JUST as it is untrue that Burma has never enjoyed an era of freedom—it lasted twenty-six days in August and September 1988—neither is it true that the elections of May 1990 did not produce a government. But instead of being sworn in at Rangoon with all the dignity at the Burmese state’s disposal, it was formed in a malarial camp in the jungle close to the border with Thailand, under constant threat of bombardment by the Burmese Army.
In her short but seminal essay on the role played by fear in authoritarian societies, “Freedom from Fear,” Suu was careful to point out how the behavior of the oppressors as well as the oppressed is twisted by fear. “Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it,” she wrote. “. . . fear of being surpassed, humiliated or injured in some way can provide the impetus for ill will.” She wrote the essay before being put in detention; but now that her party and its allies had won the election, the fear of those who had terrorized their nation for decades—the fear of confronting the vengeful fury of their victims—undermined any hope of power changing hands. “The army leaders are paralyzed by fear,” said a Western diplomat in Rangoon, “fear of the revenge of the people. It’s the Nuremberg syndrome which held up political reform in Argentina and Chile for so long.”
First SLORC spent six weeks issuing the election results in dribs and drabs. Then, when the NLD’s landslide victory was beyond dispute, they announced a two-month moratorium to allow claims of abuse and misconduct by defeated candidates to be investigated. The NLD’s acting leader Kyi Maung, the most senior of those who remained at liberty, judging that it would be a mistake to pile on pressure, allowed the junta to play for time, but finally summoned the party’s winning candidates—its MPs-elect—to a mass meeting at the Gandhi Hall in central Rangoon on July 28th and 29th.
At the meeting’s conclusion they issued a statement, the “Gandhi Declaration,” condemning the continuing delays as “shameful,” and rejecting SLORC’s plans for a constitutional convention as irrelevant. “It is against political nature,” they declared, “that the League, which has overwhelmingly won enough seats in parliament to form a government, has been prohibited from minimum democratic rights.” They gave the junta a deadline of September 30th to transfer power.
But the endgame was approaching. Even before the MPs could meet, SLORC announced a decree, number 1/90, refusing in advance any demands they might come up with. The MPs might have been elected to the Pyitthu Hluttaw, but now nobody inside the regime was talking about convening it. Before that happened, they said, a National Convention would have to be set up—it was the first anyone had heard of such a body—to draw up the guidelines for the new constitution; only after that could the Assembly convene to write its own draft constitution, which would then have to be approved by SLORC—and so on indefinitely into the future. No time frame was proposed, and participation in the Convention was not the right of the new MPs: Instead SLORC would pick the delegates it fancied. And just to make sure they stuck to this agreement, MPs-elect were obliged to sign a “1/90 declaration,” renouncing any right to form a government.
But all these pseudo-judicial measures were not sufficient to staunch the fears of the junta’s leaders, of whom it appeared that Ne Win was still the unchallenged boss. There was no real substitute for the medieval measures employed by the kings of old (and indeed the British colonialists)—to feel really secure you needed bodies in firmly locked cells.
Thus on September 6th, three weeks before the NLD’s deadline to the junta, SLORC targeted the last vestiges of robust NLD leadership, arresting Kyi Maung and his deputy and sentencing them to ten years’ jail for treason. Eighteen members of the NLD’s central executive committee out of twenty-two were now in detention. At the same time SLORC tackled the party’s foot soldiers, arresting more than forty MPs, allegedly for refusing to sign the 1/90 declaration. Two of them died in jail soon after their arrest, apparently under torture. And what of Aung San Suu Kyi herself? SLORC told foreign diplomats in Rangoon that she would only be freed if she agreed to give up politics and leave the country for ever.
Hope of reaching any sort of accommodation with the junta was now dead. The country had come full circle since Ne Win’s “multiparty democracy” declaration of July 1988 and was back exactly where it started—with the same psychopathic tyrant in charge.
