The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  Bertil Lintner was in the audience to see the prize awarded. “Alexander was extraordinary,” he said. “The whole audience was spellbound. There was a standing ovation afterwards which never seemed to end. And everyone was looking at each other and saying, who is this kid? And I asked Michael afterwards, ‘Did you write that speech for him?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I wrote something but he changed all of it.’ And he was very impressive. People on the Nobel Prize committee said they had never heard a speech like that.”6

  *

  If it was indeed the Nobel Committee’s choice that pushed Saw Maung over the edge into insanity, Oslo can claim the credit for the most significant development in Burmese politics since the birth of SLORC—though sadly not one that has helped turn Burma into a more civilized country.

  In the short term, however, the ascent of General Than Shwe to the chairmanship of SLORC in Saw Maung’s place was a boon for Suu and her family.7 Than Shwe’s career is an object lesson in how, in paranoid military dictatorships, it is often the most mediocre and unpromising candidates who get to the top.

  General Than Shwe, who ruled Burma for eighteen years.

  Born in 1933 in the central Burmese town of Kyaukse, which was for months the bloody front line between Allied and Japanese forces in the last months of the war, Than Shwe quietly rose through the ranks despite laying claim to no striking military successes, until he was appointed Deputy Defense Minister in July 1988, at the party congress where Ne Win dangled the promise of multiparty democracy before his people. After Saw Maung had put himself out of contention, the role of generalissimo became a contest between Than Shwe and military intelligence chief Khin Nyunt.

  The latter, he of the seven-hour press conferences, the movie star manqué who led the regime’s chorus of slander and abuse against Suu Kyi, was the most articulate, wily and ambitious of Burma’s top generals. He had been very close to Ne Win, and was friendly and approachable with foreign diplomats. His English was weak—at the end of one of his interminable harangues to the press he barked, “Any answers?” when he meant, “Any questions?”—but that didn’t stop him trying to speak it. But despite all these attributes, Khin Nyunt had two handicaps: As head of Military Intelligence he knew where all the bodies were buried—an asset in turf wars against his peers until it became a dreadful liability; and he had no battlefield experience from fighting insurgencies on the country’s borders, which put him at a grave disadvantage compared with those who did have it. Even those as unappetizing as General Than Shwe.

  Than Shwe’s rise is also another proof of Suu’s insight that fear corrupts those who wield power quite as much as those who are subject to it. Only in a system dominated by fear could a man like Than Shwe rise to the top and stay there: Throughout his career he gave the impression of being so unimpeachably mediocre as to be without ambition or hope of success. He was a man incapable of provoking fear—until suddenly he was at the top of the tree.

  The comments of those who had dealings with him are uniformly unflattering. “Short and fat with not a strong voice,” says one. “Relatively boring,” says another. “No evident personality.” “Our leader is a very uneducated man.” “There were many intelligent soldiers but he was not one of them . . . a bit of a thug.” “You feel that he’s got there by accident . . .” The closest Than Shwe gets to being complimented is in the description of a former World Bank official. “He is such an old fox,” he said.8

  Burma was now ruled by a military triumvirate consisting of Than Shwe, Khin Nyunt and General Maung Aye, this last another “obdurate and unimaginative” soldier according to a retired British diplomat, who “kept on making the most idiotic decisions about export licenses and the like—he really didn’t understand economics.”9 The aging Ne Win remained a shadowy figure in the background, and in the absence of any kiss-and-tell military memoirs or top-level defectors it is impossible to say how far he influenced events. But between them, the new rulers clearly felt it was necessary to turn over a new leaf.

  General Maung Aye, who shared power with Than Shwe after Khin Nyunt was purged.

  Accordingly, once Than Shwe was in office he agreed to the repatriation of 250,000 Muslim Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh, whence they had fled to escape waves of brutal sectarian persecution by the Burmese Army;10 and he released hundreds of political prisoners, including former prime minister U Nu. He ordered a cosmetic relaunch of the Working People’s Daily, which was now titled the New Light of Myanmar, though the contents remained as turgid and one-sided as before.

