The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  His gloomy words turned out to be prescient. After a week I went home to Delhi, having given the Independent’s readers what I hoped was a pleasant jolt with the news that (as the headline ran) “Burmese junta hints at power-sharing deal with Suu Kyi.” But there was no follow-up, no hint from the generals that talks were planned or under way, no rumors of progress on the diplomatic grapevine. I might have made the whole thing up.

  *

  The Rangoon-based experts who had stoked hopes of progress were not, however, living in fantasy land: Eight years later, after she emerged from her third spell of house arrest on November 13, 2010, Suu herself revealed, in an interview with a local journalist, that she had had a series of talks with Brigadier General Than Tun, the officer appointed by the regime to liaise with the NLD—the first and only negotiations in more than twenty years to go beyond preliminaries. “We were almost there,” she said. But these talks were a long time starting, and in the end, through no fault of Suu’s, they were aborted before anything could be achieved.

  Both the proximity of success and the eventual failure were caused by the particular strengths and weaknesses of Khin Nyunt.

  By the time Suu emerged from detention in May 2002, Burma’s Ne Win period was over. The old tyrant Ne Win was still alive, but in the months before Suu’s release two of his children had been accused of plotting a coup and arrested, and he himself had been put under house arrest. He was to die in December, lonely and little-mourned and still in detention. Khin Nyunt’s rise to the top had been facilitated by his patron Ne Win, the man “through whose nostrils” he breathed, as the Burmese said, and Ne Win’s disgrace and death left the protégé exposed. Khin Nyunt held two key jobs—head of Military Intelligence and Secretary-1 of SPDC, the ruling council—and it was he who had rescued the state from bankruptcy by dropping Ne Win’s disastrous economic policies and approving oil and gas deals with foreign companies. He was likewise the force behind the signing of ceasefire agreements with most of the warring groups on Burma’s frontiers, the opening up of the tourism market and the drive to build new hotels: cautiously starting to align the country with its Southeast Asian neighbors, taking some tentative bites out of Burma’s image as a hermit state.

  If he was interested in converting Burma from a military autocracy into a democracy, it was a very well-kept secret. On the contrary, all the evidence indicates that what he was really interested in doing—like Burma’s other military rulers before and since—was concentrating as much power and wealth as possible in his own hands. The difference between him and Ne Win or Than Shwe was that Khin Nyunt showed rather more intelligence and imagination in the way he went about it.

  Robert Gordon, Britain’s ambassador to Rangoon in the late 1990s, remembers him as the only senior figure in the regime he could really communicate with.

  “He was a fascinating figure,” he said, “much more approachable than the other top generals.”1 Not only was he, at the peak of his career, uniquely powerful, but he was also the closest thing to an acceptable face that the regime possessed. “Often key visitors would be introduced to him, and he would make efforts to speak English—badly but intelligibly.” On one occasion, Gordon recalled his young son squirting the general in the face with a water pistol: Khin Nyunt laughed it off, and both father and son lived to tell the tale.

  “With Khin Nyunt,” he went on, “I always felt there was a very subtle mind, but too subtle for its own good. Endless amounts of effort would be expended on trying to bring Khin Nyunt and Suu together, and you’d have to go back crab-like through several intermediaries.”

  Ingrid Jordt is an American anthropologist, whose unusually deep and close familiarity with Burma began with her taking the Buddhist precepts as a nun in a Burmese monastery in the mid-1980s. She subsequently returned to the United States and followed a career as an academic, writing the first and so far only book in English about Burma’s mass lay meditation movement. As an “old yogi,” a veteran meditator, she makes regular return visits to the country.

  As Jordt sees it, Khin Nyunt was the key figure in the regime’s attempts to claw back the religious legitimacy which Ne Win had sacrificed back in the 1960s when he adopted a rigorously secular political structure and deprived the sangha of state patronage.

