by Peter Popham
When Ne Win’s military junta seized power in 1962, Aung San’s name was again invoked at every opportunity. And this time authority was found in Aung San’s writings for the dramatically anti-democratic change of direction dictated by Ne Win.12 In 1957, in the run-up to the coup, Ne Win’s pet scholar, Dr. Maung Maung (who became a short-lived President of the Union in 1988), published in the Guardian, the Rangoon-based newspaper he edited, an essay entitled “Blue Print,” which was purportedly Aung San’s vision of Burma’s future. In the essay, written in early 1941 when he was in Japan, the future Burmese leader denigrated parliamentary government which “fosters the spirit of individualism,” advocated a “strong state administration as exemplified [in the 1930s] in Germany and Italy,” and declared that “there shall be only one nation, one party, one leader” and “no parliamentary opposition, no nonsense about individualism. Everyone must submit to the State which is supreme over the individual.”
This was nothing like the sort of democratic model of governance advocated by Aung San after the defeat of the Japanese and his alliance with the returning British, the sort of policy adopted by Burma when it became independent. And although the “Blue Print” has for many years been routinely listed among Aung San’s other literary works, Gustaaf Houtman, the Burma scholar, has uncovered persuasive evidence to indicate that it was probably not written by Aung San at all, but dictated to him by his Japanese military patrons, reflecting their own fascist priorities. But because Maung Maung depicted this prescription for authoritarian rule as the work of the sainted national founder, Ne Win was able to maintain the national Aung San cult without a hiccup.
All that changed dramatically with the ascent of Aung San Suu Kyi. As we have seen in previous chapters, the embrace by Suu of forces hostile to military rule led to the junta quietly and progressively dismantling the Aung San cult—casting themselves off from the one figure who for decades had given them his blessing from beyond the grave.
Where to turn instead for authorization? On coming to power, General Saw Maung had insisted that SLORC had no intention of hanging on to power for long, but planned to hand over to a multiparty democracy—civilian rule—as quickly as possible. But now that “that woman” had won the election hands down, a quick handover was out of the question. SLORC would have to remain in power indefinitely—but on what basis?
With Aung San no longer available, the regime cast further back, to the line of kings abruptly amputated by the British in 1885. Renaming the country Myanmar, discarding “Burma” as a colonial invention (although the word “Bama” has been in use for centuries by the Burmese themselves) was a first step. But that was for foreign consumption. If the generals were to be accepted on the same terms as the people had accepted their kings, they would have to start behaving more like kings. And fundamental to Burmese kingship for a thousand years had been the king’s relationship to the sangha.
When the Buddha and his successors endorsed the right of a particular monarch to rule, that legitimized the king in the eyes of the people; and the monks performed the ceremonies of purification and so on which kept the palace on the right track, karmically speaking. It was a symbiotic relationship, because the king in turn was the patron of the sangha, giving robes and food to the monks in person and spending a large part of his fortune building them monasteries and pagodas for the greater glory of the Buddhist faith. The king was also the ultimate authority, with the right to de-recognize parts of the sangha if particular groups of monks went off in strange directions.
It was this relationship which SLORC, and General Saw Maung in particular, now needed to buy into to obtain legitimacy in the eyes of the people—the more urgently because Aung San’s daughter had gained an overwhelming popular mandate to replace them. But now, at the military’s moment of greatest need, the monks were voting with their feet and their bowls—for the other side. No wonder the generals were deeply divided over how to respond, with the followers of the tough Ne Win line urging a fierce crackdown, while the more pragmatic and/or superstitious were desperate to find a compromise, even if it involved going down on their knees and giving the monks Coca-Cola.
It is perhaps not surprising that General Saw Maung, the titular head of the junta, a mediocre, ill-educated career soldier like most of the officers with whom Ne Win surrounded himself, should have proved unequal to the strain caused by these rebuffs by both the people and monks. The first public sign that he was facing an insurrection within his brain as well as on the streets came in a long and rambling speech he gave in November 1990, a month after crushing the monks’ uprising.
“If we look at the efforts for independence,” he told an audience of local administrators in the town of Prome, in a speech monitored by the BBC,
. . . if we choose a certain outstanding period to speak about that, we will have to say it is the time of the Thirty Comrades . . . If we are to assume that Burma gained independence because of the Thirty Comrades, then the Thirty Comrades is the core force of Burma. The Defense Services were born from that core force and continue to exist until today. In other words, the Defense Services have always been there. They were there throughout efforts for independence and also after independence, protecting the nation from the perils that emerged from time to time . . .
Through the rambling emerges his compulsion to plot himself in the line of heroes who created the independent nation—in other words, in the line of Aung San, whose name he cannot bring himself to utter.
Next he turned to the 1988 uprising—and he is unable to dissemble his sense of guilt for what happened.
A similar situation arose again in 1988 and everybody knows that the Defense Services had to control the situation. The year 1988 was not so long ago and whatever happened then cannot be forgotten. Whatever I have done was done so that there is no blemish either in the nation’s history or in my own personal history.