  Most significantly of all, in 1993 he set up an organization called the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA). Although not a political party, the USDA was a bid to claw back the civilian support that the regime had ceded so disastrously to the NLD. In form it was a sort of giant social organization. State employees were required to join it or lose their jobs; once they were inside it offered everything from courses in computers, sports, art, music and Buddhism to subsidies for farmers. It worked to wean members away from the NLD, exerted close control over all other social organizations in the country and incubated a militia force that the army was to use repeatedly to do its dirty work.

  The USDA was to prove the regime’s most effective tool for combating its massive post-election unpopularity: By a mixture of bribery and coercion, millions of Burmese were induced to come over to the army’s side, at least superficially, providing the regime with the legitimacy—“opinion of interest,” in Hume’s terms, but also to an extent “opinion of right”—that it so painfully lacked in the aftermath of the election. Its patronage by the army was so generous that within fifteen years it had swelled to embrace more than half the population.

  Aung San Suu Kyi was also on Than Shwe’s “to do” list, but not because he had any interest in opening a dialogue with the hated NLD. In 1992, Japan, Burma’s biggest donor of foreign aid and its closest ally ever since bailing out its stricken economy with war reparations in 1955, had, under American pressure, signed the official Development Assistance Charter, which required donors to pay attention to the state of human rights and democracy in the countries they helped. Japan was now the world’s second largest economy after its hectic years of growth in the 1980s, but it remained susceptible to moral pressure from the United States, and had shocked the junta by suspending all aid to Burma in January 1989. Japan had, however, also been one of the first to recognize SLORC as legitimate, just the next month; both Burma and Japan were keen to do business together again, and now Japan impressed on the generals the need to overcome this human rights hurdle.

  The obvious way was to do as the whole Western world demanded and let that woman out. But the regime’s stinging humiliation in the elections was still too fresh in their minds. So Than Shwe temporized. He announced that he would hold talks with the NLD, but took no steps towards doing so. And in the meantime, for the first time in more than two years, he granted Suu’s family permission to visit.

  Michael came first, in May 1992. He stayed for two weeks, banned as before from having contact with anyone outside her house—essentially sharing her conditions of detention. On his return to Bangkok he told a press conference that Suu was “in good health, but not particularly robust” and committed to staying in Burma. “Things have not been easy for her,” he went on, “but in the days we spent together she repeatedly pointed out to me that others have suffered much more than she has.”

  It was an acutely political statement: giving little hint of the health scares, the weight loss and hair loss, the outright poverty of her solitary life once she had resolved to refuse all offers of help from the regime, but at the same time underscoring that she was far from the pampered poster child of the West depicted in the state’s propaganda. “Hers is an austere and disciplined life,” he said. Under house arrest Suu spent her time “reading politics, philosophy, literature, Buddhist writings and listening to the radio.” She had also “with her own hands” sewn curtains for every room in the house. Regardin
g the government’s intentions, he said, she had “an open mind.”

  Of course the mind of the government itself was anything but open: The only satisfactory solution for the generals was for Suu to disappear—without leaving any blood on their hands. In March 1991, while General Saw Maung was still in charge, the Burmese Embassy in London had called Michael in and proposed that he write to her and ask her to come home. He turned them down flat, saying he knew well what her response would be.

  SLORC did not give up there. They had clearly learned from their numerous in situ spies that Suu had taken up meditation, and was in general showing more signs of Buddhist piety than in the past. So in the same year they prevailed on a senior Buddhist monk called U Rewata Dhamma to visit Suu and request her on the regime’s behalf to leave the country.