  “Khin Nyunt was the main force behind the revitalization of religion during the 1990s,” she said. “It was during this period that we saw the regime tie its legitimacy ever more closely to the sangha and to religion. His efforts need to be seen as a reaction to the mostly hands-off approach to religion by the military regime during the Ne Win period.”2

  In changing the country’s name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, the military regime was seeking to align its rule with that of the precolonial kings. Part of that effort involved undoing the secularizing tendencies of Ne Win and once again knitting the monks into the nation’s political structure. As Jordt sees it, Khin Nyunt was the driving force behind this tendency, and was frequently shown in the state media feeding monks, visiting religious sites and supervising the restoration of old pagodas and the building of new ones.

  The culmination of these efforts was the restoration of the Shwedagon, the most important religious building in the country, in 1999. It was an undertaking fraught with karmic promise and peril, and the placing of the hti, the delicate golden “umbrella,” on the topmost tip of the stupa was the most tense moment of all: the moment when, if the ruler performing the sacred ceremony was morally unworthy, nature could be expected to rebel. A taxi driver told Jordt that when the Shwedagon’s hti was being put up, everyone was frightened that there would be earthquakes and storms, because they knew the regime was not good. But when the hti was successfully hoisted and nature had made no calamitous objections, everyone felt disheartened, because it meant that these rulers were legitimate—which rendered Burma’s situation even worse. It meant that they were stuck with this government.

  “In Burmese thinking, political legitimacy is not based solely on regime performance,” she said, “but is based on the idea of whether rulers have accumulated the spiritual potency—hpoun in Burmese—that sustains power, even if rulers are cruel and oppressive. But eventually a bad king’s store of merit runs out and a virtuous king takes his place, thanks to having a larger store of merit-based hpoun.”

  As his Shwedagon project shows, Khin Nyunt was a risk-taker, in contrast to his fanatically cautious colleagues at the head of the junta. And just as he was prepared to risk all by hoisting the Shwedagon’s hti, he was also prepared to talk to Suu. With his rough but workable English, his university education and his trips abroad, he saw clearly that she and her party were the most important obstacles on the road to the junta’s acceptance by the international community. If some kind of accommodation could be reached with them, the rewards in terms of removing sanctions, the inflow of new business and the approval of the West could change the nation’s prospects dramatically.

  With his once all-powerful patron finally out of the picture, Khin Nyunt had to move stealthily: hence the elaborate complications involved in bringing him and Suu together. But indirectly the negotiations appeared to be grinding slowly forward. Razali Ismail, the career diplomat from Malaysia who had become the UN Secretary General’s special envoy for Burma, flew in and out of Rangoon frequently, paying at least a dozen visits during this period and always saw both Suu and Khin Nyunt when he did: Coming from a country respected by the junta for President Mahatir’s Look East policy, he enjoyed more prestige and had more leverage than any other UN envoy before or since.

  But before any breakthrough could be achieved, the whole process was derailed in the most violent assault on Suu and her colleagues since the party’s creation.

  *

  Aung San Suu Kyi’s claim to significance rested on two facts: her party’s overwhelming victory in 1990, and her and her party’s continuing popularity with the Burmese masses. While the first fact could not be denied even by the junta, the second might fluctuate as political
and social conditions within the country evolved: Suu could not take it for granted, given the regime’s relentless persecution of the NLD’s officers and members around the country. Her rapport with ordinary people all over the country had been the great transforming event of the 1989 election campaign. After the years of isolation she needed to meet them again, to reassure them that even though the revolution had not yet succeeded she was still dedicated to the cause. That is why, on regaining her freedom, it was an urgent priority for her to pick up where she had left off in May 1989 and go back on the road.

  But it was an equally urgent priority for the junta to prevent this happening. With the much-touted new constitution still undrafted, and the National Convention that had been given the job of drafting it in suspension for years, no new elections were in view. But the generals had a visceral fear of Suu’s massive popularity and the mandate to rule which it implied, the mandate they had long since betrayed.