The men and women who had been voted into power by their fellow-countrymen were all now in grave peril, and some of the most promising and well-qualified new MPs decided that there was nothing to be gained by hanging around in Rangoon waiting to be arrested. Eight of them, led by a cousin of Suu called Dr. Sein Win, the newly elected MP for Paukkaung, 125 miles north of Rangoon, and Western-educated like her, trekked through the mountains in the east of the country, finally arriving at a place called Manerplaw: the jungle camp which was the headquarters of the Democratic Alliance of Burma (DAB), a coalition of the insurgent forces that had been fighting the Burmese Army for many years.
First the MPs declared a ceasefire with the Alliance, then they announced that they were forming a government. Claiming the support of more than 250 elected MPs, they explained that their efforts to form a government, first in a monastery in Mandalay, then in a foreign embassy in Rangoon, had been foiled. So instead they were setting up what they called the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB) here in Manerplaw, with Sein Win as prime minister.
And it was there, a few months later, that I caught up with them.
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Mountains and forest in Karen state, near the site of Manerplaw, the Karen jungle camp destroyed by the Burmese Army.
As you would expect of a camp that had managed to hold out against everything the Burmese Army threw at it, Manerplaw was not easy to reach. For some fifteen years it had been the command center of the most stubborn and enduring of Burma’s ethnic armies, the Karen National Liberation Army. GIVE US LIBERTY OR GIVE US DEATH read the sign over the camp’s entrance. The settlement had survived because it occupied a narrow shelf between the Moei river on the east and steep mountains that climbed straight out of the grassy parade ground on the west. Beyond those mountains was another, more daunting range before the descent towards the Salween river and the positions held by the Burmese Army.
The only practicable way for a foreigner to approach Manerplaw was from the Thai side.1 Commissioned to write a magazine piece about Manerplaw and its residents, I took a bus to the Thai border town of Mae Sariang with the photographer Greg Girard, and persuaded the owner of our little hotel to take us closer to our destination.
The tarmac road soon gave way to rutted mud and we bumped down it for hours, fording streams and winding through wooded mountains. When our driver’s pick-up truck died on us he flagged down a lorry which took us the rest of the way to the riverside village of Mae Sam Leb: no more than a dirt road lined with little eateries and stores selling chains and spare parts for outboard engines, ending at a dice gambling den on the shore of the Salween river.
We had arrived in the war zone. Directly across the river but out of sight was a Burmese Army post. The bamboo shops of Mae Sam Leb were as new as they were flimsy: A year before the village had been wiped out by Burmese Army bombs. In the weeks before our arrival in early April the army had been pounding Karen villages in the area.
At the river we found a long-tailed boat going our way, with a boy who looked about ten at the helm. When it was crammed full of passengers we set off, a cool breeze in our faces and the water slapping against the sides. We turned into the Moei River heading southeast, with Thailand and its denuded mountains on the east bank, the richer forests of Burma on the west, and the grey forms of steep conical peaks looming ahead. We puttered along for several hours. Finally the boat nosed on to a gravel shore on the west side and we had arrived.
It was the hottest time of day in the hottest period of the year, during the weeks before the monsoon arrives, and Manerplaw snoozed in the baking heat. In long barracks on stilts thatched with leaves, young rebel soldiers sprawled inertly. Chickens and ducks clucked and quacked in the shadows.
But the impression of somnolent ease was deceptive. Every day for the past ten days the Burmese Army had attacked Karen strongholds, withdrawing a week before our arrival. They shelled and bombed nine Karen villages, destroying several, killing two villagers, wounding many more and driving about three thousand to take shelter in the forest or in refugee camps on the Thai side. Mortars were fired at Manerplaw from the Salween river. And four times a day the planes came over: Every day the sound of exploding bombs drew closer. Burmese Army troops had seized a hilltop position not far away, increasing pressure on the insurgents, who the previous year had lost six riverside camps further south. Manerplaw was now one of the last few strongholds that the rebels still held.
