The Lady and the Peacock

by Peter Popham

A more craven way of playing into the Burmese regime’s hands is hard to imagine. As discussed in the last chapter, the road map to what is sometimes translated as “discipline-flourishing democracy” and which led to 2011’s elections was the most substantial political achievement of the regime since 1990. But it was also fraudulent through and through. The regime’s success in holding elections and obtaining the result it needed is very far from indicating that Suu and her party have become irrelevant. In fact the truth is exactly the opposite.

  In the past the generals have repeatedly behaved as if they believed that all they had to do to make the Burmese forget about Suu was to lock her away. After having this wishful thinking punctured repeatedly over the space of fifteen years, they finally realized the bitter truth that Suu remains central to mass resistance to their rule, no matter how long they lock her up for.

  Digesting this unwelcome fact, they saw that the only way their proxies could win an election was if it was comprehensively fixed; with the NLD and Suu in particular not only out of the way but out of the running. And that, with a degree of care and finesse unusual for them, is what they then contrived.

  The ICG conclusion quoted by Marshall is that Burma’s election presents the West with “a critical opportunity to encourage [Burma’s] leaders down a path of greater openness and reform.”8 But this is simply to do the regime’s bidding and accept the illusion of change for the real thing. It is to accept the bank robber’s claim that he earned his fortune honestly as good grounds for investing in his company—even though you watched him while he robbed the bank. The only reason for doing that is because you have for many years been looking for even the flimsiest excuse to do business with these people. And sadly that is true of the ICG, a lavishly financed think tank which fulfills a useful function in some countries but which has been unreliable about Burma for a decade.

  What else has the Burmese regime done, either before or after its civilian makeover, to persuade the world that it is interested in going down “a path of greater openness and reform”? Have they released any political prisoners? Done anything to bring a just peace to borders ravaged by war for half a century? Taken a single step to reforming a judiciary which has for half a century merely done the military’s bidding? Done anything about investing in health and education, where Burma has long been close to the lowest levels in the world? They have done none of these things. They have fixed a referendum, fixed an election, and set up an impotent, purely decorative parliament—because that’s the way, they have been told, to make the West believe they are moving in the right direction.

  *

  Aung San Suu Kyi’s great gift to her country was that she threw open the windows to the outside world. At the same time she also opened the windows of the world to Burma. And more than twenty years after her return home, the message with which she galvanized her people is still reverberating, far from Burma’s shores.

  When Suu disappeared into detention in July 1989, it seemed that Burma’s democracy struggle had run its course. Thousands had died, thousands more had been driven into exile, thousands were in jail; tens of millions, the mass of the Burmese, returned to their former lives of poverty and fear. There were to be no more mass protests for nearly twenty years.

  Yet the seeds that Suu had planted on August 26, 1988, at the Shwedagon, the seeds she had scattered far and wide in the first six months of 1989, were not all strangled by thorns. Actions, Buddhists believe, have consequences: That is the meaning of the word “karma.” “My actions,” says the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, “are my only true belongings.” By insisting that the Burmese could shake off their fear and lead lives of dignity, and that immoral power, incarnated in the army, could be defeated by nonviolent resistance, and by persuading tens of millions of Burmese to vote for her party, she changed something profoundly. She did not lead her revolution to triumph, but she changed the world.

  Aung San Suu Kyi’s life tends to be described in a one-dimensional manner, as the story of a courageous woman who challenged a military junta and lost. It has been my intention in this book to show that the real story is much more complex and interesting than that. Suu’s ambition went far beyond the narrowly political, and despite the failure and marginalization of her and her party on the political plane, her impact on her society has been enormously rich and important. Whatever happens or does not happen between now and her death, Burma will never be the same again.

  That is a story that I believe has been missed by her previous biographers, perhaps blinded by the million-watt glare of her fame. But there is another story which is even more extraordinary, and that has never previously been told. Suu changed Burma by throwing open the windows of her stale and stagnant homeland and letting the winds of the world blow in. What is not appreciated is how, in the process, she also changed the world.