  Their slogan against Suu was that she “relied on external forces”—that she was a puppet of the West. And it was very disagreeable for them to be presented with new evidence that, on the contrary, what she relied on was internal forces—the overwhelming weight of popular opinion inside the country.

  During her last spell of liberty, in the late-1990s, Suu had repeatedly tried to resume her tours of the country but had repeatedly had her car blocked by the military close to Rangoon, resulting in deadlocks which on several occasions lasted for days. For the regime the drawback to this tactic was that, because of the proximity to the capital, these confrontations were quickly picked up by the foreign media. They succeeded in bottling her up, but at the cost each time of conceding another propaganda goal.

  The time was ripe for a radically different approach. So now, while Khin Nyunt and his colleagues were creeping in their crab-like fashion towards some kind of an agreement with Suu, his main rival in the ruling triumvirate, Senior General Than Shwe, was developing a very different strategy for dealing with Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularity once and for all. He would have her eliminated.

  A video grab of Suu speaking at Monywa, hours before her attempted assassination.

  2

  NIGHTMARE

  WITHIN a few weeks of her release in May 2002, Suu put to the test the agreement UN envoy Razali Ismail had prized from the junta, granting her not merely the right to leave her home but perfect liberty to go wherever she chose. She took her democracy show back on the road.

  And it was as if she had never been away, as if nothing had happened in the thirteen years since her last election campaign trip in May 1989. If anyone supposed—and some of the most powerful men in the country apparently did suppose—that the Burmese masses had forgotten all about their heroine in the intervening years, it was a rude awakening. As videos shot during her meetings attest, everywhere she went the crowds were again vast and vastly good-humored. Her tours in 1989 had been the most dramatic political manifestations in Burma’s independent history, the most vivid demonstrations, nationwide, of the strength of opposition to the junta and the strength of support for her. The reruns in 2002 and 2003, despite the passing of the years, were no less so.

  But this time around there was a sinister new element. One of the initiatives taken by Than Shwe soon after supplanting Saw Maung at the head of the junta in 1992 (as described in Part Four) was the creation of a mass organization to counter the influence of the NLD. The Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), which has since mutated into the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), now Burma’s notional ruling party, is the military’s civilian proxy: its means of securing the allegiance of millions of ordinary Burmese at every level of society by giving them favorable access to services and facilities, ranging from paved roads to courses in computing, from which the masses of those who don’t belong are excluded.

  That is the relatively respectable face of the organization. But there is another side to the USDA which is not respectable at all. When occasion demands, it provides hoodlums, thieves, drunks, drug addicts and other men with nothing to lose with the weapons and training to do the dirty jobs which the regime does not care to sully the military’s fair name by entrusting to soldiers. The USDA can rapidly mutate into a force of mercenary vigilantes, given a vicious edge by opening the gates of the jails, offering drink, drugs, crude weapons and meager bribes to the inmates, then sitting back and watching the mayhem.

  Suu had long experience of their tactics. “The USDA has become a very dangerous organization,” she said in 1996. “It is now being used in the way Hitler used his Brownshirts . . . [it] is being used to crush the democratic movement.”1 The same year, when Suu and her colleagues were driving from her house in University Avenue to address a meeting nearby, a USDA gang attacked the car and smashed the windows; two years later other thugs from the organization forced her car off the road. And during her new tours of the country, this shadowy militia dogged Suu and her colleagues every step of the way.

  The new calendar of visits, submitted to and approved by the military authorities in advance, covered much the same ground as the earlier ones. The journeys began in June 2002; Suu traveled in a new Toyota Land Cruiser, and to counter the USDA threat her team included a significantly larger number of student bodyguards than previously.

