Critics sometimes accuse Aung San Suu Kyi of being obsessed with her father. What they are implicitly driving at is that she is not a popular leader in her own right; she is totally dependent on Aung San’s status as a national hero. This is of course true in the sense that she became famous and rapidly gained a political position because she is his daughter. If she had not had this relationship, then she would not have held that speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda in 1988 and she would not have become a symbol for the democratic movement in the same way.
It is also true that a significant proportion of her own texts and speeches have often revolved around her father. Even before her return to Burma in 1988, she had published Aung San of Burma, an outline of his life in which she gives prominence to his good aspects and glosses rather too glibly over his faults and transgressions. She writes only briefly about the accusations against him of murder and nothing at all about his flirtation with totalitarian ideologies in the 1930s. Even Peter Carey, one of her and Michael’s friends in Oxford, says that she had “the uncritical and admiring attitude of a daughter to her father.”
But obsessed? She has always forcefully rejected that allegation: “I don’t think about my father every day. I’m not obsessed by him, as some people seem to think. I prefer to believe that my attitude to him is based on healthy respect and admiration, not obsession,” as she said in an interview with Alan Clements.
Of course, the accusation of obsession is really about something else. It is in the interests of the junta to discredit Aung San Suu Kyi, and therefore they are trying to spread the image of her as someone who has nothing worth saying. That she is just being nostalgic, living on and exploiting her father’s greatness.
It is particularly strange if one considers that almost everyone in Burma has regarded Aung San as a hero—the military and the democratic movement alike, the country’s political elite as well as the ordinary people in the streets. His picture has been put up everywhere, in teahouses, in officers’ barracks, and in the offices of the NLD. Streets, markets, and whole blocks have been named after him. In more recent years, however, the junta have been less keen to promote him as an example, well aware that people always think about Aung San Suu Kyi when they see pictures of her father.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s possible obsession does not differ much from that of the average Burmese. Basically, it is a battle about historiography. Ever since Ne Win seized power in 1962, the junta’s propaganda has drawn a straight line between the national hero Aung San and dictatorship. Aung San’s founding of the army and the army’s liberation of the country from the colonial powers have been used to justify military rule, as well as implicitly give the generals the right to interpret reality and an eternal right to rule the country.
By invoking her father and pointing to her own connections to the liberation of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi has torn this argument out of the junta’s hands. She has cut loose and shown that the oppression established by the junta is not at all the natural continuation of the state that Aung San sketched in the 1940s. By calling the great popular protests during 1988 “the second struggle for independence,” she instead links the opposition and the democratic movement to the struggle for liberation. In that sense, her appearance at Shwedagon was the starting point for a revision of the inheritance from Aung San and the anticolonial struggle.
However, 1988 was also the starting point for a year of intensive election work. Only a few weeks after Saw Maung’s and the new junta’s seizure of power, Aung San Suu Kyi became one of the founders of a political party, the National League for Democracy. U Tin Oo, the former commander in chief who had ended up in a conflict with the junta in the 1970s, was chosen as the party chairman. Aung San Suu Kyi was the general secretary.
The new junta, the SLORC, had sent out a message that the elections would be held some time during 1990, which meant that the NLD had between one and two years at its disposal in which to carry out an election campaign. After 1962, Ne Win had banned all parties except Burma’s socialist party, the BSPP, whose central committee had been more powerful than the country’s formal government. When the SLORC took over after the BSPP in 1988, they promised that the one-party state would be abolished and that promise gave rise to enormous activity in civilian society. New parties sprouted like mushrooms out of the ground, and within a couple of months more than two hundred new parties had been registered. Scarcely one hundred of them were later authorized by the junta and actually allowed to participate in the elections.
The junta had given all the new parties the right to use the telephone (which was far from self-evident in Burma in 1988), and they had been given special rations of gasoline so that they could travel around the country. The junta had also started a new party, the National Unity Party (NUP), which replaced Burma’s socialist party. Saw Maung saw to it that all the parties that allied themselves with the NUP were able to run their election campaigns with money from the state, while all the SLORC’s critics had to manage as best they could. Throughout the entire election campaign the generals refused to meet the representatives of the opposition in debates or in order to make clear which rules were to apply for the election process. “There are more than one hundred political parties. Which one of them are we supposed to meet?” they asked rhetorically. Then Aung San Suu Kyi suggested that the opposition should choose one representative in common, and at a meeting in Rangoon the 104 different parties united in choosing Aung San Suu Kyi to represent the assembled opposition in talks with the junta.
