The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  We had arrived in the war zone. Directly across the river but out of sight was a Burmese Army post. The bamboo shops of Mae Sam Leb were as new as they were flimsy: A year before the village had been wiped out by Burmese Army bombs. In the weeks before our arrival in early April the army had been pounding Karen villages in the area.

  At the river we found a long-tailed boat going our way, with a boy who looked about ten at the helm. When it was crammed full of passengers we set off, a cool breeze in our faces and the water slapping against the sides. We turned into the Moei River heading southeast, with Thailand and its denuded mountains on the east bank, the richer forests of Burma on the west, and the grey forms of steep conical peaks looming ahead. We puttered along for several hours. Finally the boat nosed on to a gravel shore on the west side and we had arrived.

  It was the hottest time of day in the hottest period of the year, during the weeks before the monsoon arrives, and Manerplaw snoozed in the baking heat. In long barracks on stilts thatched with leaves, young rebel soldiers sprawled inertly. Chickens and ducks clucked and quacked in the shadows.

  But the impression of somnolent ease was deceptive. Every day for the past ten days the Burmese Army had attacked Karen strongholds, withdrawing a week before our arrival. They shelled and bombed nine Karen villages, destroying several, killing two villagers, wounding many more and driving about three thousand to take shelter in the forest or in refugee camps on the Thai side. Mortars were fired at Manerplaw from the Salween river. And four times a day the planes came over: Every day the sound of exploding bombs drew closer. Burmese Army troops had seized a hilltop position not far away, increasing pressure on the insurgents, who the previous year had lost six riverside camps further south. Manerplaw was now one of the last few strongholds that the rebels still held.

  *

  The stubborn struggle of the Karen, first for independence and latterly for self-government, was one of the fundamental reasons why the “Union of Burma” has never been more than a form of words. “The first thing colonial rule denies a people is their history,” Martin Smith wrote in his classic book on Burma’s insurgencies. “The new Republic of Burma which came into being on January 4, 1948, bore little resemblance to any nation or state from the historic past.”2

  The mountains and rivers that hemmed Manerplaw were the southerly extensions of north–south ranges that girdle Burma’s central plains and that have conditioned the way the country we call Burma has developed since prehistoric times; “the natural routes of migration,” as Smith writes, “to a constant flow of peoples from the high plateaus of Central Asia.”3 The mountains and rivers were a formidable obstacle to potential invaders, but they were also a barrier to anyone within the land that the mountains enclosed who sought to unify it.

  Dozens of ethnic groups, “an anthropologist’s paradise,” settled in Burma over the centuries and met and commingled ceaselessly, but dominion never went unchallenged for long. Power spread out from city-states founded variously by the Mon, Burman, Arakanese and Shan groups, but the natural barriers ensured that it oscillated frequently between their valley kingdoms.

  The great city of Pagan on the Irrawaddy, for example, marked Burman ascendancy in the eleventh century under the Burman king Anawrahta, but its glory was short-lived. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was the Shan, cousins of the Thais, who predominated, overtaken in the sixteenth centuries by the Mon kings of Pegu. The Burmans of the central plains returned to preeminence under King Alaunghpaya in the eighteenth century, but their final conquest of the Mon and Arakanese kingdoms, carving out a kingdom roughly equivalent to present-day Burma, was only achieved on the eve of the first incursion by the British. Less than half a century later, the dynasty Alaunghpaya had founded, the Konbaung, came crashing down.

  Pagan, the medieval city which is Burma’s most famous historical site.

  The Burmans, who may account for about two-thirds of the total population, have thus dominated the country that bears their name for some centuries, but the long history of contention between the different ethnic groups lives on. The perceived injustice of Burman tyranny is explained and lamented in their folk tales. “When Yuwa [God] created the world he took three handfuls of earth and threw them round about him,” goes the Karen creation myth, as retold by George Scott. “From one sprang the Burmans, from another the Karens, and from the third the Kalas, the foreigners. The Karens were very talkative and made much more noise than all the others, and so the Creator believed that there were too many of them, and he threw another half handful to the Burmans, who thus gained such a supremacy that they soon overcame the Karens, and have oppressed them ever since.”4

  The men from the plains tried to conquer the hill tribes, and failing that to steal their land and their women, to tax and raise levies from them and to carry them away as slaves, and the animosity accumulated over the centuries. But it reached a new pitch with the Japanese invasion.

