by Peter Popham
The so-called “butterfly effect” identified by Edward Lorenz, by which the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, is perhaps the most vivid contemporary elaboration of the workings of karma. But the flashing of the peacock’s fan has been no less consequential.
AFTERWORD
THIS book was conceived in 2006, when Suu was under house arrest with no end in sight: Her detention was routinely extended year after year and she was isolated from the entire world, including her sons and her other close relatives. There was therefore no possibility of informing her about the project, let alone seeking her cooperation. At least four biographies of her had already been published, one in Japanese, one in French and two in English, and the following year the most substantial so far, Justin Wintle’s, appeared. But when the uprising of the monks erupted, which culminated with a group of them paying their respects at her gate in September 2007, it was clear to me that she was still a figure of immense importance and influence, despite her isolation. This was not the sad story of a lost cause: Suu was still at the heart of the Burmese conundrum. Her story demanded a fresh approach.
There are many things about Suu’s life that are fascinating and instructive. It is extraordinary to observe a woman emerge from the comforts and duties of suburban life in her early forties and take on a stature and role unimaginable even a year before. It is moving to witness her forge a bond of love and trust with her people, one that owed its origins to her father’s name but which flourished because of who she was and what she did and said. Within months of accepting the leadership of the democratic movement, she was already a legend throughout her country.
But it never went to her head. I obtained proof of that when an acquaintance in London, who unfortunately I cannot name, gave me the diaries kept during Suu’s campaigning trips in 1989 by Ma Thanegi, her close companion. Suu’s radiant humanity shines out of those pages, along with her good humor, her stoicism, her appreciation of modern lavatories, and her frequent explosions of temper. Some people who know little about Suu have attacked her for “abandoning” her family to go into politics. She has never worn her heart on her sleeve, but the depth of her feelings for her husband and sons and the intensity with which she was missing them are two other things that shine from these pages.
I met Ma Thanegi herself three times between 2002 and 2010. When I told her I had been given the diaries and planned to include extracts in this book, she did not demur. Her place in this story is, in the final analysis, a sad one. For the most vivid and frenetic months of Suu’s political life, she was her closest companion, and they became intimate friends, but, as I described in Part 4, Chapter 5, the friendship did not survive Ma Thanegi’s imprisonment.
It is claimed that in jail she had been won round by Military Intelligence; and if true, talking negatively about Suu and her party to the likes of me was the price, and quite a modest price, that she was paying for a quiet life. No one who has never lived in a country as viciously repressive as Burma can presume to judge those who prove insufficiently robust to resist the pressure. And if she was not strong enough to resist the MI, Ma Thanegi was by no means the only one: She herself wrote in the diary that, even during the honeymoon months of the NLD in 1998 and 1999, the only person within the party’s top circle who was never suspected of being an informer was Suu herself. There were some in Rangoon in 2011 who believed that Suu’s reluctance to do as she did in 2002 and resume traveling around the country was connected to the fact that she did not fully trust all those around her.
*
I paid my sixth visit to Burma in 2010, intending to report on the elections and then stay on to interview Suu again on her release. Unfortunately MI caught up with me, the day after I had lunch with Ma Thanegi, and I was expelled eight days before Suu’s release. I was baffled as to how they had tracked me down: The correspondent of the Times, a friend of mine, was never touched, even though we had interviewed the same high-profile NLD leader a few days before, had been in touch with the same NLD foot soldiers, and were generally not behaving like tourists.
Months later, back in Europe, I woke up one morning convinced that it was Ma Thanegi who must have told MI about me and got me thrown out. She was friendly when we met in November, and she gave me a fascinating (though very sententious) interview over lunch in a smart cafe near Bogyoke Aung San Market in central Rangoon. But when I shared my suspicion with Burmese acquaintances, they tended to agree. It could be true. By reporting my presence, she might have felt she’d killed two birds with one stone: reassured her MI minders that she was still of use to them in tracking down undercover reporters, in the highly sensitive days leading up to the election; and at the same time prevented me from meeting Suu on her release. After all, I now knew more about Ma Thanegi’s relationship with Suu than anyone else on earth. It might well have occurred to me to ask Suu what had gone wrong between her and her acid-tongued aristocratic friend . . .
Arriving back in Bangkok I immediately applied for another visa, using my second passport—but I was turned down: I realized that I was now on Burma’s blacklist.
However, five months later, with a different identity and a substantially altered appearance, I succeeded in returning to Rangoon and meeting Suu. It wasn’t a formal interview—she didn’t like talking to biographers, she explained, lest she gave the erroneous impression that she was endorsing the contents of their books—but we had a friendly conversation that was by turns funny, teasing and illuminating. Ma Thanegi’s name, like much else, was not raised.
Suu pictured in her office upstairs in the NLD’s Rangoon headquarters during her meeting with the author in March 2011.