After the meeting, leaders of all the parties except the NLD were called in for interrogation by the security police. A pair of handcuffs had been symbolically placed in front of them on the table, and several of them were pressured to renounce their support for Aung San Suu Kyi. Those who refused were subjected to very tough reprisals. Khin Maung Myint, the party leader for the People’s Progressive Party, was thrown into prison where he became very ill several years later. One of his medical orderlies related that the junta gave him an ultimatum right up to the last moment of his life: he would be given medicine and medical care, but only if he rejected Aung San Suu Kyi. Khin Maung Myint had an extremely high temperature, but nonetheless he yelled at his warders: “No uniforms! Don’t come here! I’d rather die than sign your papers!” He died after four years in prison.
Despite the junta’s efforts, the citizens of Burma knew that Aung San Suu Kyi had support from most of the political parties and groups. She suggested later that in order not to split the votes any further, an even greater degree of coordination was required of the opposition parties, which meant sharing only one candidate in each constituency. No such alliance was ever created, however.
The SLORC had promised political freedom, but it only took a few weeks for that promise to be broken. The military cracked down on the whole of the opposition. The largest student party, the Democratic Party for a New Society (DPNS), that openly supported the NLD, had the whole time to choose new leaders since the junta imprisoned them as soon as they had been nominated. One of them, the young student Moe Thee Zun, went underground when he found out that the security service was searching for him. Some weeks later he turned up on the border with Thailand, where he declared that peaceful methods were no longer of any use. It was time to take up arms in the struggle against the junta. He became one of the leading forces in the student army that warred along with the ethnic minorities against the junta for a number of years along the Thai border.
Aung San Suu Kyi, however, was a tougher nut to crack. She immediately became extremely popular, even among the soldiers in the army, and she launched an election campaign that was several months long. She traveled as though she were obsessed. She held political meetings and met NLD activists all over Burma. Everywhere she went, tens of thousands of people turned up to listen, and in record time the party succeeded in building up a comprehensive network of local offices and party associations. At the end of the year they had registered a dizzying three million members.
Traveling in Burma takes time. The roads are in a terrible state, and a swarm of cyclists, ox carts, and pedestrians make for slow going. The whole traffic situation is made even worse on account of the steering wheel in most cars being on the right, despite the introduction of right-hand traffic in the country way back in the 1970s. For an inexperienced driver, it is in other words lethal to pass since he or she cannot see the oncoming traffic.
For Aung San Suu Kyi and her companions, it was essential to plan the journeys well ahead of time in order to exploit every opportunity of meeting people and recruiting new members. Most of Suu Kyi’s meetings were held late in the afternoons or in the evenings. After each meeting she and her companions would spend the night in some guesthouse or another in order to get up as early as four o’clock in the morning and start on their journey to the next village.
“I have never ceased to be moved by the sense of the world lying quiescent and vulnerable, waiting to be awakened by the light of the new day quivering just beyond the horizon,” she wrote some years later in a Japanese newspaper.
When I talked to the journalist and author Bertil Lintner, one of the world’s leading experts on Burmese politics, he described the election campaign as presenting a much more dangerous challenge to the junta than the protests in 1988. Despite the way that the junta harassed and arrested activists, the democratic movement succeeded in disciplining its opposition. Instead of chaotic and often violent demonstrations through the big cities, people gathered to listen to quiet political speeches, and when the military and the police provoked them, they succeeded in keeping calm anyway. The whole election campaign was transformed into an education in democracy and civil disobedience.
When I made my first trip along the Burma-Thai border in the mid-1990s, I met many political activists: mostly young people who had staked everything on a political change inside Burma but who had lost the struggle and been forced to flee abroad. They spent their days in pulsating Burmese exile communities full of life, in cities like Mae Sot and Chiang Mai. Every single person I met was working for some organization that focused on the situation of political prisoners, women’s rights, the Karen people’s cultural heritage, or medical care to refugees on both sides of the border. On several occasions I asked which political ideology they represented, and the answer was often just a raised eyebrow. “What do you mean, political ideology? We are democrats.” One often meets that point of view among those in political opposition to dictatorships where there is no freedom of the press, where political parties—irrespective of ideology—are strongly opposed, and where a small elite rules arbitrarily.