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The stubborn struggle of the Karen, first for independence and latterly for self-government, was one of the fundamental reasons why the “Union of Burma” has never been more than a form of words. “The first thing colonial rule denies a people is their history,” Martin Smith wrote in his classic book on Burma’s insurgencies. “The new Republic of Burma which came into being on January 4, 1948, bore little resemblance to any nation or state from the historic past.”2
The mountains and rivers that hemmed Manerplaw were the southerly extensions of north–south ranges that girdle Burma’s central plains and that have conditioned the way the country we call Burma has developed since prehistoric times; “the natural routes of migration,” as Smith writes, “to a constant flow of peoples from the high plateaus of Central Asia.”3 The mountains and rivers were a formidable obstacle to potential invaders, but they were also a barrier to anyone within the land that the mountains enclosed who sought to unify it.
Dozens of ethnic groups, “an anthropologist’s paradise,” settled in Burma over the centuries and met and commingled ceaselessly, but dominion never went unchallenged for long. Power spread out from city-states founded variously by the Mon, Burman, Arakanese and Shan groups, but the natural barriers ensured that it oscillated frequently between their valley kingdoms.
The great city of Pagan on the Irrawaddy, for example, marked Burman ascendancy in the eleventh century under the Burman king Anawrahta, but its glory was short-lived. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was the Shan, cousins of the Thais, who predominated, overtaken in the sixteenth centuries by the Mon kings of Pegu. The Burmans of the central plains returned to preeminence under King Alaunghpaya in the eighteenth century, but their final conquest of the Mon and Arakanese kingdoms, carving out a kingdom roughly equivalent to present-day Burma, was only achieved on the eve of the first incursion by the British. Less than half a century later, the dynasty Alaunghpaya had founded, the Konbaung, came crashing down.
Pagan, the medieval city which is Burma’s most famous historical site.
The Burmans, who may account for about two-thirds of the total population, have thus dominated the country that bears their name for some centuries, but the long history of contention between the different ethnic groups lives on. The perceived injustice of Burman tyranny is explained and lamented in their folk tales. “When Yuwa [God] created the world he took three handfuls of earth and threw them round about him,” goes the Karen creation myth, as retold by George Scott. “From one sprang the Burmans, from another the Karens, and from the third the Kalas, the foreigners. The Karens were very talkative and made much more noise than all the others, and so the Creator believed that there were too many of them, and he threw another half handful to the Burmans, who thus gained such a supremacy that they soon overcame the Karens, and have oppressed them ever since.”4
The men from the plains tried to conquer the hill tribes, and failing that to steal their land and their women, to tax and raise levies from them and to carry them away as slaves, and the animosity accumulated over the centuries. But it reached a new pitch with the Japanese invasion.
Today around two million Karen live in the border area, and two or three million more in the delta area near Rangoon. When the British took their third and final bite out of Burma in 1886, annexing lower Burma and gaining mastery of the whole country, the Burmans were subjected to direct British rule, but minorities including the Karen were given a degree of control over their own affairs. The Karen population was a mixture of Buddhists and animists; Christian missionaries who poured into the region found the animists ripe for conversion.
When the Japanese invaded in 1942, the Karen troops remained loyal to the British, and in retribution both the Japanese and their Burman allies under Aung San committed atrocities against the Karen that have never been forgiven or forgotten. As a Karen leader, Saw Tha Din, said to Martin Smith in 1985, “How could anyone expect the Karen people to trust the Burmans after what happened during the war—the murder and slaughter of so many Karen people and the robbing of so many Karen villages? After all this, how could anyone seriously expect us to trust any Burman government in Rangoon?”5
During independence negotiations the Karen held out for their own homeland; they alone of the largest ethnic groups on the borders refused to sign Aung San’s famous Panglong Agreement, granting the “races” full internal autonomy within a Union of Burma.6 Instead they took up arms against the Burmese state, and have been fighting ever since. The camp at Manerplaw was now the front line of that endless guerrilla war.