The Defense Services are the core force of the nation, and they in turn are born from the people. It is essential to understand this . . . I understand that we cannot be divorced from the people. We are also constantly teaching the Defense Services personnel so that they understand this also . . .
And what of himself? This general with the people’s and monks’ blood on his hands? How was he to convince himself that he possessed any worth at all? “I am a person who never lies,” he slurred. “I have never once lied throughout my career. I work with discipline and abide by rules. I never lie to the others and I hate anyone lying to me . . . How long am I going to be lied to?”
Within a year, Saw Maung had gone off the rails completely. During a golf tournament for top army officers in Rangoon on December 21, 1991, he brandished his revolver and threatened to shoot onlookers, declaring himself to be the reincarnation of King Kyansittha, one of Burma’s greatest, and most peaceable, early monarchs. Four months after that, in April 1992, it was baldly announced that Saw Maung had resigned due to ill health.
General Saw Maung, the ruling general purged in 1992 after he became mentally unstable.
*
What is legitimacy and how is it obtained? According to the German sociologist Max Weber, it means that if you issue a command, it is probable that it will be obeyed, perhaps out of fear but for other reasons, too: “affective” reasons, that is emotional reasons, and “ideal” reasons, having to do with beliefs and thoughts. Weber thus picks up the themes of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who argued that the authority of government rests on opinion—opinions of interest, corresponding to fear and the hope of advantage—but also opinions of right: At least some subjects must be convinced that it is right to obey before the ruler can muster enough force to persuade those who are not.
But in the aftermath of Burma’s election, and SLORC’s decision to ignore the result, the junta’s stock of legitimacy was desperately low. An army of occupation can keep a territory subdued, as the British did in Burma following their three nineteenth-century wars there—but that is not legitimacy. And SLORC was n
ow in a very similar position: ruling by fear alone.
After visiting Manerplaw in the spring of 1991 I traveled through mainland Burma in the only way permitted at the time, on a guided tour. In the cities people were too terrified to say anything to a foreigner. I brought a letter from the lawyer I had met in Manerplaw, Khaing Saw Thun, to deliver to Daw Myint Myint Khin, the female head of the Bar Association who was also a member of the NLD’s Central Executive Committee. I hoped she would give me a good interview and introduce me to some other important people. But it was not to be.
Her office was on the first floor of an old building in the congested and chaotic commercial heart of Rangoon. She received me with frigid courtesy: Standing behind her desk she read Khaing Saw Thun’s letter, then handed it back and asked me to leave at once. “As soon as you have gone,” she said, “Military Intelligence will come up those stairs. They will want to know what you were doing here and if you gave me anything. So please take the letter away.” The following month she was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. I have no way of knowing whether my intrusion was partly responsible.
That was what rule by fear was like—but it was fear alone; there was no element of grudging respect, no concession that the army was perhaps within its rights to act like this. Once we were in our tour bus, safely away from possible spies, our guides were uninhibited in their expressions of loathing and disgust for SLORC. They pointed out roads that had been constructed by forced labor, and miserable new shanty towns built for those bulldozed out of the city center. In the ancient city of Pagan—once I had quietly revealed to the guide that I was a journalist—I was loaned a bicycle and given a special one-man tour of the sad new township where the lacquerware-makers of the city had been decanted by the regime in their efforts to tart up the city for foreign tourists. The ordinary people of Burma, in the aftermath of the election, were the subjects of a regime that they regarded as both brutal and illegitimate.
Gustaaf Houtman draws an important distinction between two Burmese terms that both translate roughly as “power”: ana, which he renders as “the naked power of the state,” and awza, the primary meaning of which is “nutrition” and which conveys the idea of giving strength, as in “rich soil.” Houtman translates awza as “influence.”
“Ana and awza, just like authority and influence, blend into one another,” he writes. “One who is greatly influential is often given authority, and one who is in a position of authority is also able to influence.”13 A great leader like Aung San, and like a very few Burmese kings (including Kyansittha), possessed both ana and awza—which explains their magnetic hold on the emotions of the people. But in the aftermath of the 1990 election, SLORC found its last residue of awza used up. “The army,” he writes, “used to holding the reins of power since 1962, knows that their authoritarian (ana) instruments have failed to create enduring structures of state, and they now fear the invisible, fluid, and unbounded trickling throughout the country of influential (awza) and popular personalities . . . They fear these individuals might just succeed in snatching away their privileges.”
The generals could console themselves that the one personality above all others who embodied awza, Aung San Suu Kyi, was locked away from the people and completely incommunicado, her ample resources of awza unable to be expressed. But if they had known how she was spending her time while bottled up in University Avenue, even that comfort would have been denied them.
*
Although Aung San Suu Kyi has spent more than fifteen years in detention, the first years were the hardest to bear. She has said as much on numerous occasions. Soon after she was released in November 2010 she told BBC reporter John Simpson, “the first years were the worst . . . they threw me in at the deep end.”
