The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  One of her family’s oldest friends in Rangoon was an aging businessman called Leo Nichols, part-Scottish, part-Greek, part-Armenian, part-Burmese, “Uncle Leo” to his many friends, and perhaps the only expatriate businessman to have survived the Ice Age of capitalism ushered in by Ne Win. It was Uncle Leo who had phoned Suu in Oxford at the end of March 1988 to inform her of her mother’s illness.

  A Roman Catholic and the son of the owner of a Rangoon-based shipping company, he had returned to Burma after the Japanese defeat in the Second World War. In 1972, as the prospects for foreigners in the country crumbled, his family emigrated to Australia, but he insisted on staying on in “the only place he could ever regard as home,” as Michael Aris later put it.20 He was appointed honorary consul to the Scandinavian countries, which gave him a degree of diplomatic protection. While he was forced to sell off his treasured collection of vintage cars, he buried his favorite Bugatti at Pagan—or so he claimed.

  Nichols had had his run-ins with the regime in the past: During the uprising of 1988 he had frequently offered Suu advice and practical help, for which he was later subjected to a severe interrogation. After she was released from house arrest in 1995 he met her every Friday for breakfast and resumed his role as helper and adviser, finding a gardener to redeem her ruined garden, for example, and workmen to repair her house, while continuing to support her political campaign. One practical way he helped out was by sending her “Letters from Burma” to the Mainichi Daily News in Tokyo from his fax machine.

  And that was how the regime nailed him. He owned two fax machines, one of them registered but the other one not. Possession of a fax machine without a license is a criminal offence in Burma, carrying a maximum sentence of five years. In April Nichols was arrested, interrogated over many days and sentenced to three years’ jail.

  Like the sentence given in 1989 to another of Suu’s friends and protectors, the writer and war hero Maung Thaw Ka, it was in effect a sentence of death: He was confined to Insein Jail without the medicines for his heart condition and diabetes. Two months later he fell ill and was taken to Rangoon General Hospital where he died soon afterwards, aged sixty-five, perhaps of a heart attack or a stroke.

  Nichols’ death and the betrayal by Ma Thanegi and other friends and colleagues were the occasion for one of Suu’s most painful and strongly felt essays.

  In her writing as much as in her interviews, Suu is generally at pains to put on her best, most cheerful face. That is an Asian reflex, encountered everywhere from Rangoon to Tokyo, but in Suu’s situation it was also sound tactics: If she had shown any hint of anger or misery, the regime could have congratulated itself that its campaign to damage her morale was working. But in “Letter from Burma No. 33, A Friend in Need,” the mask of equanimity slipped.

  It is an essay about how persecution subjects friendship to the toughest test of all, pitilessly exposing one’s friends’ true qualities. The process yields surprises. Those one might have considered weak reveal their strengths. But others who seemed infinitely dependable give up the struggle with shocking ease.

  Thanks to what she calls “the full force of state persuasion,” concepts previously confined to the covers of books—“villainy and honor, cowardice and heroism”—become the stuff of everyday life. “The glaring light of adversity,” she writes, “reveals all the rainbow hues of the human character and brings out the true colors of people, particularly of those who purport to be your friends.”21

  Some, like Nichols, emerge from the test with greater stature than before. “The man stripped of all props except that of his spirit is . . . testing the heights that he can scale,” she wrote. But others shrivel and collapse. “The kiss of Judas is no longer just a metaphor, it is the repeated touch of cool perfidy on one’s own cheek. Those held in trust and esteem show themselves capable of infinite self-deception as they seek to deceive others. Spines ostensibly made of steel soften and bend like wax . . .”

  Suu had been brought up with high moral standards, in emulation of her father. In the England of the Sixties, comfortable and prosperous, that didn’t seem to matter very much: Her loud championing of virginity before marriage and her insistence that children strictly obey the rules of party games were regarded as marks of risible eccentricity rather than anything more important.