But with the decimation of anti-regime protesters in the Burmese heartland that had been under way since mid-1988, Manerplaw had acquired a new meaning. Now it had also become the last bolt-hole within Burma for those committed to democratic change.
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It was in the summer of 1988, after the first massacres in Rangoon and elsewhere and when it became clear that the army was serious about punishing those who had risen up in protest, that political refugees began arriving in Karen. Burmese Army propaganda claimed that these hills were full of bandits and savages, but when the first Rangoon and Mandalay students came out of the woods the Karen fighters made them feel at home. “They welcomed us and took care of us like their own children,” said Thaung Htun, a former student in Rangoon who was one of the early arrivals.7 By the time the newly elected MPs arrived, Manerplaw was already home to a substantial community of internal exiles.
Early in the morning, when the weather was still tolerably cool, Greg the Canadian photographer and I visited each group in turn. Cocks crowed; mist hung low over the river and snagged in the trees on the mountainside. Down by the river the freedom fighters of the Central Committee of the All-Burma Students’ Democratic Front were washing their clothes and brushing their teeth and plunging in for a cool bath. They swept the dusty paths in the village of bamboo and rattan they had built in the north of the settlement, sweeping the dead leaves into piles and setting them alight. A medical graduate who was the Committee’s Foreign Secretary did the rounds of the huts of students suffering from malaria. No one who spent more than a few weeks in Manerplaw escaped the debilitating illness.
On a hillock not far away was the campus of the bravely named Federal University, throbbing to the pulse of Thai pop music. It was a university only in aspiration: There were two volunteer teachers, Janette from England and Jennifer from Canada, who taught English, Economics, History, Music and other subjects to several dozen refugee students from all parts of the country. The classrooms were huts, and books were in short supply, but the students worked hard, with lectures and tutorials carrying on late into the night by paraffin lamps and candles.
The Democratic Alliance of Burma, which coordinated the different groups, was based in a long house in the woods. There I met Khaing Saw Tun, a lawyer and democracy activist from Arakan in the far west of Burma, who had been a student leader in Rangoon in the 1960s. The changes made to the judicial system under Ne Win had made the lawyer’s job almost impossible, he told me: After 1974, trained judges were relegated to the role of technical staff, with no say in the running of trials, which were in the hands of friends of the generals. “People no longer chose a lawyer who knew the law, but a lawyer who knew a judge, or they went straight to the township councils, or delivered a petition direct to Ne Win,” he said. “There is no law in Burma now. We Rangoon lawyers are supermen: We practice law where there is no law.”
When the NCGUB arrived it set up home alongside these groups and others, all seven MPs moving into a solid teak house set at some distance from the rest of the settlement, whose population was now about five thousand. Prime minister Sein Win was away during our visit, but his Foreign Minister, Peter Limbin, had just returned from a canter around Europe and was full of good news: Planning only to attend a session of the UN’s sub-Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, he had been inundated with invitations and expressions of goodwill from European governments.
He anticipated the obvious question. “I didn’t even ask them to recognize our government,” he said. “Only a fool would do that now. First we have to make friends. They have to find out who we are, they have to trust us. And we have much to learn—about federal systems of government, for example. I went to Europe to learn, and to make friends.” Dr. Sein Win had the same message: His coalition government was only an interim body, which would dissolve once the Pyitthu Hluttaw, the national assembly, had been allowed to meet and a full government established. Given the obvious impossibility of doing any sort of real work inside Burma, their most urgent task, in tandem with an associated group based in Mae Sot, on the Thai side of the border, called NLD-Liberated Areas (NLD-LA), was to build bridges to the outside world.
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Alongside the MPs, lawyers, students, teachers and Karen fighters, Manerplaw also hosted a community of monks, living in the half-built headquarters of the All Burma Young Monks’ Union under a sign that read LONG LIVE HOLINESS. Because, although the generals were all traditional Burman Buddhists, and had for many years gone through the conventional motions of Buddhist piety, since the uprising of 1988 a gap had opened up between the monks and the junta, and was widening all the time.