  The key element was her insistence, from the first days of her involvement in the uprising of 1988, on nonviolence. Without her insisting on it, it is probable that the Burmese revolution would have taken a very different course. Already when she stood up at the Shwedagon in August 1988, students were counterattacking the riot police and the army with Molotov cocktails and other crude weapons, as they had done during the U Thant funeral riots in 1974, and suspected spies were being lynched in the streets. But Suu was adamant from the start that all that had to stop. And she got her way. The NLD’s rallies, wherever they were held, were uniformly peaceable. Her colleagues and escorts were uniformly self-disciplined in the face of great provocation, from Danubyu to Depayin.

  Many in the democracy movement in 1988 saw her insistence on nonviolence as a grave handicap, ensuring their defeat. After she was put in detention in July 1989, thousands of activists fled to the borders to train with the ethnic armies, so that instead of meeting the Burmese Army’s aggression with nonviolence they would, next time around, be better equipped to fight back.

  But those who fled to Manerplaw, the Karen Independence Army’s camp on the Thai border, to train with the Karen guerrillas, were in for a surprise. When they got there they came face to face with foreign experts telling them that, far from being a fatal weakness, Suu’s insistence on nonviolence, developed with sufficient creativity, could be the key to victory.

  *

  It was in the early 1980s that Burma and its problems got under the skin of a US Army officer called Robert Helvey, the United States military attaché from 1983 to 1985. He saw how the Ne Win tyranny held the people in its grip. “Burma has a special place in my heart,” he said.

  As defense attaché in Rangoon, two years living in Rangoon and getting around the country, I really had an opportunity to see firsthand what happens when a people are oppressed to the point that they are absolutely terrorized. When people would talk to me—and it required a bit of courage to talk to a foreigner—sometimes they would place their hands over their mouths because they were afraid someone was watching and they could read their lips. That’s how paranoid they became.9

  It wasn’t that the dictatorship was not opposed: People on the borders had been resisting the Burmese dictatorship militarily for decades. But as a military man, Helvey saw that their efforts were doomed to fail. He said:

  There was a struggle for democracy going on but it was an armed struggle on the periphery of the country, in the border regions. And it was very clear that the armed struggle was never going to succeed.

  So when I got back [to the US], I kept Burma in the back of my mind. Here was a people that really wanted democracy, really wanted political reform, but the only option they had was armed struggle. And that was really a non-starter, so there was really a sense of helplessness.

  Helvey returned to the United States and was appointed senior fellow at the Harvard Center for International Affairs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was there in 1988 when Burma blew up, and he was watching keenly. And it was around this time, as the revolt was gathering force, that this military man had an encounter with nonviolence that changed his l
ife.

  “When I was up at Cambridge one day,” Helvey recalled in an interview, “I saw a little poster saying ‘Program for Nonviolent sanctions.’ I didn’t have anything to do that afternoon so I went up to the seminar . . . Primarily, I guess, being an army officer, I was going to find out who these people are, you know, these pacifists and things like that—troublemakers. Just trying to get an understanding of it.”10

  The man giving the seminar was a maverick American academic called Gene Sharp. Helvey recalled, “[Sharp] started out the seminar by saying, ‘Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power. How to seize political power and how to deny it to others.’ And I thought, ‘Boy, this guy’s talking my language.’”11

  One of the main charges laid against Suu over the years has been futility: Nonviolence, people say, may have worked for Gandhi and the Congress, but they were up against the Raj with its tender conscience, a long way from home. Challenging the Burmese Army was a different matter. “Resorting to nonviolence tactics,” wrote Thant Myint-U, “she tried to provoke the government . . . But she wasn’t facing the Raj of the 1930s or the Johnson administration of the 1960s. These were tough men who played a very different game . . . Unlike the British, Burma’s generals were never ready to quit Burma.”12

  As a career army officer, one would expect Colonel Helvey to feel the same way about Suu’s nonviolent approach. But Burma had opened his mind.