This broad, basic democratic attitude also characterized the NLD’s first party program. It was written by Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo during the autumn of 1988. It is true that the SLORC had promised general elections and encouraged the people to get politically organized, but in practice matters were quite different. Burma furthermore had no functioning democratic constitution that could regulate the election process. Everything happened according to the conditions set by the junta.
The party program demanded the restoration of Burma as a federal union, with respect for the rights of the ethnic minorities and an explicit distribution of power within a democratic system. The ethnic minorities were even to be given more comprehensive rights than afforded in the Constitution of 1947, which had been shown to be inadequate when it came to keeping the peace and getting all the different groups within the population to cooperate in building the nation.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s spirit hovered over the text, not least because it emphasized so clearly that Burma’s rulers must respect human rights and allow the citizens to choose their own leaders. The program also established that the “road towards socialism” that Ne Win had tested from 1962 and onward had been a failure. The almost 100 percent nationalization of the country’s economy and the cultural isolation had cast the country into poverty. Now was the time for a careful liberalization of the economy and greater openness toward the rest of the world.
The NLD wrote that medical care and schools should be given special priority, which was also a reaction to the junta’s policies since the 1960s. While the military devoured more and more of the national budget, the educational system and medical care, for many decades among the best in Asia, had been totally wrecked.
However, one of the most important issues during the election campaign had to do with the path chosen by the opposition. Time and again, Aung San Suu Kyi reiterated the significance of nonviolence as an approach. In the interview with Alan Clements several years later she said, “I do not believe in armed struggle because it will perpetrate the tradition that he who is best at wielding arms, wields power. Even if the democracy movement were to succeed through force of arms, it would leave in the minds of the people the idea that whoever has the greater armed might wins in the end. That will not help democracy.”
Yet she still did not completely reject violence as a method. She was compelled to accept that several thousand students had fled into the jungle and founded an army with its base in the rebel stronghold Manerplaw near the border with Thailand. Aung San Suu Kyi realized that they were basically on her side, and chose a diplomatic middle road. She expressed understanding for resorting to violent methods out of sheer desperation but emphasized that the NLD was a nonviolent movement.
Quickly and without any visible effort, Aung San Suu Kyi fell into her role as Burma’s leading politician of the opposition. It was as though she had lived her whole life waiting for just this moment in time, when the paths of history crossed, revealing to her what was to be her destiny.
While the election campaign was being carried on with ever greater intensity, it was clear that her mother, Khin Kyi, was not going to survive for much longer. Her condition worsened, and she died at the end of December. She was seventy-six years old, and despite having survived her husband by over forty years, she had never met another man. There is not even a note anywhere about a “male acquaintance” or anything else that might hint at a love relationship. Aung San Suu Kyi has said that her mother had far too great a sense of responsibility to meet anyone new. She was Aung San’s widow, and the national consciousness required her to remain just that. Full stop. She had a sense of responsibility that we in the West would normally associate with royal families, if with anyone at all.
The funeral was held on January 2, 1989, and it developed into yet another gigantic protest against the junta. On account of the military violence, people had not dared to venture out and take part in any large demonstrations since September. But the funeral of Aung San’s widow was sanctioned by the whole social machinery, and the SLORC could not do a thing when more than a hundred thousand people took to the streets once again. The NLD, fearing new violence, called out several hundred party activists to ensure it was carried out peacefully and in an organized manner as the huge procession slowly advanced along University Avenue.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, and their sons, who had returned to England just after the speech at Shwedagon to start their school term, now traveled once again to Burma to be present at Khin Kyi’s funeral. The splitting up of the family had yet been neither painful nor particularly dramatic. As on earlier occasions during their marriage, Michael and Suu Kyi kept in contact by writing long letters to each other, and they spoke on the telephone almost every day. However, Suu Kyi’s family’s visit to Burma turned out to be brief. Only a few days after the funeral, Michael was recalled to Oxford by his duties, and Suu Kyi increased the pace of the election campaign.