Suu and her colleagues had established good relations with the sangha, as the community of monks is known, from the beginning of their campaign. During the campaign trips of late 1988 and the first six months of 1989 they had frequently been given hospitality in monasteries around the country and participated in pagoda ceremonies. At the same time Suu’s surging popularity among the Burmese masses reflected the fact that she was increasingly seen not only as a political leader but also as a religious figure: as a bodhisattva, a holy person dedicated to relieving the sufferings of others, or as a sort of angel or spirit, a nat-thana in Burmese, a contemporary equivalent of historical figures who had met unhappy deaths, often at the hands of the authorities.8 Visiting Burma in 1990, Kei Nemoto, a Japanese scholar, observed, “There seems to be a big discrepancy between Burmese people’s expectations of Suu Kyi and her own image of the future, democratic Burma. The ordinary supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi tend to worship her as the goddess [nat-thami] of . . . suffering Burma. If Suu Kyi herself is content with this personality worship, there will be little unhappiness between them. But she is not.”9
Yet although Suu has always decried efforts to depict her as some kind of a goddess and to worship her, she was clear from the outset of her political career that moral and ethical concerns were at the heart of her message. On this she has never wavered. So the support and solidarity of monks who, like the rest of the population, had labored for decades under the brutish and incompetent rule of the generals, was hardly a surprise.
These two themes—her saintly resonance with the superstitious masses, and her appeal to the hearts and minds of the nation as the leader who had dared to defy the generals and launch a political revolution—came together in the summer of 1990 as it slowly dawned on the Burmese that their mass endorsement of the NLD in the privacy of the polling booth was being betrayed.
In a phenomenon analogous to the bloody tears supposedly wept by images of the Virgin Mary in devoutly Roman Catholic countries, in the months after the election people around Burma began claiming that the left breasts of Buddha images in their local temples were swelling and weeping. “This story was believed even by people living in big cities like Rangoon or Taunggyi,” reported Professor Nemoto.10 The “miracle” was seen by many as a good omen for Aung San Suu Kyi—the swelling left breast symbolizing a mother’s nurture, and indicating that her power would grow and that she would succeed in saving Burma from suffering.
And in a related development occurring at the same time, the monks themselves—the incarnation, one might say, of Burma’s collective conscience—began for the first time since independence to demonstrate their anger at the impiety of the rulers.
Burma loves anniversaries, especially ones of great political moment, so when August 8th—the second anniversary of the brutal army crackdown against the 8/8/88 uprising—rolled around with the generals no closer than ever to convening parliament, some kind of protest was inevitable. What was interesting and new—and, for the generals, extremely unsettling—was that among the brushfires of anger that broke out on that day, the most significant was a protest not by students but monks.
On the day of the anniversary, several hundred monks left their monastery in Mandalay before dawn with their begging bowls. There was nothing unusual about that: It was the unchanging ritual of the monks to give laypeople living and working near the monasteries an opportunity to gain merit by offering them food every morning of the year. What was different this time was that the monks carried their bowls upside down, symbolizing a boycott, a temporary excommunication, of the military regime: the exclusion of the army from the spiritual benefits it was in the exclusive power of the sangha to confer. Their march was joined by thousands of laypeople.
The military had already been deployed around the city in anticipation of trouble. The soldiers ordered the demonstrators to halt, and when they refused the soldiers opened fire, killing at least four people, two of them monks.
In response to the bloodshed, the sangha announced that their boycott of the regime would go on indefinitely. It spread rapidly from Mandalay to the rest of the country. By October, when the regime ordered the monks to end the boycott or face the forcible disbanding of their orders, around fifteen thousand monks in 160 monasteries in Rangoon—one-quarter of the capital’s total—were on strike. In Mandalay, the religious capital of the country, the number was about twenty thousand.