  But in the testing fire of Burma, those standards were the difference between honor and shame, between hope and despair. To be Suu’s friend and supporter in London or Oxford or Washington, DC, is easy. To be her friend in Rangoon or Mandalay is one of the toughest decisions you can ake. True friendship, as she pointed out in the same essay, demands the highest moral qualities: “According to the teachings of Buddhism, a good friend is one who gives things hard to give, does what is hard, bears hard words, tells you his secrets, guards your secrets assiduously, does not forsake you in times of want and does not condemn you when you are ruined. With such friends, one can travel the roughest road.”22

  Suu did not want for such friends: It is one of the paradoxes of brutal societies that they inculcate great virtue in those who defy their brutality. But by turning Ma Thanegi and others, and killing Nichols, the Burmese regime discovered in what way and to what extent Suu was vulnerable. And they had an even crueler trick up their sleeve.

  *

  Throughout the 1990s, Michael Aris plays a shadowy but at the same time a central role in Suu’s story. If ever there was a case of true friendship being tried in the fire of adversity it was their marriage. During their decades as man and wife there were the frictions and irritations that come up in all marriages: Suu disliked his smoking and nagged him to stop, complained to her friends that he was too easygoing to fulfill his potential at university and too tolerant of English social hypocrisy. In family snaps from those years she frequently looks as if she would rather be anywhere on the planet than north Oxford.

  Family life certainly had its trials, yet when the real tests came Michael was magnificent. If Suu was born to do what she found herself doing in Burma, Michael was born to be her perfect foil, her perfect other half.

  That statement requires immediate qualification: For their sons he could never replace their mother, nor even be a very satisfactory substitute. He knew how to cook an omelette, but it was a great relief for the whole family when he found a pair of Burmese Christian nuns to come and live with them in Oxford and take care of the housekeeping. (SLORC eventually found a way to terminate that arrangement, forcing the nuns to return to Burma.) Nor could he begin to compensate emotionally for Suu’s absence. That was an unfillable void.

  But from the start Michael understood the path she had gone down, understood why it was for her an unavoidable decision, and realized that as a result the family’s life had entered an utterly new phase. Never did he show any hint of bafflement, resentment, doubt or hostility, emotions that would be quite understandable for an ambitious man whose career and indeed whose whole life had been thrown out of kilter by his partner flying off at a dangerous, extraordinary tangent.

  Instead, without a blip, he became her other half in the world outside: marshalling support, passing on news, giving interviews and then, as Suu’s defiance became a global phenomenon, traveling tirelessly as her personal envoy to collect awards and pass on messages. He was “her knight in shining armor,” said one friend, “the one who was defending and fighting for her and trying to slay the dragon for her.”23 It was at Michael’s suggestion that Ma Thanegi kept her campaign trail diary in 1989; it was Michael who, seven years later, wrote to Ma Thanegi terminating the relationship after she began launching public attacks on Suu and the NLD.

  Peter Carey commented:

  In the first twenty years of their marriage [Suu] was the north Oxford housewife, but after 1988 that completely turned on its axis and it was not Michael who was the focus any longer, it was Suu, and Michael was there to provide the support, to bring up the children, to drive them to school, to make the meals.

  In the 1990s the reality began to da
wn: He was a single father in Park Town . . . looking after his children, being as good a father as possible, the tides of Burma lapping to the door—faxes and messages and requests for interviews, press releases.24

  Carey quotes a Javanese saying about the qualities required to be a good wife: “‘To follow behind and serve as a good woman should’—I think that was the role that Michael adopted, he was following behind and serving but in an incredibly discreet and subtle and effective fashion.”

  In photographs and videos Michael always looks much the same: tall, gentle, reflective, a little untidy; perhaps somewhat stern and sad but always calm and composed. But there was a more volatile side to his character that the camera did not see. “Michael stayed with me once in Bangkok after the house arrest started,” said Terry McCarthy, who at the time was the Independent’s correspondent in Bangkok.