  Today around two million Karen live in the border area, and two or three million more in the delta area near Rangoon. When the British took their third and final bite out of Burma in 1886, annexing lower Burma and gaining mastery of the whole country, the Burmans were subjected to direct British rule, but minorities including the Karen were given a degree of control over their own affairs. The Karen population was a mixture of Buddhists and animists; Christian missionaries who poured into the region found the animists ripe for conversion.

  When the Japanese invaded in 1942, the Karen troops remained loyal to the British, and in retribution both the Japanese and their Burman allies under Aung San committed atrocities against the Karen that have never been forgiven or forgotten. As a Karen leader, Saw Tha Din, said to Martin Smith in 1985, “How could anyone expect the Karen people to trust the Burmans after what happened during the war—the murder and slaughter of so many Karen people and the robbing of so many Karen villages? After all this, how could anyone seriously expect us to trust any Burman government in Rangoon?”5

  During independence negotiations the Karen held out for their own homeland; they alone of the largest ethnic groups on the borders refused to sign Aung San’s famous Panglong Agreement, granting the “races” full internal autonomy within a Union of Burma.6 Instead they took up arms against the Burmese state, and have been fighting ever since. The camp at Manerplaw was now the front line of that endless guerrilla war.

  But with the decimation of anti-regime protesters in the Burmese heartland that had been under way since mid-1988, Manerplaw had acquired a new meaning. Now it had also become the last bolt-hole within Burma for those committed to democratic change.

  *

  It was in the summer of 1988, after the first massacres in Rangoon and elsewhere and when it became clear that the army was serious about punishing those who had risen up in protest, that political refugees began arriving in Karen. Burmese Army propaganda claimed that these hills were full of bandits and savages, but when the first Rangoon and Mandalay students came out of the woods the Karen fighters made them feel at home. “They welcomed us and took care of us like their own children,” said Thaung Htun, a former student in Rangoon who was one of the early arrivals.7 By the time the newly elected MPs arrived, Manerplaw was already home to a substantial community of internal exiles.

  Early in the morning, when the weather was still tolerably cool, Greg the Canadian photographer and I visited each group in turn. Cocks crowed; mist hung low over the river and snagged in the trees on the mountainside. Down by the river the freedom fighters of the Central Committee of the All-Burma Students’ Democratic Front were washing their clothes and brushing their teeth and plunging in for a cool bath. They swept the dusty paths in the village of bamboo and rattan they had built in the north of the settlement, sweeping the dead leaves into piles and setting them alight. A medical graduate who was the Committee’s Foreign Secretary did the rounds of the huts of students suffering from malaria. No one who spent more than a few weeks in Manerplaw escaped the debilitating
illness.

  On a hillock not far away was the campus of the bravely named Federal University, throbbing to the pulse of Thai pop music. It was a university only in aspiration: There were two volunteer teachers, Janette from England and Jennifer from Canada, who taught English, Economics, History, Music and other subjects to several dozen refugee students from all parts of the country. The classrooms were huts, and books were in short supply, but the students worked hard, with lectures and tutorials carrying on late into the night by paraffin lamps and candles.

  The Democratic Alliance of Burma, which coordinated the different groups, was based in a long house in the woods. There I met Khaing Saw Tun, a lawyer and democracy activist from Arakan in the far west of Burma, who had been a student leader in Rangoon in the 1960s. The changes made to the judicial system under Ne Win had made the lawyer’s job almost impossible, he told me: After 1974, trained judges were relegated to the role of technical staff, with no say in the running of trials, which were in the hands of friends of the generals. “People no longer chose a lawyer who knew the law, but a lawyer who knew a judge, or they went straight to the township councils, or delivered a petition direct to Ne Win,” he said. “There is no law in Burma now. We Rangoon lawyers are supermen: We practice law where there is no law.”