The SLORC continued its brutal, sometimes almost tragicomical propaganda against her. The security chief, Khin Nyunt, explained that Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo were part of an international right-wing conspiracy that also included several foreign governments. He never declared which ones, but he mentioned that the British BBC and the radio channel Voice of America belonged to those who spread lies about the country. Shortly afterward his criticism did an about-face, and he accused Suu Kyi of being totally in the hands of the Burmese communist party instead. The idea was to link both Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD to the forty-year-old conflict with the communist guerrillas.
However, the propaganda was most often quite simply about discrediting her as a person. They called her a “Western fashion girl,” and since she was married to a foreigner she must, according to the junta’s crazy, xenophobic image of the world, per definition be a foreign spy, an “axe in the hands of the neocolonialists.”
When Aung San Suu Kyi held election meetings, the security police used to regularly harass and arrest the public. During one campaign trip to the Irrawaddy Delta, her party was followed the whole time by a military truck with a sound system at its back. As soon as they stopped to give a speech, the army started playing military music at top volume to drown her out.
The strategy of strictly monitoring the NLD’s meetings boomeranged against the junta in a slightly surprising way. Propaganda portrayed her as a terrorist and agitator, a person who would bring chaos to the country, but out in the field the soldiers met quite another person. When her followers yelled insults at the soldiers and the army (a popular criticism was about the junta leaders not having any education), she encouraged them to stop. Soldiers who had been sent out to disturb meetings often jumped down from their trucks and joined the crowd to listen to her speeches.
One of her bodyguards at that time, Moe Myat Thu, tells the story of something that happened in October 1988 when Aung San Suu Kyi was about to travel to the village of her father’s birth, Natmauk. Just before the city boundary she was stopped at a checkpoint, but instead of letting herself be provoked by the soldiers, she began talking to them as though they were old acquaintances. She asked about their children and the living standards of their families, and about how they liked being in the army. For the soldiers this was something quite new. Burma has always been a hierarchical society. Throughout history the distinctions between those up there and those down here have been sharp and impenetrable. People with power have always expected a degree of subordination from those further down the social ladder, irrespective of whether the rulers have been the British colonizers or the Bamar nobility. The junta had sharpened the contrasts by situating a strictly military hierarchy on top of the more traditional class distinction. Officers communicated with their soldiers by means of direct orders, never through social small talk. Aung San Suu Kyi broke all those rules. A few of those I have spoken to in the course of this work have described her as snobbish and haughty. They have seen a side of Suu Kyi that she seems to display when she does not like the person she meets. However, the absolute majority say the complete opposite. Despite her family background, despite her education and her status as a national icon, she treats people as equals.
During the election campaign, she often received questions about why she was married to a foreigner. Moe Myat Thu remembers a meeting in a little village in central Burma, where the question was put by a man at the very back of the audience. “It’s not very strange,” explained Aung San Suu Kyi with a smile. “I just happened to live in England when I was at the age when you get married. If I had lived in this village I might have been married to you.”
The generals in the junta quite simply did not know how to handle a person with such disarming charm.
During those first months of the election campaign there were few direct threats aimed at her person. The junta did not dare. They realized that such a measure might lead to a full-scale revolution. During one trip, however, Aung San Suu Kyi was only seconds from being shot to death. The occurrence has now become part of the mythmaking around her, not least because it says something important about her personality.
It all happened in Danubyu, a dusty little dump in the Irrawaddy Delta about sixty miles northwest of Rangoon. It was April 5, 1989. During the day Suu Kyi and her people had been out with a boat in the Irrawaddy Delta, carrying out their election campaign. Everywhere they had been met by rejoicing crowds, and neither the police nor the military had intervened to stop their meetings. When evening was approaching, they were on their way back to the town of Danubyu. As they got closer to the harbor area, they saw that it was full of soldiers who were standing with rifles raised and aimed at their boats.
They were not surprised. When they had arrived at Danubyu the same morning, the streets had been full of soldiers. The inhabitants in the town had been ordered to stay at home, otherwise they would risk getting arrested or even shot. Once at the NLD office, they were met by a certain Capt. Myint Oo, who forbade them to hold any political meeting. “For security reasons,” he explained. Aung San Suu Kyi had agreed to their demand and met her party comrades inside the office instead.