This was in March 2011, and it was already clear that Suu was taking a different approach to her freedom than she had on previous occasions. She had given numerous interviews to foreign (and some local) journalists and had met various foreign politicians and other officials passing through the country; her family members abroad had been granted visas, in some cases for the first time in decades, and her younger son Kim was among those who had visited, bringing with him Michelle Yeoh, the Chinese film star who plays the role of Suu in Luc Besson’s dramatization of her life, The Lady. But while in 1995 she had immediately begun addressing supporters over her garden wall, and in 2002 she had wasted no time in going back on the road, this time she did nothing of the sort. Instead, she invited her party officials and members to come visit her in Rangoon: During my week there, the party headquarters filled up every morning with out-of-town supporters. It was an efficient way of getting back in touch with people she hadn’t seen for many years, but it did not capture the imagination like her earlier forays, and it left open the question of how much support she still enjoyed out in the country, after so many years of absence. It was a choice that smacked of timidity, even timorousness—not qualities one had ever associated with her.
Suu meeting her son Kim at Mingaladon Airport, Rangoon, during his visits to her in 2011.
One year later, however, it was clear to me that this approach must have been decided in consultation with the new government: the first test of a new policy of cooperation and coordination which would subsequently change the political climate of Burma beyond recognition.
The first public sign that something was afoot was an invitation to Suu to meet the new head of state, President Thein Sein, on August 19, 2011, in Naypyidaw, a city she had never before set eyes on. She was also invited to participate in a high-powered seminar on the economy the same day, where she was photographed joking with senior generals. After her meeting with the President, the two of them were photographed under a portrait of her father, and later she had dinner with the President and his wife.
It was the beginning of a relationship which has no parallels in Suu’s history. During the previous two decades, her very few publicly announced meetings with senior regime officials had been stiff and formal, and without any useful follow-up. Private meetings, such as her
negotiations with Brigadier-General Than Tun in 2004, were held in deepest secrecy, with word of them emerging only years later if at all.
But soon after her first meeting with Thein Sein, it was clear that this time was going to be different: The government announced a flurry of reforms, including the legalization of trade unions, the setting up of a human-rights commission, and changes to the electoral law, which allowed the NLD to register as a party again. The release of some political prisoners was not a surprise—Than Shwe had done no less in 1992, soon after taking the top job—but when Thein Sein announced that work on a highly controversial dam on the Irrawaddy was to be suspended because it was “against the will of the people,” it was clear that Burma was moving into uncharted territory. The dam was being built by the Chinese, and 90 percent of the energy it produced was earmarked for export straight back to China, but suddenly it seemed permissible to thwart the plans of Burma’s giant neighbor when they conflicted with the opinions of ordinary Burmese. This was extraordinary. President Thein Sein had spent his whole career in the army before swapping his khaki pants for a civilian longyi, but these were not the sorts of ideas that any of Burma’s former military rulers had ever come close to voicing.
Age sixty-five when he became President, Thein Sein had been Prime Minister throughout the Saffron Revolution and its bloody repression and had come to power through a grotesquely fixed election. But despite all that, it gradually emerged that he was very different from his predecessors: He was serious about bringing real reforms to his country, and he believed that it would be possible to do so in conjunction with Aung San Suu Kyi. He did not see her as a menace, a subversive or an agent of foreign powers but as a person whose unwavering commitment to democracy had given her unrivaled influence both at home and abroad. He had the wit and the courage to see her not as an enemy to be destroyed but, potentially at least, as a vital ally.
The feeling was reciprocated. During the twenty-plus years that she had been back in Burma, Suu had never had anything good to say about its rulers. But Thein Sein was different, and she never missed an opportunity to tell foreign interviewers that he was “a good listener” and that she trusted him. More than an ally, he was shaping up to be her partner. When Suu announced her intention to run for parliament in the by-elections to be held on April 1, 2012, Thein Sein responded, in his first-ever interview with a foreign newspaper, the Washington Post, by floating the idea that she might be appointed a minister in his government. The fact that such an idea was no longer remarkable is a measure of how far Burma had traveled since Suu’s release in November 2010.
This was the good news that Burma had waited two decades to hear. Now the reforms came thick and fast, and even if many of them were superficial—the reform of censorship, for example, left intact the machinery of government that scrutinizes every word that gets into print—they changed the tenor of life. Suddenly, after two decades during which they had been taboo, Suu’s image and her words were everywhere. The first release of political prisoners was followed by two more, the third of which included Min Ko Naing, the most important student leader in 1988, and U Gambira, one of the monks who led the Saffron Revolution. And two days before that, the government announced its first-ever ceasefire with the Karen National Union, raising the prospect of an end to the civil war that had been raging since 1949.
Initiatives like these were enough to persuade Hillary Clinton that President Obama’s policy of engagement was finally beginning to pay dividends, and in December 2011 she became the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit Burma since John Foster Dulles in 1955. Her meetings with Thein Sein were complemented by two warm encounters with Suu. And in January 2012, Suu finally began traveling again. The huge crowds that came out to cheer her in Pakkoku, the town where the Saffron Revolution started, and everywhere else she went were proof that her popular appeal was undiminished.
Suu welcomes Hillary Clinton to her home on December 2, 2011, during the first visit to Burma by a U.S. Secretary of State since 1955.