  When the NCGUB arrived it set up home alongside these groups and others, all seven MPs moving into a solid teak house set at some distance from the rest of the settlement, whose population was now about five thousand. Prime minister Sein Win was away during our visit, but his Foreign Minister, Peter Limbin, had just returned from a canter around Europe and was full of good news: Planning only to attend a session of the UN’s sub-Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, he had been inundated with invitations and expressions of goodwill from European governments.

  He anticipated the obvious question. “I didn’t even ask them to recognize our government,” he said. “Only a fool would do that now. First we have to make friends. They have to find out who we are, they have to trust us. And we have much to learn—about federal systems of government, for example. I went to Europe to learn, and to make friends.” Dr. Sein Win had the same message: His coalition government was only an interim body, which would dissolve once the Pyitthu Hluttaw, the national assembly, had been allowed to meet and a full government established. Given the obvious impossibility of doing any sort of real work inside Burma, their most urgent task, in tandem with an associated group based in Mae Sot, on the Thai side of the border, called NLD-Liberated Areas (NLD-LA), was to build bridges to the outside world.

  *

  Alongside the MPs, lawyers, students, teachers and Karen fighters, Manerplaw also hosted a community of monks, living in the half-built headquarters of the All Burma Young Monks’ Union under a sign that read LONG LIVE HOLINESS. Because, although the generals were all traditional Burman Buddhists, and had for many years gone through the conventional motions of Buddhist piety, since the uprising of 1988 a gap had opened up between the monks and the junta, and was widening all the time.

  Suu and her colleagues had established good relations with the sangha, as the community of monks is known, from the beginning of their campaign. During the campaign trips of late 1988 and the first six months of 1989 they had frequently been given hospitality in monasteries around the country and participated in pagoda ceremonies. At the same time Suu’s surging popularity among the Burmese masses reflected the fact that she was increasingly seen not only as a political leader but also as a religious figure: as a bodhisattva, a holy person dedicated to relieving the sufferings of others, or as a sort of angel or spirit, a nat-thana in Burmese, a contemporary equivalent of historical figures who had met unhappy deaths, often at the hands of the authorities.8 Visiting Burma in 1990, Kei Nemoto, a Japanese scholar, observed, “There seems to be a big discrepancy between Burmese people’s expectations of Suu Kyi and her own image of the future, democratic Burma. The ordinary supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi tend to worship her as the goddess [nat-thami] of . . . suffering Burma. If Suu Kyi herself is content with this personality worship, there will be little unhappiness between them. But she is not.”9

  Yet although Suu has always decried efforts to depict her as some kind of a goddess and to worship her, she was clear from the outset of her political career that moral and ethical concerns were at the heart of her message. On this she has never wavered. So the support and solidarity of monks who, like the rest of the population, had labored for decades under the brutish and incompetent rule of the generals, was hardly a surprise.

  These two themes—her saintly resonance with the superstitious masses, and her appeal to the hearts and minds of the nation as the leader who had dared to defy the generals and launch a political revolution—came together in the summer of 1990 as it slowly dawned on the Burmese that their mass endorsement of the NLD in the privacy of the polling booth was being betrayed.

  In a phenomenon analogous to the bloody tears supposedly wept by images of the Virgin Mary in devoutly Roman Catholic countries, in the months after the election people around Burma began claiming that the left breasts of Buddha images in their local temples were swelling and weeping. “This story was believed even by people living in big cities like Rangoon or Taunggyi,” reported Professor Nemoto.10 The “miracle” was seen by many as a good omen for Aung San Suu Kyi—the swelling left breast symbolizing a mother’s nurture, and indicating that her power would grow and that she would succeed in saving Burma from suffering.