When students and workers had protested en masse in 1988, the army’s response was straightforward brutality, with thousands mowed down in cold blood. But this time around, because the protests were led by and overwhelmingly composed of monks—acting, as they were to do again seventeen years later in the Saffron Revolution, when it became obvious that for non-monks to protest would invite bloody mayhem—the junta’s response was deeply conflicted.
On the one hand they threatened to dissolve hostile monasteries and force protesting monks back into ordinary life; and these threats were eventually acted upon when three monastic sects were dissolved. And the army garrisoned Mandalay to stop the protests recurring.
“The military has raided more than a dozen monasteries,” the Washington Post reported,
. . . and seized a variety of prohibited items ranging from political tracts to slingshots . . . This former Burmese capital has the look of an occupied city. But instead of foreign invaders, like the British who captured Mandalay in 1885, today’s occupiers are members of Myanmar’s own Tatmadaw, as the army is called. Helmeted troops armed with automatic weapons and grenade launchers patrol neighborhoods on foot and in trucks, man barbed-wire roadblocks on downtown streets and guard key intersections and installations. As the 11 PM curfew approached one night this week, soldiers cradling German-designed G3 assault rifles set out in single file through a residential neighborhood like a combat patrol through enemy territory . . .11
But at the same time as purging the sangha, a quite different approach was tried: Some generals responded to the monks’ demand for an apology for the killings in August by getting down on their knees and begging forgiveness. “The military stepped up efforts to appease senior Buddhist abbots,” the Washington Post’s report continued, “by staging televised appearances in which the generals knelt before them . . . The generals . . . were filmed giving the monks such nontraditional offerings as color television sets and bottles of imported soft drinks.”
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SLORC’s split response betrayed the fact that the monks’ challenge, coming on top of the drubbing the regime-sponsored NUP had suffered at the ballot box, was a powerful assault on their claims to legitimacy.
Legitimacy in postcolonial states is a fragile and fissiparous commodity. In the first forty years of Burma’s history, legitimacy boiled down to a single name: Aung San, the saintly father of the Burmese Army, the new nation’s founding hero. Prime minister U Nu had been the Bogyoke’s close comrade-in-arms, and ruled in the martyr’s place, following the plans for government which Aung San was developing when he died, with a broadly socialist program and with the ethnic minorities linked to the center in a loose federal structure.
When Ne Win’s military junta seized power in 1962, Aung San’s name was again invoked at every opportunity. And this time authority was found in Aung San’s writings for the dramatically anti-democratic change of direction dictated by Ne Win.12 In 1957, in the run-up to the coup, Ne Win’s pet scholar, Dr. Maung Maung (who became a short-lived President of the Union in 1988), published in the Guardian, the Rangoon-based newspaper he edited, an essay entitled “Blue Print,” which was purportedly Aung San’s vision of Burma’s future. In the essay, written in early 1941 when he was in Japan, the future Burmese leader denigrated parliamentary government which “fosters the spirit of individualism,” advocated a “strong state administration as exemplified [in the 1930s] in Germany and Italy,” and declared that “there shall be only one nation, one party, one leader” and “no parliamentary opposition, no nonsense about individualism. Everyone must submit to the State which is supreme over the individual.”
This was nothing like the sort of democratic model of governance advocated by Aung San after the defeat of the Japanese and his alliance with the returning British, the sort of policy adopted by Burma when it became independent. And although the “Blue Print” has for many years been routinely listed among Aung San’s other literary works, Gustaaf Houtman, the Burma scholar, has uncovered persuasive evidence to indicate that it was probably not written by Aung San at all, but dictated to him by his Japanese military patrons, reflecting their own fascist priorities. But because Maung Maung depicted this prescription for authoritarian rule as the work of the sainted national founder, Ne Win was able to maintain the national Aung San cult without a hiccup.
All that changed dramatically with the ascent of Aung San Suu Kyi. As we have seen in previous chapters, the embrace by Suu of forces hostile to military rule led to the junta quietly and progressively dismantling the Aung San cult—casting themselves off from the one figure who for decades had given them his blessing from beyond the grave.