  We were friends, we got along very well, and I remember him shouting down the phone to the people in the Burma immigration office, his eyebrows going mad . . . He looks very affable and calm in the photographs but he had a fiery side too, and he found the behavior of the generals so irrational that it drove him mad. Suu on the other hand knew where they were coming from, she knew why she had infuriated them so . . . Although he supported her fully, it was very tough for him. That’s why he was so angry with the generals: He blamed them for taking his wife away from him.25

  He may also have had an unrealiztic view of Suu’s hopes of coming to power. Soon after her release from detention in the summer of 1995, he and Kim were granted visas—he could not have known that it was the last Burma visa he would receive in his life—and flew to Rangoon. Ma Thanegi said that when she met him there she felt he had convinced himself that power was about to drop into his wife’s hands:

  Once in late June or early July 1995, Dr. Aris and I sat on the stairs in the NLD office—there were too many people downstairs and no chairs left—talking about the situation. He was very excited and sure that NLD would soon be in power. He kept saying, the regime must learn to change, they must learn to change. I said, they’re not going to, they’re not going to. We went around in circles like this for about five minutes. I could not penetrate his wild expectations.

  Another old friend, Bertil Lintner, found a different flaw in him: excess of prudence:

  He was overly cautious. When he and the boys flew from Rangoon to Bangkok in late August 1989, everybody knew they were coming but nobody knew what they looked like: Very few people in Bangkok had met Michael and the kids. And we Bangkok-based reporters were there to meet them and it was sort of agreed that I would identify Michael as I was the only one who knew him. So when he and the boys came out I said, “Hello, Michael!” and he said, “Not you!” So I said all right, and stepped aside.

  In the evening he rang me and said, “I’m sorry about that, let’s get together tonight”—he had brought out a load of stuff he wanted me to have. But he didn’t want people to know I even recognized him. It was silly.26

  Yet Michael had excellent reason to be very careful: The regime saw Suu’s marriage to him as one of the main chinks in her armor, and never missed an opportunity to insult her for her supposed “treachery” to Burma in marrying a foreigner. Michael was a treasure for her, but in her dealings with her co-nationals he was always a liability.

  “The Bogadaw [a term for the wife of a European] has lost her right to inherit her father’s name, Aung San,” the New Light of Myanmar declared in a typically venomous piece on May 9, 1997. “She should be called Daw Michael Aris or Mrs. Michael Aris . . .” Why had she lost the right? Because the English, the writer claimed (in defiance of the historical record) had been behind Aung San’s assassination, and because she had failed to “safeguard [her] own race,” sullying her blood by mixing it with a foreigner’s. For the regime’s propagandists, her marriage to Michael was all the proof they needed that Suu was an agent of foreign powers.

  As a result Michael was discreet to the point of invisibility in supporting Suu, and demanded that Alexander and Kim behave likewise. Yet although he continued to work in his beloved Tibetan studies, publishing several specialist books and finally succeeding, with the warm encouragement of the Prince of Wales and the generous support of the Rausing family, of Tetrapak fame, in setting up Britain’s first Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Center at Oxford, no one close to him doubted that it was around Suu and her struggle that his life revolved.27

  His sister Lucinda estimates that he spent at least half his time working on Suu’s behalf, and says he had a secretary who worked exclusively on Burmese matters. “I don’t think Suu ever realized how much he did,” she said.28 But as the years passed and every visa application after 1995 was turned down, the strain began to tell. Lintner recalled:

  He was offered this teaching fellowship in Sanskrit at Harvard. It suited him perfectly well and Suu was happy with it too. He had this small studio flat in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I visited him there, I went to see him in his room. He was still afraid of Burmese spies: He didn’t want to meet in public.

