The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

  The fact that the monks’ protest had erupted so soon after the conclusion of the National Convention may have been a coincidence, but it was instructive. Than Shwe had sought to correct one of Burma’s glaring anomalies, the fact that it lacked a national constitution and was ruled ad hoc by soldiers and emergency decrees. By this means he hoped to persuade his people, and the world, that Burma was back on a good course. But nothing he did could remedy the moral decay and corruption of which that anomaly was only one of many signs.

  The climax of the uprising—captured only by a mobile phone camera—came on October 24th, when the barricades parted and one column of chanting monks was allowed to come almost to the gate of Suu’s home. Suu came out of the gate and saluted them with tears in her eyes as they continued chanting.

  The crackdown began the next day: The regime threatened violence if the marches did not cease. Soldiers surrounded the Shwedagon, the mustering point for Rangoon’s marches, and on the night of September 26th began raiding monasteries, beating, arresting, forcibly defrocking and killing monks. When monks and members of the public defied the overnight repression to march again in Rangoon, troops opened fire, killing at least nine including Kenji Nagai, a Japanese video journalist, shot dead in cold blood. The murder was recorded by Democratic Voice of Burma’s brave undercover cameramen and the shocking images sent around the world.

  A monk covers his eyes against smoke during the uprising.

  “This popular uprising marked a new era in post-Independence Burmese politics,” says Jordt. “Burma had finally entered the age of information.” For the first time the Burmese people were able to see political reality—protest and violent repression—played out in real time on their televisions.

  In an open-air coffee shop in the town of Kaw Thaung, in the far south of Burma, where I was reporting the uprising—the closest I could get to the action, Rangoon being under lockdown—one large television was tuned to a Japanese samurai drama, the other to CNN. During those days, much of the American channel’s news coverage was devoted to “the Saffron Revolution” with shots of tens of thousands of marching monks intercut with clashes on the streets, lorries full of troops and trashed monasteries. The customers in the coffee shop watched round-eyed and in silence.

  According to Jordt, Than Shwe’s violent suppression of the protests, which millions of Burmese saw with their own eyes on television or the Internet, put him in a special category of vileness.

  In suppressing the monks’ uprising, Than Shwe claimed in the state-run press that he was merely acting as a “good king” and punishing what he claimed were “bogus monks” who were betraying their cloth by turning political. “But that claim simply did not stand up in light of the images of monks being violently abused and beaten, of monks’ corpses floating in the rivers,” she said. “These were horrific images that shocked the devout nation of Buddhists. Than Shwe was seen as nothing more than a monk killer. The regime’s claim that these were only bogus monks was dismissed, as were the claims that the monks were playing politics.”

  The Burmese were in no doubt, says Jordt: They expected any day that Than Shwe would “descend head first into the hell realms,” unless his astrologers and sorcerers were clever enough to come up with some black magic—yadaya in Burmese—to keep that fate at bay.4

  Where did that leave Aung San Suu Kyi, locked up in her home throughout these events?

  “She is seen as a witness, a moral compass for her country,” says Jordt. “Where she has the greatest traction is in her role as moral exemplar.” It is a role analogous to that of the monks: They shape the morality of individuals by exemplifying morally ideal behavior, while Aung San Suu Kyi plays a similar role in the political realm. “Her virtue-based politics . . . contrasts starkly with the ruling generals’ oppressive and cruel reign,” Jordt said.

  Her power lies in being a witness to the process of moral degradation and violent oppression by the military regime. She inspires the populace to recall or imagine a different kind of social contract between ruler and ruled based on the highest human aspirations of compassion, loving-kindness, sympathetic joy and equanimity: the four sublime states of mind.

  When the file of monks was permitted to walk down University Avenue and stop at the gate of her home, this performance evoked the way in which the sangha traditionally conferred its moral endorsement on an aspiring ruler, sanctifying their claim through recognizing their virtue.

