by Peter Popham
By 6 PM the NLD entourage reached Monywa. The military made them welcome by cutting off the town’s electricity supply—or so Suu’s supporters charge, though it may just have been one of the regular power cuts. They also made sure that the abbot of a local monastery whom Suu intended to visit was away on official business. None of this inhibited the local people from turning out in huge numbers to greet the visitors, and the next morning, after spending the night at a supporter’s home in the town, Suu addressed them from the balcony of a building in the town center. No one present could have known that this would be her last speech before a Burmese crowd for more than seven years.
She began talking soon after 8:30 AM. Early May, before the rains break, is the hottest time of the year in upper Burma, and even at this hour of the morning her listeners were fanning themselves to keep cool. But the heat had not discouraged them from turning up: Practically the entire population of the town was there, packing the square in front of the building, spilling back into the streets and lanes leading away from it, standing in solemn silence in the full sunshine—only one umbrella was visible—then breaking into raucous applause when she said something they liked. There might have been twenty thousand people packed into that roasting hot public space. A few of them drifted away before she finished, but of the state-sponsored critics who had turned out to abuse her the day before there was no sign.
Suu wore a sky-blue silk htamein and a large cluster of yellow jasmine flowers in her hair, and her heavy fringe flopped down over her eyebrows.3 Lines under her eyes betrayed the fatigue of the trip, which had already lasted nearly a month, her longest outing since her release, but as usual she spoke vigorously, fluently and without notes. When the audience clapped and cheered, she smiled and wobbled her head from side to side appreciatively, a charming, unconscious gesture she had perhaps picked up during her teenage years in Delhi.
She was recognizably the same woman who had galvanized a million listeners—even those who could not hear a word she said—in the grounds of the Shwedagon pagoda nearly fifteen years before. But she was not the stern, girlish, shouting figure of that occasion. Here was a mature leader, familiar with the rigors as well as the pleasures of being a public figure; familiar also and apparently quite relaxed about being the unique focus of the hatred of the most powerful men in the country. It was a burden she had grown accustomed to; now, with her husband gone and her sons grown up, bearing it had become her life.
She began, as so often before, with a reference to her father. He had visited the town in 1947, when he was “quite tired,” she said, and came to Monywa for a rest; he had commented that he found the people “very prudent.” “I have to say,” she went on, “that [for me] Monywa is strong and firm rather than prudent. . . . In 1988 Monywa was extraordinarily firm, and I feel that it is now even stronger.” The place went wild.
“The reason for this,” she pursued, “. . . is because the people don’t like injustice. They don’t like bullying.” But during her trips around Mandalay earlier in the month, she said, “members of the USDA tried every method to destroy our works by means of bullying. We had to be very patient.”
Now she chose her words carefully. “We believe that everyone has the right to demonstrate,” she went on. “. . . But they are not staging true demonstrations. They forced some people to join them.”
It was clear that the USDA’s persistent intimidation had become the dominant theme of the tour, one it was impossible to avoid. So, in her characteristic way, she met it head on.
“We do not react to them,” she said. “We only report them to the authorities. But the authorities are taking no action . . . because they argue that they are doing things within legal boundaries. As the authorities are taking no action, the members of the USDA are becoming more daring.” She told the crowd that at several villages in previous days,
they threatened our supporters with sticks, machetes and catapults. But we didn’t react to them. We only reported the case to the police station. The next day they increased the harassment . . . When we came to Monywa we heard about the one-sided bullying [here], we heard how the USDA was mobilizing its members . . . We also saw them do it along the way: There were cars with many [USDA] demonstrators. Other people are banned from using cars, are not allowed to hire cars, but they have many cars . . .
Yet the size and warmth of the crowds that came out to greet her gave her heart, she said. Everywhere she went, “The people have been supporting us in massive numbers. I believe they support us because they can’t stand bullying and injustice . . .”