Where to turn instead for authorization? On coming to power, General Saw Maung had insisted that SLORC had no intention of hanging on to power for long, but planned to hand over to a multiparty democracy—civilian rule—as quickly as possible. But now that “that woman” had won the election hands down, a quick handover was out of the question. SLORC would have to remain in power indefinitely—but on what basis?
With Aung San no longer available, the regime cast further back, to the line of kings abruptly amputated by the British in 1885. Renaming the country Myanmar, discarding “Burma” as a colonial invention (although the word “Bama” has been in use for centuries by the Burmese themselves) was a first step. But that was for foreign consumption. If the generals were to be accepted on the same terms as the people had accepted their kings, they would have to start behaving more like kings. And fundamental to Burmese kingship for a thousand years had been the king’s relationship to the sangha.
When the Buddha and his successors endorsed the right of a particular monarch to rule, that legitimized the king in the eyes of the people; and the monks performed the ceremonies of purification and so on which kept the palace on the right track, karmically speaking. It was a symbiotic relationship, because the king in turn was the patron of the sangha, giving robes and food to the monks in person and spending a large part of his fortune building them monasteries and pagodas for the greater glory of the Buddhist faith. The king was also the ultimate authority, with the right to de-recognize parts of the sangha if particular groups of monks went off in strange directions.
It was this relationship which SLORC, and General Saw Maung in particular, now needed to buy into to obtain legitimacy in the eyes of the people—the more urgently because Aung San’s daughter had gained an overwhelming popular mandate to replace them. But now, at the military’s moment of greatest need, the monks were voting with their feet and their bowls—for the other side. No wonder the generals were deeply divided over how to respond, with the followers of the tough Ne Win line urging a fierce crackdown, while the more pragmatic and/or superstitious were desperate to find a compromise, even if it involved going down on their knees and giving the monks Coca-Cola.
It is perhaps not surprising that General Saw Maung, the titular head of the junta, a mediocre, ill-educated career soldier like most of the officers with whom Ne Win surrounded himself, should have proved unequal to the strain caused by these rebuffs by both the people and monks. The first public sign that he was facing an insurrection within his brain as well as on the streets came in a long and rambling speech he gave in November 1990, a month after crushing the monks’ uprising.
“If we look at the efforts for independence,” he told an audience of local administrators in the town of Prome, in a speech monitored by the BBC,
. . . if we choose a certain outstanding period to speak about that, we will have to say it is the time of the Thirty Comrades . . . If we are to assume that Burma gained independence because of the Thirty Comrades, then the Thirty Comrades is the core force of Burma. The Defense Services were born from that core force and continue to exist until today. In other words, the Defense Services have always been there. They were there throughout efforts for independence and also after independence, protecting the nation from the perils that emerged from time to time . . .
Through the rambling emerges his compulsion to plot himself in the line of heroes who created the independent nation—in other words, in the line of Aung San, whose name he cannot bring himself to utter.
Next he turned to the 1988 uprising—and he is unable to dissemble his sense of guilt for what happened.
A similar situation arose again in 1988 and everybody knows that the Defense Services had to control the situation. The year 1988 was not so long ago and whatever happened then cannot be forgotten. Whatever I have done was done so that there is no blemish either in the nation’s history or in my own personal history.
The Defense Services are the core force of the nation, and they in turn are born from the people. It is essential to understand this . . . I understand that we cannot be divorced from the people. We are also constantly teaching the Defense Services personnel so that they understand this also . . .
And what of himself? This general with the people’s and monks’ blood on his hands? How was he to convince himself that he possessed any worth at all? “I am a person who never lies,” he slurred. “I have never once lied throughout my career. I work with discipline and abide by rules. I never lie to the others and I hate anyone lying to me . . . How long am I going to be lied to?”