  She thereby became, to invoke a Burmese notion of political legitimacy, the “rightful pretender to the throne.”

  The Burmese believe that evil acts provoke reactions in nature. Eight months after the violent suppression of the monks, in May 2008, the regime announced the referendum to endorse the new constitution that had been rubber-stamped by the National Convention—the fourth step on the road map. But days before the referendum could be held, a violent cyclone struck the country, killing 138,000 people, mostly poor farmers in the Irrawaddy Delta, rendering 2.4 million more homeless and causing billions of dollars in damage.

  Jordt says that popular opinion in Burma was in no doubt that the disaster had been provoked by Than Shwe’s abuse of the monks. “Cyclone Nargis was taken as a sign that the regime was illegitimate and that the country was being punished as a whole for the rulers’ bad actions against the monks,” she said. “A little poem was secretly circulated through the population, encapsulating their dire expectations”:

  Mandalay will be a pile of ashes

  Rangoon will be a pile of trash

  Naypyidaw will be a pile of bones.

  4

  THE PEACOCK EFFECT

  JOHN WILLIAM YETTAW, who lives in a small mobile home in the Ozark Mountains, Missouri, is a four-times married Vietnam War veteran and a devout Mormon; a man who believes that God speaks to him and sends him on urgent missions.1

  One of his three ex-wives has said he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. NLD sources have referred to him, not without reason, as “a nutty fellow” and “that wretched man.”2 What is also true, however, is that under the compulsion of God, or trauma, or plain nuttiness, he did what even the most enterprising journalists had not bothered to attempt—neither I nor Kenneth Denby nor even John Simpson, during the many years of Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention: He made his way to her home, under the noses of her many guards, not once but twice.3

  He didn’t get an interview, but then that was not what he was after. His mission was to warn her that terrorists planned to assassinate her, then pin the blame on the junta.

  His first visit came during a twenty-six day trip to Burma in November 2008. During her years of detention, as well as the mother and daughter who kept house for her, there were numerous guards both at the razor-wire barricaded gate, and inside the house. The first time Yettaw made his way to her home—swimming across Inya Lake with the help of home-made wooden flippers—he failed to meet her: He was stopped at the shore and eventually sent on his way, after leaving a copy of the Book of Mormon for Suu as his visiting card. Acting no doubt on information from one of the people who had intercepted him in the grounds of her home, he did not swim back across the lake but took the easy way out, walking along the lake shore then through a drainage pipe which brought him out near the American Embassy.

  The following year Yettaw, now fifty-three, still apparently obsessed with Suu and determined to warn her in person, made his second attempt. He arrived in Rangoon on May 2, 2009, and checked into a small downtown hotel. The following evening he took a taxi to the spot near the American Embassy where he had emerged from the drain the previous year, and followed the route he had taken then in reverse: walking through the drainpipe and along the lake shore to the back entrance to 54 University Avenue. And this time, oddly enough, despite all the security, he had no trouble meeting Suu.

  She reportedly pleaded with him to leave at once; he refused, complaining of exhaustion and cramp (even though, contrary to newspaper reports but according to the court record, he had not at
that point done any swimming that night). He stayed two nights in the house, eating at least two meals, and leaving various unexplained items there, including two chadors. He was said to have spent a lot of the time praying. He eventually left at around midnight on May 5th, swimming across the lake with the aid of his famous flippers and two empty five-liter water bottles.

  He was arrested five and a half hours later while swimming in the lake close to the home of the American chargé d’affaires on Pyi Road, at the opposite end of the lake to Suu’s house. He admitted having come from Suu’s house. How he had spent the intervening five and a half hours has never been clarified—and Yettaw has yet to agree to be interviewed at any length.

  This story begs several questions. As he was apprehended during his first visit, and was clearly breaking several Burmese laws, why was he not arrested there and then? How was he able to pay a second visit to her home? After meeting Suu in May 2009 on this second visit—just two weeks before she was due to be released from house arrest—why did he not return to his hotel by the far more convenient land route? And how did he pass the hours between bidding Suu farewell and being arrested?