That shouldn’t have been a surprise. For most of the past twenty-four years—the decades which are this book’s main subject—Burma has seemed one of the most hopeless places on the planet, one where no sooner did the spirit of freedom and democratic reform flicker into life than it was extinguished. But the Burmese have never had the luxury of despair: After all, it was their country, their future, their destiny, and however slim the hope of change, it was all they had to cling to. Suu, with her calm resolve, was the embodiment of that slim, stubborn hope.
Steadfastness: That was the example Suu set for her fellow citizens. And now, almost miraculously, it is beginning to receive its reward.
NOTES
PROLOGUE
1. “A voter can choose not to vote,” one such homily noted: New Light of Myanmar, October 2010.
2. 94 percent of the seats: NLD won 392 seats out of 447, about 80 percent; its ethnic ally the Shan State NLD won 23 seats; other ethnic NLDs won another 7 seats, giving a grand total of 94.4 percent.
3. State employees and others were dragooned: interview with expatriate aid worker in Rangoon, November 2010.
4. We discussed how to take advance votes from members of thirty civil societies in Rangoon: Irrawaddy website, November 2010.
5. We have won about 80 percent of the seats: Agence-France Presse wire, November 8, 2010.
6. NLD-Liberated Areas: Burmese political parties are barred by law from having branches overseas, hence the name of this party, staffed by exiles from Burma and loyal to the NLD in Burma.
7. There is no legal basis for detaining her any longer: Agence-France Presse wire, November 13, 2010.
8. Soldiers armed with rifles and tear-gas launchers pushed aside the barbed-wire barriers blocking University Avenue: Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2010.
9. The previous week an NLD veteran, one of the party’s founders, released from prison after nineteen years, had told me: U Win Tin, interviewed by the author in November 2010. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi: Daw is the honorific prefix used for women of middle age and above; “Ma” for younger women.
PART ONE
1. insisted on being described as a housewife: on her visa application for Japan in 1986; interview with Noriko Ohtsu.
2. Thant Myint-U, grandson of U Thant, in his book, The River of Lost Footsteps, casts Suu as little more than a footnote: “She wasn’t facing the Raj . . . These were tough men who played a very different game” in Thant Myint-U, The River of Lost Footsteps, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2006) p.337.
3. Michael W. Charney, in his History of Modern Burma: see “Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal connections to the West . . .” in Michael Charney, A History of Modern Burma, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p.169. Her positive role for the mass of Burmese is disposed of in the phrase: “ASSK was . . . becoming a permanent symbol of popular opposition to the government,” p.177.
4. A previous biographer, Justin Wintle, comes to the eccentric conclusion: Justin Wintle, Perfect Hostage, Hutchinson, 2007, pp.419–20.
5. Aung San was a boy from the provinces, shy, a poor speaker, with abrupt manners, and prone to long unexplained silences : Aung San Suu Kyi, Aung San, 1984.
6. But the Burmese experience was very different: see “Intellectual Life in Burma and India under Colonialism” in Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear, Penguin Books, 1995.
7. In lower Burma the British had refused to accept the authority of the thathanabaing, the senior monk authorized by the king: cf. Donald Eugene Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma, Princeton University Press, 1965.
8. big enough to scare away the crows: tour guide in Mandalay to author, March 2008.
9. They “proclaimed the birthright of the Burmese to be their own masters”: Aung San Suu Kyi in her short biography of her father, included as “My Father” in Freedom from Fear.
10. Burmans and Indian Muslims: Burman refers to the ethnic group, who have been dominant and the majority for some centuries.
11. th
e Japanese tatemae, what appeared on the surface, might speak of Burmese independence, but the honne, the unspoken reality, would be that “mighty Nippon” remained firmly in charge behind the scenes: cf. Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence, Kodansha International, Tokyo, 1973.
12. William Slim, the British general: see Field Marshal Viscount Slim, Defeat into Victory, Pan, 2009 (first published 1956), p.594.
13. He told journalists that he wanted “complete independence”: Aung San Suu Kyi, “My Father,” op cit.
14. Aung San Suu Kyi was two years old when her father died, “too young,” as she put it, “to remember him”: Aung San Suu Kyi, Preface in Aung San, p.xiii.
15. how a great civilization, which had been under the thumb of the imperialists for far longer than Burma, had not lost its soul: cf. “Intellectual Life in Burma and India under Colonialism” in Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear.
16. A Burman to all outward appearances, but entirely out of harmony with his surroundings: cf. ibid, p.113.
17. Rammohun Roy set the tone for the Indian Renaissance: ibid.
18. General Ne Win: the head of the army; information from author’s interview with Bertil Lintner and others.
19. From her earliest childhood: Michael Aris, Introduction, Freedom from Fear, p.xviii.
20. Again and again she expressed her worry that her family and people might misinterpret our marriage and see it as a lessening of her devotion to them: ibid.
PART TWO, CHAPTER 1: LATE CALL
1. sewing, embroidery: cf. interviews with Alan Clements, Aung San Suu Kyi, The Voice of Hope, Rider, 1997.