  They visited Mon state, to the east of Rangoon, where Ma Thanegi had noted in 1989 that the crowds were the biggest in the country; the watery land of the Irrawaddy Delta west and north of Rangoon, where Suu was born and where, in February 1989 in the village of Danubyu, she had narrowly avoided being shot dead. They went southeast to Karen state, bordering Thailand, where she paid a second visit to U Vinaya in the town of Thamanya, the celebrated anti-regime monk, now ninety-two and increasingly frail, whom she had first met after her release in 1995 and whose work in creating a town animated by metta she had described in her “Letters from Burma.”

  They visited Arakan state on the border with Bangladesh, Chin state, bordering India in the northwest, Shan state to the northeast, site of her father’s agreement with Burma’s ethnic races in 1947, and many places in between—some ninety-five townships altogether, as the regime later recorded.

  On May 6, 2003, she arrived in Mandalay, Burma’s old capital, for the second time since her release, and made a number of sorties into the surrounding countryside, the last of which began on May 29th and would take her west to the town of Monywa.

  The journey was planned as carefully as a military manoeuver—which in a sense it resembled, despite the authorities’ formal approval of the itinerary. Suu had warned her companions that if they were attacked by the USDA, they were not to retaliate. So their only hope of safety was in careful planning, and in numbers.

  Wunna Maung, one of her bodyguards, said later in testimony to the US Congress:

  Before our journey we heard many rumors that local officials of the military regime were training their troops with blunt weapons, including clubs, spears and iron spikes. For this reason, Daw Suu advised us to absolutely avoid any words or behavior that might lead to confrontation with any members of the military. She told us that if we were attacked we must not fight back. Even if we are struck or killed, she said, we should absolutely not fight back.2

  Suu was well aware of the potential danger they faced. During one of the most tense periods of her previous spell of freedom, in November 1996, the secretary of the USDA, U Win Sein, who was also Minister of Transport, had told a meeting of villagers near Mandalay that killing Aung San Suu Kyi was their duty. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, “the creator of internal political disturbances” must be “eradicated,” he said. “Do you understand what is meant by eradicated?” he asked them. “Eradicated means to kill. Dare you kill Daw Suu Kyi?” Villagers within earshot later testified that he repeated the question five or six times but received no reply.

  Given this high-level interest in her elimination, Suu was taking no chances. At 9 AM on May 29th, seven NLD cars and twenty motorcycles rolled out of Mandalay on the
road west. In the lead, a few hundred yards ahead of the rest, was a scout car; next came Suu’s dark green Toyota, driven by a law student called Kyaw Soe Lin, one of the party’s legal staff, followed by two other cars filled with senior NLD figures, including party vice-chairman U Tin Oo, then the cars of local supporters. The group consisted of about a hundred people in all.

  The trouble that awaited them had been carefully prepared. Starting six days earlier, the military authorities in the area, under the command of plump, pasty-faced Lieutenant Colonel Than Han, had mustered local USDA members from townships around the town of Shwebo, sixty miles north of Mandalay, a total it is claimed of about 5,000 men, and brought them to the grounds of Depayin High School along with more than fifty lorries and ten pickup trucks, to train them for the assault. On the day of the attack they were issued with their weapons: bamboo staves, baseball bats, sharpened iron rods, and similar crude implements, many of them specially made by a local blacksmith.

  Less than two hours after the NLD party’s departure, as they approached the town of Sagaing, hundreds of USDA members were waiting for them. “Before entering Sagaing,” said Wunna Maung, “we witnessed about six hundred people holding signs that read, ‘We don’t want people who don’t support the USDA.’” They were chanting the same slogan, as if they had learned it by rote. But their numbers were dwarfed by thousands of townspeople behind them, who were drowning them out with cries of “Long Live Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.”

  More USDA members had massed at another stop the party reached in midafternoon, but again their numbers were swamped by Suu’s supporters and their action came to nothing. Suu and her colleagues carried out their prearranged program, reopening local NLD offices closed years before by the authorities, hanging up signboards outside them, making speeches to large crowds, then moving on to the next stop. All the time they were closely observed and filmed by local police and agents from Military Intelligence.