  The choice of this divine was not random: The connections between U Rewata Dhamma and Suu’s family went back decades. They had first got to know him in Rangoon, then when they moved to Delhi the acquaintance was renewed: The monk had gone to India’s Varanasi University to study Sanskrit and Hindi, as well as to learn more about Mahayana Buddhism. And when Suu settled down in Oxford with Michael and their first child, it so happened that Rewata Dhamma moved to England to set up the Birmingham Buddhist Vihara. The strong karmic connection was revived.

  Apart from her husband, therefore, the regime could not have picked a more influential person to try to persuade Suu to leave. And it is a reflection of the great respect in which Suu held the monk that she did not turn him down flat. Instead she agreed that she would indeed do as he proposed and leave Burma—on four conditions: the transfer of power to civilians; the release of all political prisoners; fifty minutes of broadcast time on government-run TV and radio stations; and, finally, to be allowed to walk to the airport, a distance of more than ten miles.11

  In the depths of the toughest period of her detention, with a regime billboard outside her house that screamed, in Burmese and English, CRUSH EVERY DISRUPTIVE ELEMENT, Suu had not lost her sense of humor.

  *

  U Rewata Dhamma did not give up there. He realized the futility of trying to get her to depart, but understood the urgent need to get Suu and the regime talking. And it was thanks to pressure from him, as well as pressure from Japan and the world at large, that the two sides finally met, for the first time since the funeral of Suu’s mother in January 1989.

  There were two encounters, the first on September 20, 1994, with both Than Shwe and Khin Nyunt present, the second with Khin Nyunt and two other generals. This second meeting, on October 28th, was splashed across the front page of the following day’s New Light of Myanmar. Senior General Than Shwe got the top spot in that day’s paper, with a short piece in which it was reported that he had sent “felicitations to the Republic of Turkey” on its national day. Other senior junta figures also made it onto the front page: We learn of deputy-prime minister Vice Admiral Maung Maung Khin meeting Japanese businessmen to discuss investment, the American chargé d’affaires calling on the Minister for Forestry, and the Minister of Transport receiving the Ambassador of Pakistan.

  But readers were left in no doubt about the day’s top story: “Dialogue between the State Law and Order Restoration Council Secretary-1, Lt-Gen Khin Nyunt and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi” as the headline put it. It was immortalized in no fewer than three front-page photographs, in the largest of which they beam at each other across an oversize bowl of flowers. No background was given, no mention of Suu’s role in her party—no mention of the party at all, in fact—and no mention of the fact that she had spent five years and more detained at the regime’s pleasure. But here it was, at last: “Dialogue” according to the headline.

  “The discussions, which were frank and cordial,” ran the report, “covered the current political and economic situation of the country, the political and economic reforms . . . and steps that should be taken with a view to the long-term welfare of the nation.” The absence of grammatical errors suggests that Suu may have looked over the draft.

  And that was it. After the talks finished she was driven back to University Avenue and house arrest. It was the closest she would come to negotiating with Burma’s military rulers for the next eight years, and they went precisely nowhere. When rumors began to circulate that the two parties had reached an undisclosed agreement—the first step towards her release and an ongoing dialogue—she smuggled out a statement denying it. “There has not been and there will not be any secret deal with regard to either my release or to any other issue,” she insisted.

  Both the empty “dialogue” and Suu’s release nine months later reveal the importance of Japan’s influence on the regime.12 The Japanese ambassador’s residence is within sight of Suu’s house; on July 10, 1995, Japanese diplomats were the first foreigners to be tipped off about what was unfolding, and witnessed the white car carrying the chief of police pull into 54 University Avenue at 4 PM to inform Suu that she was free. The Japanese government then did as it had promised, welcoming her release, and indicating that aid to Burma would soon be resumed.

  Although Japan’s wartime control of Burma ended in disaster, the two countries for many years enjoyed a unique bilateral relationship. Not only had Aung San, Ne Win and other young anti-imperialists trained there, but many Burmese students were given scholarships to study in Japan during the war years, and formed an influential cadre of leadership afterwards. As the first Asian country to modernize and challenge the West, Japan felt under an avuncular obligation to help Burma as it took its first faltering steps as an independent nation.