  It was tragic to see that room. There were pictures of Suu on all the walls. And ashtrays with cigarette butts towering up . . .29

  The strain of the years of enforced separation was now telling on him fatally. In the summer of 1998 he suffered appalling backache, which is often associated with some forms of cancer. Tests that he took in September proved negative, but in January 1999 he sent Suu a letter via the daughter of a Rangoon-based friend with the news that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

  Soon it became clear that his condition was deteriorating quickly, and his attempts to persuade the Burmese regime to give him a visa took on a sudden urgency. All his eminent connections and those of his family were pressed into service: Prince Charles and Countess Mountbatten were only two of the great and good who sent letters to Senior General Than Shwe, pleading with him to issue the dying man a visa so that he and Suu could meet one more time before he died.

  It was perhaps inevitable, given the extremely narrow view the regime has always taken of its interests, that they would interpret Suu’s emotional emergency in the cruelest and most stupidly calculating way conceivable: as the best opportunity yet to get her to leave the country.

  A Western diplomat who was close to Suu remembers this harrowing period vividly. “They not only said no to these appeals—in fact they never replied—but they cynically used it in psychological warfare,” he recalled. “Towards the very end they started printing stuff saying, of course any time Suu Kyi wants to leave she can go to her dying husband, it’s the duty of every proper wife to go and be at the bed of the dying husband rather than the other way around, etcetera, etcetera. I was so sickened by the way they dealt with this thing that I refused to shake the foreign minister’s hand any more. I thought he was very, very craven in going along with this despicable tactic.”30

  Michael was failing fast, and friends of the couple in Rangoon witnessed their tragedy at close quarters. One of them recalled:

  Towards the very end Michael was extremely, falsely optimistic—about the visa, about himself: Sure, he said, I shall be getting better soon, the visa will be coming through soon. He may genuinely not have realized how quickly this disease was going to carry him off. It was one of the most ghastly trials that Suu has ever had to face, and she did it with enormous dignity and courage.

  Another friend added:

  Her bravery in such an appallingly difficult time was testimony to her being an exceptional person. Ultimately I think her strong Buddhist faith sustained her.

  Back in England, Suu and Michael’s old friend Sir Robin Christopher, at the time the British ambassador to Indonesia, visited Michael in hospital. Both Suu and Michael had always been keenly aware that if she ever left Burma that would be the end of the story—her passport would be cancelled and she would never be readmitted. Now, however, they began to discuss the possibility again in earnest. But the conclusion they reached was the same as before.

&nbs
p; Michael Aris died on March 27, 1999, his fifty-third birthday, less than three months after learning that he had the disease. Christopher flew to see Suu in Rangoon soon afterwards. “I arrived as a memorial ceremony to Michael was in progress,” he said. “There were probably about 300 people there in the garden, monks chanting, Suu listening to them.” When it was all over he and Suu talked things over at length. Christopher recalled:

  At the end it was tragic that he was not allowed to see her. She talked about it a lot, and how they had discussed it. They both understood that there were an awful lot of her followers in Burma whose livelihoods depended on her being there: If she wasn’t there they would be rounded up and either killed or imprisoned. And a number of families existed on the meager support that she was able to pull together. Food and freedom were the issues: food for the families of those that were imprisoned, who would have completely gone under without her help, while she felt her closest followers would almost certainly have been arrested once she was out of the way. So in other words an awful lot of lives depended on her staying where she was. Michael was going to die anyway. They shared the decision. It was a very strong relationship.

  She was grieving. But fundamentally this had not destroyed her. She had seen it coming, they had communicated a lot, she was wracked by the issue of whether she should go back or whether she shouldn’t. But she was consoled by the fact that Michael had said, don’t come. Don’t come. He entirely understood the situation.31

  “I am so fortunate to have had such a wonderful husband who always understood my needs,” Suu wrote on the day of his death. “Nothing can take that away from me.”

  The military regime, which in 1997, on the advice of an American public relations consultancy, had changed its name, to the State Peace and Development Council or SPDC, had run out of ideas. They had succeeded in confining Suu to Rangoon: Every time she had tried to travel since 1998 they had blocked her at the capital’s outskirts. Her refusal to turn back had led to a series of stand-offs that had their farcical elements, but each time the regime eventually got its way.