When they were about to leave Danubyu later on, Capt. Myint Oo tried to stop them again but allowed them to pass after Aung San Suu Kyi had promised that they would be back before six o’clock.
Despite the fact that they were back well before the time agreed on, the atmosphere was now very threatening in the harbor area. Nyo Ohn Myint, who was the chairman of the NLD youth section and also included in Suu Kyi’s force of bodyguards, suggested that they should get out of the boats on the beach beside the jetty. Suu Kyi climbed out first onto the clay bank. When the rest of her party had come ashore, they were surrounded by a group of soldiers who pressed them toward the water, pulled at their clothes, and yelled at them to turn around. One of Suu Kyi’s bodyguards lost his temper and nearly started a fight with one of the soldiers, but after a couple of minutes the pressure eased and Aung San Suu Kyi suggested that she should walk ahead toward the NLD office.
They walked for three hundred or so feet along the main street, and when they arrived in the vicinity of the town marketplace, they met six soldiers blocking their path. Capt. Myint Oo stood beside them with a pistol in one hand and a megaphone in the other. One of the bodyguards, Win Thein, walked diagonally in front of the rest of the group with an NLD flag.
Maw Min Lwin, who was the chief of the bodyguard force, realized that Suu Kyi was exposing herself to unnecessary danger. Along with Nyo Ohn Myint, he tried to walk in front of Suu Kyi, but she stopped them. “No, you don’t need to,” she said. “That will only make them nervous. Let me go first.”
They continued on their way.
At that time of day, Danubyu was usually teeming with market noise, traffic, and the babble of thousands of human voices. Now not a sound was to be heard.
Ma Thanegi, one of the women in the NLD leadership, was walking a few steps behind the bodyguards. She tried to speak to the captain. “Stop this. You must let us pass,” she said. “You must let us walk to our office.”
But the captain yelled that they would be shot on the spot if they continued walking in the middle of the road. “Okay,” said Suu Kyi, “then we will walk along the side of the road instead.” The captain yelled back that they would be shot even if they walked along the side of the road. He started counting from one and ordered his soldiers to open fire when he got to ten. Then Suu Kyi turned around to the rest of her party and asked them to stop. If the captain meant what he said, she did not want to risk a bloodbath. Aung San Suu Kyi herself continued slowly onward.
The soldiers cocked their weapons.
“I was scared to death,” says Nyo Ohn Myint, telling me the story of this incident twenty years later. “But just as the captain was about to give the order to fire one of his superiors came running, a major, and stopped the counting.”
A violent exchange of words broke out on the pavement. It ended with Capt. Myint Oo tearing off the officer’s tabs from his uniform and yelling, “What have I got these for if I can’t give an order to fire?” By that time Aung San Suu Kyi had already walked straight through the line of soldiers. As she passed, Suu Kyi saw how they were trembling with nervousness. One of the soldiers was crying. Later on, Aung San Suu Kyi told Alan Clements about this incident: “My thought was, one doesn’t turn back in a situation like this. I don’t think I’m unique in that. I’ve often heard people who have taken part in demonstrations say that when you are charged by the police you can’t make up your mind in advance about what you’ll do; it’s a decision which you have to make there and then.”
Nyo Ohn Myint remembers how the NLD had an informal meeting later on in the evening in the Danubyu office. Everyone was shocked by what had happened. He had been unable to speak for an hour after they had arrived in safety. One of the local NLD activists also recounted that Capt. Myint Oo had sat in the local police station after his humiliation earlier on in the day and swore to kill Aung San Suu Kyi. He had been terribly drunk, waved his pistol about, and screamed that he had “saved a bullet for the wife of that Indian!” Among racist Bamar, all foreigners are often called Indians.
Well inside the NLD office, most people thought it was time to go home, but Suu Kyi refused to cancel the arrangements for the following day. They were going to visit a monument dedicated to General Bandula, who was killed at Danubyu in 1825 during a crucial battle against the British in the first Anglo-Bamar war.
“If I die in Danubyu,” she said, “you have to seize the opportunity to democratize the country.” When they arrived at the monument, they were met by the major who had stopped the shooting the previous day. He told them that Capt. Myint Oo had been transported away from Danubyu and assured them that Suu Kyi no longer needed to feel threatened.