  Burma’s generals learned much from the Japanese approach to dealing with the West. Japan’s brutal experience during and after the Pacific War had taught it that the bullying demands of the West could not be ignored, but did not have to dictate the way the state behaved. They must be honored in form, but the substance was another matter. Japan was always urging the regime to do as Japan did after its surrender and erect a decorous constitutional facade, one which was acceptable to the United States in particular. For the same reason, they tried to get the regime to understand the importance of releasing Aung San Suu Kyi—not as a first step to negotiating with her, let alone ceding power to the NLD, but as a sop to the West. What mattered was to concede the symbolic demand. By doing the minimum necessary, the generals could carry on ruling and doing business just as before.

  The junta eventually went along with Japan’s ideas. Yet in the long run such diplomacy of gestures brings only grief. The gesture—in this case, the release of Suu—seems to contain the promise of further development, yet on further examination proves empty. What has been presented as promising proves to be treacherous, and what has been claimed to be a demonstration of sincerity turns out to be the opposite.

  The straight-talking American ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, was to make that clear to the generals very soon. Visiting Rangoon in September 1995, two months after Suu’s release, the highest-ranking American to meet the regime since 1988 told Khin Nyunt that merely releasing Suu was not nearly enough to persuade the world that it was making progress towards democracy. She urged other countries including Japan to hold back on investing in Burma until more serious steps were seen.

  Far from signalling a thaw in American–Burmese relations, Albright’s visit saw them go into the deep freeze, with President Clinton agreeing to Congress’s demand for the first American commercial sanctions against Burma since the ban on arms sales back in 1988.

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  One reason SLORC felt able to free Suu was because they had convinced themselves that she no longer mattered: The election result was a flash in the pan, six years is a long time, the demonising efforts of state propaganda had done their job—and besides, she was a woman! It was the same cocktail of wishful thinking and male chauvinism that had led them down the garden path in 1990. And it was to make them look just as foolish very quickly.

  Suu never planned to give impromptu talks from the slightly undignified position of he
r front gate, teetering on a table and hanging on to the spikes; it just happened that way. On the day of her release, as the news raced through Rangoon, people began making their way to University Avenue. Inside, Suu had been joined by U Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung, two of her most senior colleagues, released from jail a few months earlier, and U Aung Shwe, who had been acting leader of the party while the rest were out of action. Soon her former student bodyguards and office assistants, many of whom had spent years in jail, were also streaming back along the road to sign up for duty again. Ma Thanegi, her personal assistant during the campaigning months, had told her before they parted in 1989 that she wanted to go back to painting full time and would not be available to help any more. But after Suu’s release in 1995 Ma Thanegi was asked if she could help out for a few days until Suu found someone else. She agreed, and turned up the next day.

  And the ordinary people of Rangoon came too. By July 11th, the day after her release, thousands were milling around the gates of Suu’s house, hoping for a glimpse of her. Her first instinct was to go and mingle with them, but Tin Oo and Kyi Maung discouraged it: She was still frail after her years of austerity, and some crackpot, or regime agent, could take advantage of her proximity to do her harm. So instead a table was taken out of the house and pressed up against the steel gate and, to the delight of those gathered on the other side, suddenly her head appeared above it, flanked by her lieutenants. They clapped and roared their welcome.

  She spoke for ten minutes, telling them that democracy could still be achieved, that patience was required, and that she and her party hoped soon to be in dialogue with the regime. Then she got down again. But if the Military Intelligence agents in their pressed white shirts and sunglasses, beadily observing the goings-on, imagined that that would be the end of it, they were soon to be disabused. Some of the crowd went away but more arrived. They stayed all night. By the morning there were even more. Out of simple politeness, Suu got up on her table and spoke again. And still they didn’t go home. A microphone and loudspeakers were rigged up so it was more like a proper meeting. They were still there the following day, so she addressed them again. And so on.