The speech over and the ceremonies of reopening the town’s NLD office concluded, the party set off again, bound for Shwebo district, thirty miles to the northeast. As usual, they had obtained full authorization for this journey in advance, but as the jabs and taunts of their enemies intensified, they must have felt like an army patrol traveling through hostile guerrilla country: never sure when the next attack would come or what form it would take.
And now, as they headed towards Depayin township, the army joined in the harassment. “When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi arrived near Zeedaw village,” an eyewitness later testified, “military authorities from the Northern Command headquarters stopped the convoy including the cars of the people of Monywa who had come to see them off.” Suu and her party were permitted to proceed, but when her supporters returned later to the same village on their way back to Monywa, “the police waiting in readiness beat them up and put them under arrest.”
Unaware of this, Suu and her team drove on to the town of Butalin, where she once again performed the ceremonial reopening of the local party office. They were now deep into the flat paddy fields of the countryside, far from any sizeable town and even further from the gaze of foreign diplomats and journalists. They stopped at the little town of Saingpyin, where Suu had an emotional encounter with the family of the local NLD MP-elect, who was still serving a jail sentence. Meanwhile her minders sent a car on to scout the road ahead. Ominously, it failed to return. Motorcycles were sent to find out what had happened to it, but they too disappeared.
Still miles from their destination, with darkness closing in, Suu and her team were driving blind into terra incognita, with a hostile army presence behind them and no way of knowing what lay ahead.
By the time they arrived at the little village of Kyi it was pitch-dark. They had not planned to stop here, but a little way beyond the village the headlights of Suu’s car picked up two elderly monks sitting on the roadside, who hailed them as they approached.
“They asked if Suu could address a gathering,” Kyaw Soe Lin, her driver, recalled. “I told Daw Daw”—“aunty” Suu—“that we shouldn’t stop as we usually get harassed around dusk. But the monks said they had been waiting for Suu Kyi since the evening before and requested that she give a speech and greet them.” To turn down such a request from two old monks would be the height of bad manners, whatever the circumstances. Suu fell into the trap. According to Kyaw Soe Lin, “Daw Daw said we should stop for them.”
But the old men were not monks at all but imposters from the USDA. And as the convoy halted on the road while Suu decided how best to accede to their request, the full fury of the USDA fell upon them.
Four vehicles which had been tailing them, two lorries and two pickup trucks, now roared up alongside the convoy and armed men poured out, shouting anti-Suu slogans. When the local villagers, who had come out of their houses to see what was going on, started shouting back at them, the USDA thugs attacked them with iron rods, bamboo staves and baseball bats. One of the USDA lorries took a run at the villagers in its headlights, and the villagers scattered in terror—whereupon a much larger USDA force—four thousand according to some eye-witnesses, though the figure is impossible to verify—who had been waiting to ambush the convoy poured from the sides of the road and attacked the NLD cars and their motorcycle outriders and local supporters.
“We watched helplessly and tried to show courage,” said Wunna Maung, th
e bodyguard.
Because we had been told to never use violence, we tried to protect Suu’s car by surrounding [it] with our bodies in two layers. As we waited, all the cars behind us were being attacked, and the USDA members beat the NLD members mercilessly. The attackers appeared to be either on drugs or drunk.
The USDA members struck down everyone, including youths and women. They used the iron rods to strike inside the cars. I saw the attackers beat [NLD vice-chairman] U Tin Oo and hit him on the head before they dragged him away. He had a wound on his head and was bleeding.
The attackers beat women and pulled off their longyi and their blouses. When victims, covered in blood, fell to the ground, the attackers grabbed their hair and pounded their heads on the pavement until their bodies stopped moving. The whole time the attackers were screaming the words, “Die, die, die . . .” There was so much blood. I still cannot get rid of the sight of people, covered in blood, being beaten mercilessly to death.4
What saved Suu’s life, according to Aung Lynn Htut, the senior MI officer who later defected to the United States, was that the officers in charge of the attack had not expected her car to be at the front—which was why the initial attack was concentrated on the cars in the middle and the rear. But it was not long before they realized their mistake.
“As the USDA members approached Daw Suu’s car, we braced ourselves for the attacks,” Wunna Maung recalled. “The attackers first beat the outer ring of my colleagues on the left side of Daw Suu’s car, and smashed the window . . . As my colleagues collapsed one by one, the attackers then started beating the inner ring of security. The attackers hit my colleagues ferociously, because they knew we would not fight back.” Wunna Maung was only saved because he was on the right side of the car, while the attacks were concentrated on the left.
Inside the car Suu’s driver pleaded with the attackers, telling them who exactly he was carrying in the back—but that only inflamed them further. “My anger exploded,” he admitted, “I wanted to run them over.” He put the vehicle into reverse, stamped on the accelerator and the car hurtled back; the assailants reacted by raining blows on the car, breaking the windows both in the front and the back, where Suu was traveling, as well as the wing mirrors and the headlights, and battering the car’s bodywork.
Over his shoulder as he roared backwards Kyaw Soe Lin saw wounded colleagues sprawled across the road, in his path; frightened that he might run them over, he again reversed direction—but now the road ahead was blocked by trucks.
Pulling over to the verge he succeeded in squeezing past them, but then found himself faced by dozens more trucks, their lights illuminating more attackers—two to three hundred was his estimate—“there were so many of them,” he said—some of them holding banners with anti-NLD slogans.
The USDA men looked on “in surprise,” he said, as he hurtled towards them. Some of his party’s bodyguards were clinging to the outside of the vehicle, hanging on for dear life. “I was worried that the attackers might pull them off if we got too close,” he said, “so I drove straight at them, pretending I was going to run into them, and they scattered. Then I pulled the car back onto the road and kept on driving.”
In the murk ahead he saw more road blocks, but resolved to get through them without stopping. “I realized that all of us, including Daw Daw, would die if we didn’t get out of this place, so I kept on driving.” As he roared through the hostile mob they threw objects at the car, smashing the remaining windows and one of them striking him.
“Daw Daw asked me if I was okay. I said I was fine and kept on driving. I knew that if I stopped at the road blocks they would beat us to death.” He kept driving as fast as he could, weaving through another barricade of trucks and past a line of police with their guns pointed at the road, and other figures with guns who looked like soldiers. “I drove through them but didn’t hit anyone as they jumped out of the way,” he recalled. “Daw Daw said we should only stop when we reached Depayin.”
But they didn’t make it that far. As they entered the town of Yea U, armed guards forced them to stop, demanded to know who was in the car, and made them wait. Half an hour later a large contingent of soldiers turned up. “One officer, apparently a battalion commander, arrived and put a gun to my temple and ordered us to go with them,” Kyaw Soe Lin said. “Daw Daw nodded at me, so I did as they said. We were taken to Yea U Jail.” Suu’s year of freedom—her year of living more dangerously than ever before—was over.
*
Suu survived the Depayin massacre without serious injury thanks to the courage and skill of her driver, but it cost the lives of about seventy of her supporters. For the outside world, and for most people in Burma, too, it was seen as another disastrous setback for the cause of Burmese democracy. But in the highest, most secretive echelons of the junta, a different story was being played out. Depayin was the worst, bloodiest and most perilous moment in Suu’s career, indeed in her entire life. Yet paradoxically the months that followed brought her and her party closer to a political breakthrough than they have ever been before or since—one which only now, nearly a decade later, is coming to light.
The aftermath of Depayin reveals two things about the Burmese junta. One is the extraordinary brutishness of Senior General Than Shwe, who soon afterwards admitted ordering the massacre, with the aim of “eradicating” Aung San Suu Kyi. The other is the total disarray within the ruling triumvirate. However, as the negative consequences of the massacre unfolded, it was Than Shwe’s rival Khin Nyunt who, against the odds, found himself back in the ascendant. And his longstanding ambition of reaching agreement with Suu and her party finally began to bear fruit.
*
In the days after the attack, Suu was locked up in Insein Jail, all her senior colleagues in the party were put in jail or under house arrest, and party offices throughout the country, including the ones she had been busy reopening in the days leading up to the attack, were closed down again. The brave if vague hopes raised by her release, which had led the insiders I interviewed in May 2002 to predict a power-sharing agreement between her and the junta, were dashed.
The international community, which had been expecting to see results from Suu’s liberation, was shocked. The United States and the European Union tightened economic sanctions, the United States banning most imports (although Burma’s three main exports, gas, gems and timber, continued to get through the net), and Japan, as ever a bellwether for what the junta could get away with, suspended economic aid. Even the flaccid councils of ASEAN were bounced into reacting by the United States, demanding Suu’s release for the first time ever.
For UN envoy Razali Ismail, the massacre killed off all the hopes that had been raised during many months of painstaking negotiations. He flew into Rangoon a few days after the massacre, when Suu’s condition and even her whereabouts were still unknown, and demanded to see her. “I was taken in a car with darkened windows, and we changed cars along the way,” he recalled. “Finally we arrived at Insein Prison and I was totally shocked. They had never told me she was in jail: Khin Nyunt had simply told me he had rescued her from the mob.”5
Despite everything that had happened, Suu told the Malaysian diplomat that she was still willing to “turn the page” and use the situation as an opportunity for dialogue. But Ismail could see no redeeming elements in the situation: Instead he anticipated all too clearly the outside world’s reaction. “I came out very angry,” he said. “I told Khin Nyunt, ‘What are you doing? Do you know if I go out and tell the world that Aung San Suu Kyi is in Insein Prison what will happen? What are your intentions? Why are you keeping her like this? Why is she looking so bedraggled?’ The next day she was given clean clothes, better food, and within two weeks she was out.” Suu was taken straight from the prison to her home, where she was once again put under detention.
Yet although Khin Nyunt was the target of Ismail’s anger—his only interlocutor within the junta—Khin Nyunt was just as livid himself.
It was he who had be
en the junta’s representative in the talks with Suu and Ismail that had begun well before her release from detention; it was he who saw her integration into Burma’s governing structure as the key to his country’s international rehabilitation. And now his plans, like Ismail’s, were in ruins.
Khin Nyunt and Brigadier General Than Tun, his subordinate who had the job of liaising with Suu, had warned her that it was risky to tour the country so soon after her release, but they had no prior knowledge of what was planned at Depayin. That was because of the intense distrust between the three men at the head of the junta, all of whom had climbed to the top by different routes. Khin Nyunt was a university graduate who had gone on to the Officers’ Training School in Rangoon, Maung Aye was a product of the Defense Academy in Maymyo, the old British hill station near Mandalay, while Than Shwe had no such elite training but had come up through the ranks. Each had their own culture, their own entourage and their own views of Burma’s future, and they guarded their secrets jealously.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the regime tried to claim that what had happened at Depayin was a minor incident provoked by youths and monks who supported the NLD. In a press conference on June 6th, Deputy Foreign Minister U Khin Maung Win said that Suu’s motorcade “attempted to plough through” a crowd of “townspeople protesting against her visit,” causing injuries to people in the crowd and provoking “clashes between the townspeople and the motorcade” that resulted in four people dying and fifty being hospitalized.
But it was not long before the truth emerged. Soon after the massacre, according to the defector Aung Lynn Htut, “Maung Aye and Khin Nyunt approached Than Shwe and asked him whether he had ordered the assassination of Aung San Suu Kyi. He admitted yes, he had ordered the attack to kill her.”6
Than Shwe, whose ruthlessness is matched by an amazing unawareness of the effect his orders can have on the outside world, later repeated the admission to a larger audience. In a letter to Asian governments, he justified the attack by claiming that Suu and her party had been “conspiring to create an anarchic situation . . . with a view to attaining power” by Suu’s birthday on June 19th. He maintained that he was faced with “a threat to national security by this militant group,” and was compelled to take firm measures “to prevent the country from sliding down the road to anarchy and disintegration.”