The self--sacrificing behavior she had demonstrated at Danubyu was an important explanation as to why the young activists in the democratic movement joined her after the bloody autumn of 1988. She showed that her own safety was not more valuable than anyone else’s, and she did whatever she could to protect the activists who gathered around her.
Immediately after their homecoming from Danubyu, Moe Myat Thu, one of her bodyguards, and five other young people were arrested outside the gates of 54 University Avenue. The soldiers dragged them out of their car and took them to an army camp in the vicinity. When Aung San Suu Kyi heard about this incident, she immediately went out onto University Avenue and sat down on the pavement. She told the surprised soldiers that she was thinking of sitting there until her colleagues were released. The soldiers grew nervous. It was the first day of the annual Burmese water festival, and they knew that the whole street would soon be flooded with people wanting to celebrate at the NLD headquarters, situated five hundred feet from there. If Aung San Suu Kyi was still sitting out on the street, the whole situation might develop into a demonstration against the junta. After about thirty minutes, the NLD activists were released.
“It isn’t a hard choice to make, to follow a leader who acts like that to protect her colleagues,” says Moe Myat Thu when I interviewed him in Thailand in the winter of 2010.
Most of all, of course, it shows a strange, sometimes almost death-defying obstinacy. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi will not agree that she is brave. When asked a question about Danubyu, she has replied, “There must be thousands of soldiers who do that kind of thing every day. Because, unfortunately, there are battles going on all the time in this world.”
Aung San Suu Kyi often emphasizes that she refuses to allow fear to rule her life, even if there is often good reason to be afraid. “You must not let your fear stop you from doing what is right,” she has explained. “You must not deny fear. Fear is normal. But it’s dangerous if you let it stop you from doing what you know is right.”
In her next breath she usually mentions how as a child she used to handle her fear in the same way she did during the election campaign when perpetually harassed by the junta—by challenging it. During her earliest years, she, like most other children, was afraid of the dark when she was about to go to sleep in the evenings. But instead of pulling the covers up over her head and shutting her eyes, she chose to get up and go down into the pitch-dark cellar. There she sat on the floor and waited until she was used to the darkness, until she controlled it. One of the most famous things she is quoted as saying is “Fear is a habit.”
After Danubyu, the junta realized that Aung San Suu Kyi was not going to give an inch even when faced with the threat of death, and the election campaign had shown that both the democratic movement and the ethnic minorities stood behind her. Even a large part of the army looked up to her. Aung San Suu Kyi thus constituted a direct threat against the continuation of the junta’s long hold on power. She still believed that they might draw up some kind of formal death sentence against her. If it became public, then it would trigger a revolution. At the same time Capt. Myint Oo’s unstable behavior demonstrated that there were elements within the army who wanted to see her dead.
The temperature rose even higher during the spring and summer of 1989. The junta intensified their harassment, and more and more democratic activists were arrested and sentenced to long terms in prison after summary trials.
That did not stop Aung San Suu Kyi from intensifying her criticism of the military rule. Lian Sakhong, who lives in Uppsala nowadays, remembers a meeting immediately before the annual water festival in Rangoon. Lian comes from the Chin people, and at that time he was one of the leaders of the ethnic minorities’ alliance, the United Nationalities League for Democracy (UNLD). He was going to give a speech after Aung San Suu Kyi:
Before the meeting she seemed quite calm. Her face was expressionless, but the look in her eyes was concentrated, filled with energy and focused straight ahead all the time. She was wearing a white blouse with full sleeves, and just as the meeting was about to start, she rolled them up above her elbows. I’ve never seen anything like it. She looked like a gunman preparing for a shoot-out.
In her speech a few minutes later she went on the attack for the first time against the former dictator Ne Win. In prior speeches, she had avoided pointing him out in any specific way. In Burma one has a duty to respect and revere those who are older, even if they are guilty of a brutal genocide, and nobody else in the democratic movement had dared to criticize the former dictator. It is true that he had given up his power in the summer of 1988, but both the people of Burma and the international community assumed that he still ruled from the wings. Aung San Suu Kyi accused him now of having corrupted her father’s legacy, having dragged the country down into poverty, and not having had the ability to make peace with the ethnic minorities.