Every human consolation had been taken from her, one by one: Her party colleagues, her friends, her children, her husband. She had no telephone to compensate. She still had her family’s letters and parcels with books and tasty items of food that would remind her of home. But in the run-up to the election, Khin Nyunt tried to obtain a little of the awza that Suu possessed in such ample quantities by telling the press that the junta was doing her the favor of passing on all these luxury goods that would turn the average Burmese pale with envy. One of the parcels addressed to her was opened and the contents photographed for the New Light of Myanmar: a Jane Fonda work-out video, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, novels, food in tins and jars, laid out for the cameras.
After that, Suu declined to accept any more letters or parcels until her release in 1995. It was a refusal that has been attacked as obdurate and harsh, particularly for its effect on her children, who had no contact with her at all for about two years. But given her desire to live in full solidarity with her imprisoned party colleagues, it is understandable. Receiving mail should be a detainee’s right; instead it was presented as a favor, and she refused all favors that accorded her special status.
Her isolation deepened. She had no visitors, either from elsewhere in Burma or from abroad. To maintain solidarity with her comrades in jail, who would have starved without relatives to provide food for them, she refused to accept food from the regime. Instead, as she had no access to money, she instructed her guards to remove furniture from the house and sell it to buy her food. They went along with the charade—though in fact the furniture was stored in an army warehouse. But the money the fictitious sales yielded was barely enough to keep her alive. She later told an interviewer:
Sometimes I didn’t have enough money to eat. I became so weak from malnourishment that my hair fell out, and I couldn’t get out of bed. I was afraid that I had damaged my heart. Every time I moved my heart went thump-thump-thump and it was hard to breathe. I fell to nearly 90 pounds from my normal weight of 106. I thought to myself that I’d die of heart failure, not of starvation . . . Then my eyes started to go bad. I developed spondylosis, which is a degeneration of the spinal column.14
She paused, then told the interviewer, putting a finger to her head: “But they never got me up here.”
Sometimes she would wake at night in the dilapidated old house, and then her father’s spirit would keep her company, she said. “I would come down at night,” she told another reporter, “and walk around and look up at his photograph, and feel very close to him. I would say to him then, ‘It’s you and me, father, against them,’ and I felt very comforted by his presence. I felt at times as if he was there with me.”15
Suu had already known plenty of sorrow in her life, from the assassination of Aung San to the death of her brother six years later. But she had never been tested like this before. It commanded all her inner resources.
When, years later, she was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Natal—“the equivalent,” she responded appreciatively, “of a cohort of legendary heroes coming to the aid of our cause”—her speech of thanks, delivered by Michael on her behalf, dwelt on the lessons she had learned in those terrible days.16
“Those who have to tread the long and weary path of a life that sometimes seems to promise little beyond suffering and yet more suffering need to develop the capacity to draw strength from the very hardships that trouble their existence,” she wrote. “It is from hardship rather than from ease that we gather wisdom. During my years under house arrest I learned my most precious lesson from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, many of whose verses, even in unsatisfactory translation, reach out to that innermost, elusive land of the spirit that we are not always capable of exploring by ourselves. The title of the poem, ‘Walk Alone,’ is bleak and its message is equally bleak.”
If they answer not your call, walk alone.
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou of evil luck,
Open thy mind and speak out alone.
If they turn away and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
O thou of evil luck,
Trample the thorns under thy tread,
And along the blood-lined tra
ck travel alone.
If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled by storm,
O thou of evil luck,
With the thunder-flame of pain ignite thine own heart,
And let it burn alone.
Suu went on, “It is not a poem that offers heart’s ease, but it teaches that you can draw strength from your harshest experience, that a citadel of endurance can be built on a foundation of anguish. How can anyone who has learnt to ignite his heart with the thunder-flame of his own pain ever know defeat? Victory is ensured to those who are capable of learning the hardest lessons that life has to offer.”
But what is the nature of the “victory” that these hard lessons ensure? It cannot mean that the generals are going to cave in, simply because a woman has suffered. So what does it mean?
*
Once in detention, the habits of discipline instilled by her mother came to Suu’s help. “I started off on the basis that I would have to be very disciplined and keep to a strict timetable,” she said later. “I thought that I must not waste time and let myself go to seed . . . I would get up at 4:30 and meditate for an hour . . .”17
This was new. It was a practice that began with her detention, more or less: In the time when she suddenly went from being the busiest, most in-demand person in Burma to having all the time in the world, and no one to share it with.
Before this her Buddhist practice had been conventional. In 1987 she had put her sons through the shinbyu ceremony, like every Burman mother in the country. The year before that in the Japanese countryside she had shown sudden devotion before a Burmese shrine. And once a week she told her Buddhist rosary. On the campaign trail, Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary about the mantra Suu recited every week on Tuesday, the day of the week when she was born—when she remembered to do so: