The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  But within a month of the attack, as the scale of the outside world’s reaction became clear, Than Shwe was forced onto the defensive. In June, as the true culprits were exposed and the US Congress’s Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Human Rights mounted an investigation, he ordered the closure of USDA offices around the country. It was a sham—none of them stayed closed for long, and soon the organization was once again prospering—but it was a sign that his attempt to bluster his way out of the crisis had failed.

  Than Shwe is an intensely superstitious man, like his predecessors, and it is possible that he saw in Suu’s survival of this concerted and well-planned attempt to kill her further proof of her supernatural powers. With the careful work of rebuilding Burma’s prestige now in tatters, he was forced to accept that a new policy was required. And the only man to provide it was Khin Nyunt. The only English speaker at the summit of the junta, the only man willing and able to talk to foreign diplomats, he was put in charge of cleaning up Than Shwe’s mess. And in August, less than three months later, Than Shwe named him prime minister in place of himself, retaining his own positions as head of state and chairman of the State Peace and Development Council.

  “Khin Nyunt’s power had been on the wane in the months leading up to the Depayin massacre,” said Dr. Maung Zarni, “but the failure of Depayin, which was intended to get rid of Aung San Suu Kyi, and the negative international reaction to it, put him back in the game: His men were the most polished in the Ministry of Defense and within SPDC as a whole. It was his team’s trouble-shooting prowess that gave Khin Nyunt greater scope.”

  Five days after his promotion, in response to the new sanctions, Khin Nyunt announced the plan that has dominated political discourse in the country ever since: the Seven-Point Road Map to Democracy.

  It was an attempt to tackle the bogey of legitimacy which had bedeviled the junta ever since the army crackdown of September 18, 1988. When the newly named SLORC took the place of the old socialist one-party system designed by Ne Win, it was presented as a stopgap to deal with the emergency caused by the popular rising, which would melt away once a new government had been elected.

  When the elections were won by the NLD, that plan was aborted and SLORC, later renamed SPDC, clung to power, but still with the understanding that it was a provisional arrangement that would last only until a permanent constitutional framework could be agreed on. But with the NLD’s walkout from the torpid, regimented and pre-cooked National Convention in 1996, all efforts to build that framework were suspended, along with the Convention itself. Khin Nyunt’s road map was an attempt to get the whole process started again.

  The first step, as he told his colleagues in the highest levels of the junta at Rangoon’s People’s Assembly Building at 9:30 AM on August 30, 2003, “is to reconvene the National Convention that has been adjourned since 1996.” Subsequent steps would involve the drafting of a constitution by the National Convention, the submission of the constitution to a referendum, the holding of new elections under the constitution and the convening of parliament, followed by the building of “a modern, developed and democratic nation.” This, he told his colleagues, would be the “road map” to “a disciplined democratic system.”

  Khin Nyunt only mentioned Suu directly once in the speech, referring to the fact that his senior colleague Than Shwe had “with magnanimity” met her—nine years before plotting her violent death—to try to “find ways to smooth out the differences.” Elsewhere he refers to her obliquely as “an individual” and “a preferred individual,” but her problematic person dominates his discourse. The National Convention had been suspended because her party, overwhelmingly the most important one, had walked out of it; the only way to reconstitute the Convention and gain the credibility of the outside world, in particular of the “big nations” which are “unfairly pressuring our country”—a clear reference to the new sanctions imposed after the Depayin massacre—was to persuade the NLD to sign up for it again. And although no mention was made of this in his speech, and few hints of it were picked up by the foreign press, this was now his urgent priority.

  Days after Depayin, Suu had told Razali Ismail that, despite all that had happened, she was prepared to “turn the page.” If, despite everything, she could bring herself to do that, then Khin Nyunt’s road map might actually lead somewhere.

  *

  The talks went on in the weeks and months after August 2003. It is clear that both protagonists were committed to making real progress. Khin Nyunt was still under the thumb of Than Shwe, but as prime minister he now had greater scope than before to make the concessions Suu required if she was to persuade her party to sign up for some kind of power-sharing arrangement.

  Than Shwe had been bruised and weakened by the Depayin outrage, but it remained a perilous undertaking. The senior general’s loathing of Suu had by no means diminished after the failure of his plot to assassinate her. For him she would always and only be “that woman” and, as Razali Ismail attested, he could and did terminate meetings if her name was mentioned. Everyone knew how important she was to the outside world, and (in their view) how arrogant, obstinate and difficult to deal with, even though under house arrest. Somehow, though, she and her party would have to be smuggled into the road map, almost without Than Shwe’s knowledge.

  We don’t know where or when the talks occurred or how many there were; all that is certain is that they took place, that Suu’s main interlocutor was Than Tun—and that, as Suu revealed cryptically for the first time in 2010, “we were almost there.”

  That revelation came out of the blue, in November 2010. A journalist for the regime-friendly Burmese magazine the Voice, harping on Suu’s proverbial obstinacy in an interview with her soon after her release from detention, asked why she had refused to negotiate with the regime. “But we did,” she replied. “And we were almost there. And the people who were leading these negotiations are still alive. But I can’t reveal anything more.” It was the first time that the existence of the negotiations had been made public. “Than Tun met her many times, sometimes openly, sometimes secretly,” a senior Burmese journalist told me in Rangoon in March 2011, on condition of anonymity.

  According to the defector Aung Lynn Htut, the agreement was finally drafted in May 2004 and envisaged the NLD rejoining the National Convention that it had walked out of in 1996. But when Khin Nyunt presented the agreement to Than Shwe, the latter got cold feet: He realized that it would change the status quo, and that the prestige of Khin Nyunt would rise while his own position, as Suu’s failed assassin, would inevitably decline. So he simply rejected it, and there was nothing that Khin Nyunt or anyone else could do to get him to change his mind.

  “Than Tun had to go back to Aung San Suu Kyi and tell her the deal was off,” an insider said. “She was furious. ‘You all ought to wear htamein!’ she exploded, using a favorite (sexist) Burmese insult, implying that the negotiators were as ‘untrustworthy as women.’” The long-simmering power struggle between Khin Nyunt and Than Shwe now came to a climax, and Than Shwe deployed his superior forces and the well-founded fears that MI and its secret archives engendered among his colleagues to bring his rival down. Military Intelligence was always a thorn in the side of the rest of the army: One of Khin Nyunt’s predecessors during the Ne Win years had been purged just as abruptly when his colleagues decided that he knew too much. Than Shwe, Maung Aye and their cronies have corruptly amassed billions of dollars in kickbacks over the years, so the activities of Khin Nyunt’s agents always posed a potential threat to them.

  In July 2004, while Khin Nyunt was away in Singapore, they struck preemptively: A raid on an MI depot in Shan State by officers of a parallel intelligence network set up by Maung Aye found evidence that Khin Nyunt’s network was involved in illicit trade. On his return Khin Nyunt in retaliation angrily ordered his underlings to compile incriminating dossiers on the other top men in the junta, but before he could find an opportunity to blackmail them, he was
brought down: On October 18, 2004, he was arrested while on a trip to Mandalay. The following day the state media carried a single-sentence announcement signed by Than Shwe which said that Khin Nyunt, now sixty-four, had been “permitted to retire on health grounds.” This was soon proved to be nonsense when he was put on trial, charged with corruption, and sentenced to forty-four years in jail. The prison sentence was commuted to house arrest, but Than Tun, who had refused to reveal any details of his talks with Suu despite being tortured, was sentenced to 130 years. He is still being held in one of Burma’s most remote jails, in the far north.

  A collateral victim of the purge of Khin Nyunt was General Thein Swe, the father of Sonny Swe, who was the friend and patron of the Australian journalist Ross Dunkley. The General, a senior member of Khin Nyunt’s Military Intelligence team, was sentenced to 149 years in prison. As a result, all Dunkley’s dogged brown-nosing over the course of the decade came to nothing. Lacking a reliable protector within the regime, he was painfully exposed, and on February 13, 2011, the inevitable finally occurred when he was arrested at Rangoon airport on returning from abroad. He was remanded in custody in Insein Jail, accused of assaulting a prostitute. Within three weeks, a crony of the regime called Dr. Tin Tun Oo had prized the company from his grasp, taking over as Chief Executive while Dunkley remained in jail, awaiting trial.

  The Australian was duly convicted but treated with unusual leniency by Burmese standards: On June 30, 2011, he was sentenced to one month in jail and released because of the time he had already served. He told reporters he would appeal against the conviction.

  Khin Nyunt’s weakness was his strength, as mentioned earlier, and his strength was his weakness. As head of MI, a desk-bound officer with no military achievements to boast of, he was at a permanent disadvantage when it came to obtaining the support of the army at large. He had sought to compensate for this by fashioning the most intrusive and ubiquitous domestic intelligence network the world has ever seen, Orwell’s 1984 brought to life; by pacifying, by whatever means necessary, much of the wartorn border, signing ceasefire deals with more than twenty armed groups; and finally, by trying to cut a deal with Suu.

  But Than Shwe, alarmed by the prospect of Suu finally dividing the army and taking the spoils, applied brute force and brought the process to an end. As Suu had written many years before, “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it . . .”7

  Khin Nyunt as Prime Minister in 2004, shortly before he was purged.

  3

  THE SAFFRON REVOLUTION

  AUNG SAN SUU KYI disappeared from view on May 30, 2003, the same day she had made the speech in Monywa, and reappeared nearly seven and a half years later, on November 13, 2010.

  For most of that period her human contacts were restricted to the mother and daughter who now kept house for her, and her doctor who paid occasional visits. Every so often the UN’s latest envoy, a Nigerian called Ibrahim Gambari who was Under-Secretary General to Kofi Annan, was given permission to meet her; later, when she was charged with a criminal offence, she was given access to a lawyer, a colleague in her party.

  But that was about all. She had no telephone line, let alone a computer with Internet access, no way of talking to her colleagues in the NLD, and she received no mail. As during previous periods of detention, her most important and valuable companion was the radio, which she listened to for many hours every day. But despite everything the BBC World Service and Voice of America could tell her, she emerged in November 2010 like Rip Van Winkle, amazed by the sight of ordinary Burmese talking into mobile phones—a device she had never used—dazzled by the profusion of Internet cafes in Rangoon, and tantalized by the possibilities offered by such unheard-of facilities as Facebook and Twitter.

  Given the length of her latest spell of detention and the completeness of her isolation, it was surprising to hear her say, in one of her first post-liberation interviews, that it was not these years but her first years of house arrest—from 1989 to 1995—that were the worst. Perhaps she had simply grown used to the solitude, the simplicity, the regularity; the lake beyond the ragged garden shimmering in the sun; the monsoon rain dripping through the holes in the roof. “For some years,” she wrote in a column for the Mainichi Daily News after her release in 2010, “I had spent the monsoon months moving my bed, bowls, basins and buckets around my bedroom like pieces in an intricate game of chess, trying to catch the leaks and to prevent the mattress (and myself, if I happened to be on it) from getting soaked.”

  The roof leaked because her estranged brother Aung San Oo had filed a court case in 2000 claiming that by rights half the house belonged to him—and blocking repairs on the basis that they would “damage” his property. The lawsuit dragged on until the last year of her detention, when, to the surprise of those who despaired of Burmese justice, the court found in her favor.

  In her absence the years from 2004 to 2010 marked a great improve- ment in the regime’s luck, or its strategic skills, or perhaps both. Perhaps it was the purging of Khin Nyunt that made the difference: Always tugging against the will of his more conservative colleagues, he was the force behind Suu’s release both in 1995 and 2002, convinced that the only way to deal with Suu and her party was to incorporate them into the junta’s machinery rather than leaving them outside to make mischief.