  Yettaw’s visitation was bad news for Suu. Her latest and longest spell of detention had begun in 2003, and was renewed every six months after that, year after year. But under the law used to confine her, the “Law to safeguard the state against the dangers of those desiring to cause subversive acts,” which was passed in 1974 after the U Thant uprising, five years was the maximum term allowed. In 2008 the regime extended her house arrest for another year; the UN’s working group on arbitrary detention ruled that this final extension was illegal under both Burmese and international law.

  Unless it wanted to incur more of the same sort of opprobrium, the regime would have to release the nation’s hottest political prisoner into the blinding glare of international publicity at the end of May 2009—a year or more ahead of the general election which was intended to crown Senior General Than Shwe’s constitutional marathon, step six of the famous road map.

  With the “Saffron Revolution” and the popular anger it had channeled less than two years in the past, Suu at large would present the regime with a serious problem. Yet to keep her detained in defiance of its own laws would be to put all its budding claims to be a legitimate, constitutional force in jeopardy.

  It was thus highly satisfactory for the regime that Suu was caught in the act of committing what, by their lights, was a criminal offence.

  Indeed, it was so satisfactory that it is very hard to believe that the incident was not craftily set up. There is of course no proof either way, but the whole incident reeks. A Western diplomat, who requested anonymity, was quoted by Newsweek as saying that when Yettaw was in Thailand, before his second visit, two agents of Burmese Military Intelligence—in its new, post-Khin Nyunt incarnation—approached him posing as members of the NLD and told him the Lady was ready to receive him.

  The main charge against Suu was that she had violated the terms of her detention by allowing a visitor to stay at her home overnight. In the old days Burma had no hotels because hospitality was freely offered to travelers, even those with no claim of family or friendship. It is typical of the way military rule has corroded the traditional morality and practices of the country that what was once a basic rule of life is now a crime.

  Both Yettaw and Suu and her companions were put on trial for the alleged offences. Yettaw was charged with entering a restricted zone and breaking immigration laws. The trial was held inside Insein Prison, where Suu and her companions were remanded for its duration, Suu in prison officers’ quarters. Foreign journalists were as usual refused visas that would have allowed them to attend, but fifty-one ambassadors and other foreign diplomats attended some of the hearings, along with a couple of dozen local journalists.

  Suu pleaded not guilty to the charges, blaming Yettaw’s appearance at her home on a failure of security. British ambassador Mark Canning, who was in court to hear her testify, said, “She made it clear that the whole thing had been thrust upon her. When pressed about why [Yettaw] did it, she said they should ask him.” In answer to questions, she said she did not tell the military authorities about his intrusion. “I allowed him to have temporary shelter,” she said.4

  “Mr. Yettaw’s antics are a gift for Burma’s military junta,” Phoebe Kennedy wrote in the Independent on May 27, 2009, “which can use them as a pretext to keep the popular figurehead of peaceful resistance locked up during and beyond elections due next year.”5 A senior figure in the regime, Brigadier General Myint Thein, claimed the authorities had considered freeing her at the expiration of her detention order, but the situation had “regretfully” changed on account of Mr. Yettaw.

  Yettaw was sentenced to seven years jail, and Suu and her companions to three years each. A coup de théâtre was provided before the verdict when a message came from Senior General Than Shwe in person, remitting half of the sentences of the three women: Suu’s detention would be extended “only” by eighteen months, to November 2010. This act of leniency, it was explained, was on account of Suu “being the daughter of Bogyoke Aung San who sacrificed his life for the independence of Myanmar, viewing that peace, tranquility and stability will prevail, that no malice be held against each other, that there be no obstruction to the path to democracy.”6

  There was no such mercy for Mr. Yettaw, but after three months in jail he was sent back to the Ozarks, his release having been secured by American Senator Jim Webb, who repaid the junta by giving numerous interviews calling for the repeal of sanctions.