  Listening to Gene Sharp, Helvey said, “I saw immediately that there may be an opportunity here for the Burmese. You know, if you only have a hammer in your toolbox, every problem looks like a nail. So maybe if they had another tool in their toolbox, they could at least examine the potential of strategic nonviolent struggle. So that’s how I got interested in it.”

  It so happened that Dr. Gene Sharp was, and remains, the world’s leading authority on nonviolent struggle. His involvement had begun with working with the Norwegian resistance to Nazi/Quisling rule in the Second World War. For more than thirty years he held a research appointment at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. His books include The Politics of Nonviolent Action and Gandhi as a Political Strategist.

  After the seminar, Helvey introduced himself. “We met for coffee and for lunch, and our conversations kept expanding because there’s so much overlap. If you think strategically about nonviolent conflict, you use some tools used by the military. You think about the environment in which the conflict is waged. About the rules of engagement. About problem-solving methodologies. About strategic estimates. About operational planning.”

  Under Sharp’s influence, Helvey set about beating his sword into a ploughshare. “After I retired from the military,” he said, “I continued my interest in nonviolent conflict and began teaching and consulting.” And after the democratic uprising was killed off in September 1988 he went back to Burma to take another look.

  Instead of going to Rangoon, though, he went to Manerplaw, the jungle camp on the Thailand–Burma border which I described earlier, where the Karen guerrillas who had been fighting the Burmese since independence had been joined by students, monks and intellectuals fleeing army persecution. And he tried to win over the hard-boiled leader of the Karen Independence Army, General Bo Mya, to his ideas.

  “I went into his office and gave him a short pitch—the sources of power, and how the focus of the strategic nonviolent conflict is to undermine the organizations and institutions that hold up the government . . . I explained how with that theoretical understanding you could purposely undermine these pillars of support and train people to resist and defy.

  “There was a big grunt and he just turned around and walked away. No thank you, no nothing.” When Helvey told a friendly Karen in the camp what had happened, he advised him to try again—leaving out the word “nonviolence.”

  “So we came up with the term ‘political defiance’ instead of ‘nonviolence.’ It sounded more courageous.” The word change worked: Bo Mya ordered Helvey to run introductory courses on “political defiance” for everybody in Manerplaw—Karens, students, monks, everyone.

  Helvey persuaded his original mentor, Gene Sharp, to come over and join him. Bo Mya “never converted,” Helvey admitted. “He felt that people who participated in nonviolent actions were probably cowards, but he was pleased that Gene and I were able to provide opportunities for cowards to participate in the struggle . . .”

  Helvey and Sharp found themselves face to face with student politicians who, until the army takeover on September 18, 1988, had believed they were on the brink of seizing power; with elected NLD MPs whose only reward for their commitment to democracy was to be hunted down like vermin; with monks deeply estranged from a regime which paid lip service to Buddhism while committing atrocities and practicing black magic. They were all Suu’s “sons,” the great new family she had embraced on her return to Burma; but now that she was under indefinite detention they were more like orphans.

  All of them confronted the same conundrum. No one doubted the massive support that Suu and her party enjoyed—the support, as the election had proved, of the overwhelming majority of the people. But in the face of the army’s refusal to yield an inch, how could you get there—into power—from here?

  Helvey and Sharp endorsed Suu’s own conviction, the rule she had imposed fiercely on her party, that every temptation to go down the way of violence should be resisted. Equally vital, and umbilically linked to it, was the need to retain the moral high ground.