  Suu’s failed assassin Than Shwe felt no such compulsion. He had perhaps been persuaded that she could not, in fact, be done away with, but he was determined to lock her out of the country’s new political arrangements permanently. It took time and stolid determination to do so, but in the end the effort paid off.

  At seventy-seven, the age Ne Win was in the crisis year of 1988, Than Shwe crowned his career with the engineering of a comprehensively rigged general election which left Suu and her party—not the “opposition” as so often described in the foreign press but the runaway winners of Burma’s only genuine election in modern times—out in the cold. He (or his clever advisers) then contrived to distract the world’s attention from his outrageous election scam by setting Suu free the following week. She emerged, to the jubilation of thousands of her supporters and the relief of the world, into a new landscape where she had no role. Is that the end of the story?

  *

  Democracy has had scant opportunity to sink roots in Burma’s soil. When Suu and her colleagues traveled around the country in 1989, one of her main tasks was to explain what this thing democracy was. She reported that people received it with great enthusiasm. Not surprising: Almost any political novelty would be preferable to the existing regime. But a generation of military dictatorship, which followed little more than a decade, and a chaotic decade at that, of democratic experiment, meant that Burmese democracy was very much a work-in-progress when Suu was put under house arrest for the first time. Since then the regime has done everything in its considerable power to kill it off.

  If we try to assess Aung San Suu Kyi’s success and importance on the basis of the strength and the achievements of her party, therefore, we will come away with a poor result. Like the AFPFL, which her father headed, the NLD has always been more a “united front” than a party, a bundle of aspiring politicians with different ideas and backgrounds, bound together by the desire to end military rule and by belief in Suu and her charisma. It had little of the ideological glue that defines a party in much of the world, and but for her it would surely have broken into several warring factions long ago. After the watershed of July 20, 1989, when she was locked up for the first time, the junta declared open season on the party, jailing practically the entire top leadership; when it went on to win the election anyway, the persecution proceeded apace, with many MPs-elect in jail, many more in exile, and those that remained in the country living furtive existences. Similar persecution continued for the next twenty years, culminating in the de-registering—essentially the outlawing—of the party and the closure of all but one of its offices by 2007.

  So to judge Suu on her
success in implanting democracy in her country is to invite the retort: She has failed. An honorable failure, certainly, in the circumstances, but a pretty total one. The travesty of democracy on display in 2010’s election, with the largest party conjured into existence practically overnight by the simple device of taking the USDA and replacing the A with a P, shows how far democratic Burma has yet to travel.

  But Suu’s impact on Burma is only partly reflected in the development, or lack of it, of democracy.

  Her appeal to the people of Burma at the outset was nothing to do with her principles or democracy and everything to do with her name. Then there was her courage, the courage of this “pretty little thing” to defy the anger of Ne Win as no one had defied him for twenty-six years. There was her fragile beauty, and the charisma of all these things together. There was her commitment to nonviolence, about which she was adamant from the beginning, and her steady adoption—a little hazily at first, but gaining in confidence as she became an experienced meditator during her years of house arrest—of the Buddhist wisdom that has always underpinned Burma’s notions of morality, both private and public. Then, as the cord that bound all these qualities together, there was her steadfastness: her willingness to undergo bitter personal suffering for her cause, and her refusal, year after year, to give in.

  This is why, of all the political figures to whom she has been compared, Gandhi is the only adequate comparison. A leader of the Indian National Congress, he was never contained by the conventional expectations of the political life, but burst those bonds time after time. He was a democrat inside the party, but he was seen by his millions of devotees as far more than a politician: as a sage, an embodiment of the Indian soul, and, in his clothing, his adoptive poverty and his devotion to the spinning wheel, as the apotheosis of the Indian peasant.