  John Yettaw, Suu’s unbalanced intruder, returning to Bangkok after release from Insein prison in 2009.

  *

  John Yettaw is Everyman: The whole world wants a part of Suu, wants to warn her, award her, co-opt her, write about her, possess her, exploit her, empathize with her, love her, be loved by her. The brave, frail beauty locked up year after year like some princess in a dismal fairy story has taken possession of our collective unconscious, in defiance of the remoteness of her country and the obscurity of its politics.

  Suu is one with brave fellow Nobel Peace Prizewinners Shirin Ebadi and Mairead Maguire, and in the courage she has shown in overcoming great obstacles is comparable to Malalai Joya, the woman Afghan MP, and the indomitable Pakistani lawyer Asma Jahangir—but just to list those names is to appreciate the chasm between them and Suu. She is in a league of her own, far more famous than any of them. Which car-maker would dream of using any of the other women on that list to sell their cars, as Chrysler and Lancia have done with Suu? What manufacturer of designer lamps would use the image of another of these women in their advertisements year after year, as the Italian firm Artemide has made use of Suu—“There is a light on earth” runs the copy—without even feeling the need to print her name?

  Despite her instinctive hostility to the idea, Suu has become an A-list international celebrity; but again she cannot be compared with any other star because it is her inaccessibility that keeps her celebrity voltage so high. Yes, she will accept the role of Guest Director of the Brighton Festival in the UK; she will humbly accept the latest of the sixty-six honorary degrees (and similar) and fifty-seven international prizes (and other miscellaneous tributes) that, at the time of writing, have been showered on her. And though she will never turn up to receive them in person, for more than twenty years she has had the best alibi in the world.

  The upside of Suu’s fame is that it gives Burma’s democracy struggle a prominence in newsrooms around the world that, in her absence, it would absolutely lack. The Dalai Lama has had a comparable importance for Tibet’s struggle against China. The downside is that, unlike the Dalai Lama, for many years she has had no direct control over how her name and image are used.

  Campaigners have been understandably eager to use her smiling or troubled face to lend heft to their appeals, but in trying to grab one minute of the attention of American teenagers, for example, the realities of Burma have on occasion been b
uried under a “fight the evil ones” rhetoric more appropriate to Star Wars. Exploited in this way, Suu risks being reduced to a cipher of Western self-righteousness, graphic shorthand for how great it makes us feel to empathize with a beautiful woman horribly put-upon by bullies in uniform. She is the love interest in our Rambo version of the Burmese democracy struggle. The result is a rising tide of cynicism about such campaigns and the real economic interests they often further. Look at the difference between the economic profiles of Bangkok and that of Rangoon, and imagine how much money remains to be made once the latter is fully wrenched open. The Chrysler ad featuring Suu climaxes with the car they are trying to sell smashing down a wall. The subtext is not hard to fathom.7

  Because for many years she had no control over how her name and image were exploited, Suu finds herself at the center of debates over Burma for reasons that have everything to do with her image but nothing to do with her. In April 2011, for example, Andrew Marshall, a Bangkok-based journalist, picked up on Suu’s celebrity status to write in Time magazine, “In our celebrity-obsessed age, it is perhaps inevitable that a nation’s struggle for democracy is re-cast as a one-woman reality show . . . Realpolitik, though, is no match for romance.” Celebrity, reality show, romance: By singling out the meretricious ways in which Suu’s persona is sometimes exploited, Marshall sought to undermine her importance.

  He was taking his cue from a new report on Burma by the International Crisis Group (ICG): An indication of Suu’s relative insignificance, he suggested, was in the fact that her name “appears just six times” in the twenty-one page ICG report which concluded that the time was ripe, after November 2010’s election, for the world to start re-engaging with Burma. All that stands between us and that sensible objective, Marshall suggests, is our trivial, immature obsession with a beautiful celeb.