This last issue—relations with the ethnic minorities—was controversial even for the democratic movement and the NLD. With July 19, 1989, in view, Aung San Suu Kyi sent out information that she was thinking of arranging an alternative demonstration in memory of her father on the forty-second anniversary of his murder. Ever since 1962, they have transformed this memorial day into a celebration of the country’s military power. However, instead of taking part in the celebrations of the regime, Aung San Suu Kyi was now planning a peaceful march of her own along the streets of Rangoon. On July 19 a meeting was held between the NLD and the ethnic groups’ UNLD. Lian Sakhong, one of the participants at the meeting, relates that Aung San Suu Kyi and the representatives from the UNLD planned to make it into a shared demonstration. However, U Tin Oo and the other generals in the executive for the NLD reacted very strongly and threatened to join the regime’s demonstration if the suggestion was accepted. The pensioned generals in the executive of the NLD distrusted the ethnic groups, and several of them wanted to keep the national control of the federal states in one way or another. Aung San Suu Kyi, on the contrary, was of the opinion that a federal constitution was necessary in order to create peace in the country, and she strove for even closer cooperation with the UNLD. She also suggested that the NLD refrain from running for office in the federal states so that the ethnic parties would not suffer competition from her own party.
Meeting at NLD’s head office (spring 1989). From the left: Salai Ngai Sak, Lian Sakhong, Ram Ling Hmung (standing), Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and U Tin Oo. Courtesy of Lian Sakhong.
The conflict within the NLD never became acute during the election campaign. When the SLORC heard about the plans for an alternative July 19 demonstration, they called in several battalions from the regiments stationed around the capital and let them patrol the streets at the same time the state-controlled mass media trumpeted out that the junta was going to keep law and order at any price.
With this threat of a new bloodbath hanging over it, the demonstration was canceled, but the junta had now been given an excuse to tighten the thumbscrews. Early in the morning of July 20, 1989, eleven covered trucks drove up along University Avenue. The vehicles were parked so that they blocked all transport past Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. Soldiers poured out of the backs of the trucks and stopped the forty NLD activists and family members who were inside the house from leaving.
Several hours passed without anything happening. The soldiers wanted either to spread anxiety and uncertainty among those inside the house, or else they were waiting for orders from above. Aung San Suu Kyi realized that the time had come and spent the day packing. “I thought if they were going to take me to prison then at least I should have a bag packed with essentials,” said Suu Kyi a few years later, in an interview with Barbara Victor, “such as toothbrush and a change of clothes. After I did that, we all had a nice time just waiting.”
Suu Kyi was able to spend the day conversing with her party comrades and being together with her sons, Alexander and Kim. They had come to Rangoon some weeks earlier with their father, but Michael had returned to attend his own father’s funeral in Scotland. Sixteen-year-old Alexander was old enough to understand that the soldiers constituted a threat, but Kim mostly thought that it was exciting. “I remember the soldiers coming to the house,” he said in an interview in 2004 in the magazine The Weekly. “There was a huge amount of activity and lots of guns and shouting. Of course, I wasn’t really aware of what it was all about, but, for a young boy, it was incredibly exciting. Mother tried to be reassuring, at least when I was around, and I can’t remember ever being frightened.”
One of Suu Kyi’s assistants played Monopoly with the children to pass the time. At about four o’clock in the afternoon the wait seemed to be over. Half a dozen soldiers entered the house and searched through the office spaces on the ground floor. They turned desk drawers upside down and poured out the contents on the floor. They tore items out of the wardrobes and the kitchen cupboards. After them, an older officer made his entrance. He exhorted U Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung to leave the house. The others there were arrested and thrown into prison. Some of them were released after two or three days, and others received long prison sentences.
The officer who had forced his way into the house read a document with allegations against Aung San Suu Kyi. She was a “dangerous” and “subversive” person, he said, since she was planning to carry out an alternative ceremony to commemorate her father’s death, and therefore she would now be committed to house arrest. The house was emptied. Only her sons and two maids were permitted to remain.
Aung San Suu Kyi was now a prisoner in the shabby white stone house on the shores of Lake Inya, the very house in which she had spent so many years of her childhood.