  And in a related development occurring at the same time, the monks themselves—the incarnation, one might say, of Burma’s collective conscience—began for the first time since independence to demonstrate their anger at the impiety of the rulers.

  Burma loves anniversaries, especially ones of great political moment, so when August 8th—the second anniversary of the brutal army crackdown against the 8/8/88 uprising—rolled around with the generals no closer than ever to convening parliament, some kind of protest was inevitable. What was interesting and new—and, for the generals, extremely unsettling—was that among the brushfires of anger that broke out on that day, the most significant was a protest not by students but monks.

  On the day of the anniversary, several hundred monks left their monastery in Mandalay before dawn with their begging bowls. There was nothing unusual about that: It was the unchanging ritual of the monks to give laypeople living and working near the monasteries an opportunity to gain merit by offering them food every morning of the year. What was different this time was that the monks carried their bowls upside down, symbolizing a boycott, a temporary excommunication, of the military regime: the exclusion of the army from the spiritual benefits it was in the exclusive power of the sangha to confer. Their march was joined by thousands of laypeople.

  The military had already been deployed around the city in anticipation of trouble. The soldiers ordered the demonstrators to halt, and when they refused the soldiers opened fire, killing at least four people, two of them monks.

  In response to the bloodshed, the sangha announced that their boycott of the regime would go on indefinitely. It spread rapidly from Mandalay to the rest of the country. By October, when the regime ordered the monks to end the boycott or face the forcible disbanding of their orders, around fifteen thousand monks in 160 monasteries in Rangoon—one-quarter of the capital’s total—were on strike. In Mandalay, the religious capital of the country, the number was about twenty thousand.

  When students and workers had protested en masse in 1988, the army’s response was straightforward brutality, with thousands mowed down in cold blood. But this time around, because the protests were led by and overwhelmingly composed of monks—acting, as they were to do again seventeen years later in the Saffron Revolution, when it became obvious that for non-monks to protest would invite bloody mayhem—the junta’s response was deeply conflicted.

  On the one hand they threatened to dissolve hostile monasteries and force protesting monks back into ordinary life; and these threats
were eventually acted upon when three monastic sects were dissolved. And the army garrisoned Mandalay to stop the protests recurring.

  “The military has raided more than a dozen monasteries,” the Washington Post reported,

  . . . and seized a variety of prohibited items ranging from political tracts to slingshots . . . This former Burmese capital has the look of an occupied city. But instead of foreign invaders, like the British who captured Mandalay in 1885, today’s occupiers are members of Myanmar’s own Tatmadaw, as the army is called. Helmeted troops armed with automatic weapons and grenade launchers patrol neighborhoods on foot and in trucks, man barbed-wire roadblocks on downtown streets and guard key intersections and installations. As the 11 PM curfew approached one night this week, soldiers cradling German-designed G3 assault rifles set out in single file through a residential neighborhood like a combat patrol through enemy territory . . .11

  But at the same time as purging the sangha, a quite different approach was tried: Some generals responded to the monks’ demand for an apology for the killings in August by getting down on their knees and begging forgiveness. “The military stepped up efforts to appease senior Buddhist abbots,” the Washington Post’s report continued, “by staging televised appearances in which the generals knelt before them . . . The generals . . . were filmed giving the monks such nontraditional offerings as color television sets and bottles of imported soft drinks.”

  *

  SLORC’s split response betrayed the fact that the monks’ challenge, coming on top of the drubbing the regime-sponsored NUP had suffered at the ballot box, was a powerful assault on their claims to legitimacy.

  Legitimacy in postcolonial states is a fragile and fissiparous commodity. In the first forty years of Burma’s history, legitimacy boiled down to a single name: Aung San, the saintly father of the Burmese Army, the new nation’s founding hero. Prime minister U Nu had been the Bogyoke’s close comrade-in-arms, and ruled in the martyr’s place, following the plans for government which Aung San was developing when he died, with a broadly socialist program and with the ethnic minorities linked to the center in a loose federal structure.