constant threat of bombardment by the Burmese Army.
In her short but seminal essay on the role played by fear in authoritarian societies, “Freedom from Fear,” Suu was careful to point out how the behavior of the oppressors as well as the oppressed is twisted by fear. “Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it,” she wrote. “. . . fear of being surpassed, humiliated or injured in some way can provide the impetus for ill will.” She wrote the essay before being put in detention; but now that her party and its allies had won the election, the fear of those who had terrorized their nation for decades—the fear of confronting the vengeful fury of their victims—undermined any hope of power changing hands. “The army leaders are paralyzed by fear,” said a Western diplomat in Rangoon, “fear of the revenge of the people. It’s the Nuremberg syndrome which held up political reform in Argentina and Chile for so long.”
First SLORC spent six weeks issuing the election results in dribs and drabs. Then, when the NLD’s landslide victory was beyond dispute, they announced a two-month moratorium to allow claims of abuse and misconduct by defeated candidates to be investigated. The NLD’s acting leader Kyi Maung, the most senior of those who remained at liberty, judging that it would be a mistake to pile on pressure, allowed the junta to play for time, but finally summoned the party’s winning candidates—its MPs-elect—to a mass meeting at the Gandhi Hall in central Rangoon on July 28th and 29th.
At the meeting’s conclusion they issued a statement, the “Gandhi Declaration,” condemning the continuing delays as “shameful,” and rejecting SLORC’s plans for a constitutional convention as irrelevant. “It is against political nature,” they declared, “that the League, which has overwhelmingly won enough seats in parliament to form a government, has been prohibited from minimum democratic rights.” They gave the junta a deadline of September 30th to transfer power.
But the endgame was approaching. Even before the MPs could meet, SLORC announced a decree, number 1/90, refusing in advance any demands they might come up with. The MPs might have been elected to the Pyitthu Hluttaw, but now nobody inside the regime was talking about convening it. Before that happened, they said, a National Convention would have to be set up—it was the first anyone had heard of such a body—to draw up the guidelines for the new constitution; only after that could the Assembly convene to write its own draft constitution, which would then have to be approved by SLORC—and so on indefinitely into the future. No time frame was proposed, and participation in the Convention was not the right of the new MPs: Instead SLORC would pick the delegates it fancied. And just to make sure they stuck to this agreement, MPs-elect were obliged to sign a “1/90 declaration,” renouncing any right to form a government.
But all these pseudo-judicial measures were not sufficient to staunch the fears of the junta’s leaders, of whom it appeared that Ne Win was still the unchallenged boss. There was no real substitute for the medieval measures employed by the kings of old (and indeed the British colonialists)—to feel really secure you needed bodies in firmly locked cells.
Thus on September 6th, three weeks before the NLD’s deadline to the junta, SLORC targeted the last vestiges of robust NLD leadership, arresting Kyi Maung and his deputy and sentencing them to ten years’ jail for treason. Eighteen members of the NLD’s central executive committee out of twenty-two were now in detention. At the same time SLORC tackled the party’s foot soldiers, arresting more than forty MPs, allegedly for refusing to sign the 1/90 declaration. Two of them died in jail soon after their arrest, apparently under torture. And what of Aung San Suu Kyi herself? SLORC told foreign diplomats in Rangoon that she would only be freed if she agreed to give up politics and leave the country for ever.
Hope of reaching any sort of accommodation with the junta was now dead. The country had come full circle since Ne Win’s “multiparty democracy” declaration of July 1988 and was back exactly where it started—with the same psychopathic tyrant in charge.
The men and women who had been voted into power by their fellow-countrymen were all now in grave peril, and some of the most promising and well-qualified new MPs decided that there was nothing to be gained by hanging around in Rangoon waiting to be arrested. Eight of them, led by a cousin of Suu called Dr. Sein Win, the newly elected MP for Paukkaung, 125 miles north of Rangoon, and Western-educated like her, trekked through the mountains in the east of the country, finally arriving at a place called Manerplaw: the jungle camp which was the headquarters of the Democratic Alliance of Burma (DAB), a coalition of the insurgent forces that had been fighting the Burmese Army for many years.
First the MPs declared a ceasefire with the Alliance, then they announced that they were forming a government. Claiming the support of more than 250 elected MPs, they explained that their efforts to form a government, first in a monastery in Mandalay, then in a foreign embassy in Rangoon, had been foiled. So instead they were setting up what they called the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB) here in Manerplaw, with Sein Win as prime minister.
And it was there, a few months later, that I caught up with them.
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Mountains and forest in Karen state, near the site of Manerplaw, the Karen jungle camp destroyed by the Burmese Army.
As you would expect of a camp that had managed to hold out against everything the Burmese Army threw at it, Manerplaw was not easy to reach. For some fifteen years it had been the command center of the most stubborn and enduring of Burma’s ethnic armies, the Karen National Liberation Army. GIVE US LIBERTY OR GIVE US DEATH read the sign over the camp’s entrance. The settlement had survived because it occupied a narrow shelf between the Moei river on the east and steep mountains that climbed straight out of the grassy parade ground on the west. Beyond those mountains was another, more daunting range before the descent towards the Salween river and the positions held by the Burmese Army.
The only practicable way for a foreigner to approach Manerplaw was from the Thai side.1 Commissioned to write a magazine piece about Manerplaw and its residents, I took a bus to the Thai border town of Mae Sariang with the photographer Greg Girard, and persuaded the owner of our little hotel to take us closer to our destination.
The tarmac road soon gave way to rutted mud and we bumped down it for hours, fording streams and winding through wooded mountains. When our driver’s pick-up truck died on us he flagged down a lorry which took us the rest of the way to the riverside village of Mae Sam Leb: no more than a dirt road lined with little eateries and stores selling chains and spare parts for outboard engines, ending at a dice gambling den on the shore of the Salween river.