  Nonviolent struggle, Helvey says, “is a form of warfare. And you’ve got to think of it in terms of a war.” But at the same time the commitment to keeping it nonviolent is vital. Violence, he said:

  is a contaminant to a nonviolent struggle . . . the greatest contaminant. I use the example of gasoline. If you get a little bit of moisture in your gas tank, the engine will still run—not real smooth—but it’ll still run. But when the moisture level reaches a certain point, the engine doesn’t run at all . . . Once violence becomes a policy or accepted, then it becomes a major contaminant—so major that you’re going to lose the moral high ground . . . And the other thing is, you are meeting your opponent where he is strongest. And that’s dumb. Why would you invite the enemy to fight you on his terms?13

  Gene Sharp’s involvement in the Burmese struggle did not stop at Manerplaw. At the request of an exiled Burmese dissident journalist based in Bangkok called U Tin Maung Win he wrote a series of articles on the nuts and bolts of nonviolence and how to practice it, which were published in Burmese in the magazine Tin Maung Win edited, Khit Pyaing (New Era Journal). “I could not write an analysis that had a focus only on Burma,” Sharp later wrote, “as I did not know Burma well. Therefore, I had to write a generic analysis.” Subsequently the articles were gathered together into a booklet and published in both Burmese and English. The English title was From Dictatorship to Democracy—A Conceptual Framework for Liberation.

  Little known in the United States or Britain, the booklet has been translated into twenty-eight languages. As Sharp himself concedes, his booklet, though less than ninety pages long, “is a heavy analysis and is not easy reading.” It concerns a subject, nonviolent resistance, that is still widely written off by mainstream opinion as something that only works for a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, Jr., when you are pushing at an open door; the choice of cowards, in General Bo Mya’s robust view, of bien pensant liberals too delicate to face up to life’s ugly realities. But very quietly and surreptitiously, unnoticed by most of the media, nonviolent resistance has been changing the face of the world.

  “In recent years,” Sharp writes in the book’s recently updated first chapter, with a hint of pride,

  Various dictatorships . . . have collapsed . . . when confronted by defiant, mobilized people. Often seen as firmly entrenched and impregnable, some of [them] proved unable to withstand the concerted political, economic and social defiance of the people.

  Since 1980 dictatorships have collapsed under nonviolent opposition in Esto
nia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, Madagascar, Mali, Bolivia and the Philippines. Nonviolent resistance has furthered the movement towards democratization in Nepal, Zambia, South Korea, Chile, Argentina, Haiti, Brazil, Uruguay, Malawi, Thailand, Bulgaria, Hungary, Nigeria and various parts of the Soviet Union.14

  The little book that was begotten in Manerplaw went on to inspire an organization of Serbian activists who called themselves Otpor, the Serb word for resistance, and who in turn invented a raft of brilliant, startling, nonviolent tactics to undermine the tyrannical rule of Slobodan Miloševićc, leading directly to his downfall in October 2000. That revolution, as one journalist wrote “became a textbook standard for nonviolent, peaceful struggle” and prompted the creation of a group called Canvas, run by two Serb veterans of the victory, which “works with activists from nearly fifty other countries,” including Iran, Zimbabwe, Tunisia and Egypt.

  Nobody, we are told, saw the largely bloodless Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions coming: The West was convinced that violent jihad was the only sort of revolution the Muslim world was interested in. But from Tehran to Algiers, intelligent Muslims saw the disasters that fundamentalism brought in its train; they looked around the world for a better approach, and the ideas incubated by Sharp and Helvey helped them to identify it.

  Arriving on the Burmese border when Suu was in her first years of detention, Helvey and Sharp brought a much-needed element of rigor and analysis to the nonviolent struggle as Suu had preached and practiced it. “For all her wonderful qualities,” Sharp said in an interview with the Irrawaddy in March 2011, “and her heroism and inspiration for those who believe in democratic rights and the rights of the Burmese people, [Aung San Suu Kyi] is not a strategist, she is a moral leader. That is not sufficient to plan a strategy.” Clearly both qualities, the strategic and the moral, are required for success. It is also true that, with its army so willing (unlike, say, Serbia’s or Egypt’s) to massacre unarmed demonstrators, Burma is one of the toughest schools of revolution in the world. But without Suu’s “heroism and inspiration,” Helvey and Sharp would never have made that trek to Manerplaw; and From Dictatorship to Democracy would not have been written.