Within a year, Saw Maung had gone off the rails completely. During a golf tournament for top army officers in Rangoon on December 21, 1991, he brandished his revolver and threatened to shoot onlookers, declaring himself to be the reincarnation of King Kyansittha, one of Burma’s greatest, and most peaceable, early monarchs. Four months after that, in April 1992, it was baldly announced that Saw Maung had resigned due to ill health.
General Saw Maung, the ruling general purged in 1992 after he became mentally unstable.
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What is legitimacy and how is it obtained? According to the German sociologist Max Weber, it means that if you issue a command, it is probable that it will be obeyed, perhaps out of fear but for other reasons, too: “affective” reasons, that is emotional reasons, and “ideal” reasons, having to do with beliefs and thoughts. Weber thus picks up the themes of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who argued that the authority of government rests on opinion—opinions of interest, corresponding to fear and the hope of advantage—but also opinions of right: At least some subjects must be convinced that it is right to obey before the ruler can muster enough force to persuade those who are not.
But in the aftermath of Burma’s election, and SLORC’s decision to ignore the result, the junta’s stock of legitimacy was desperately low. An army of occupation can keep a territory subdued, as the British did in Burma following their three nineteenth-century wars there—but that is not legitimacy. And SLORC was now in a very similar position: ruling by fear alone.
After visiting Manerplaw in the spring of 1991 I traveled through mainland Burma in the only way permitted at the time, on a guided tour. In the cities people were too terrified to say anything to a foreigner. I brought a letter from the lawyer I had met in Manerplaw, Khaing Saw Thun, to deliver to Daw Myint Myint Khin, the female head of the Bar Association who was also a member of the NLD’s Central Executive Committee. I hoped she would give me a good interview and introduce me to some other important people. But it was not to be.
Her office was on the first floor of an old building in the congested and chaotic commercial heart of Rangoon. She received me with frigid courtesy: Standing behind her desk she read Khaing Saw Thun’s letter, then handed it back and asked me to leave at once. “As soon as you have gone,” she said, “Military Intelligence will come up those stairs. They will want to know what you were doing here and if you gave me anything. So please take the letter away.” The following month she was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. I have no way of knowing whether my intrusion was partly responsible.
That was what rule by fear was like—but it was fear alone; there was no element of grudging respect, no concession that the army was perhaps within its rights to act like this. Once we were in our tour bus, safely away from possible spies, our guides were uninhibited in their expressions of loathing and disgust for SLORC. They pointed out roads that had been constructed by forced labor, and miserable new shanty towns built for those bulldozed out of the city center. In the ancient city of Pagan—once I had quietly revealed to the guide that I was a journalist—I was loaned a bicycle and given a special one-man tour of the sad new township where the lacquerware-makers of the city had been decanted by the regime in their efforts to tart up the city for foreign tourists. The ordinary people of Burma, in the aftermath of the election, were the subjects of a regime that they regarded as both brutal and illegitimate.
Gustaaf Houtman draws an important distinction between two Burmese terms that both translate roughly as “power”: ana, which he renders as “the naked power of the state,” and awza, the primary meaning of which is “nutrition” and which conveys the idea of giving strength, as in “rich soil.” Houtman translates awza as “influence.”
“Ana and awza, just like authority and influence, blend into one another,” he writes. “One who is greatly influential is often given authority, and one who is in a position of authority is also able to influence.”13 A great leader like Aung San, and like a very few Burmese kings (including Kyansittha), possessed both ana and awza—which explains their magnetic hold on the emotions of the people. But in the aftermath of the 1990 election, SLORC found its last residue of awza used up. “The army,” he writes, “used to holding the reins of power since 1962, knows that their authoritarian (ana) instruments have failed to create enduring structures of state, and they now fear the invisible, fluid, and unbounded trickling throughout the country of influential (awza) and popular personalities . . . They fear these individuals might just succeed in snatching away their privileges.”
The generals could console themselves that the one personality above all others who embodied awza, Aung San Suu Kyi, was locked away from the people and completely incommunicado, her ample resources of awza unable to be expressed. But if they had known how she was spending her time while bottled up in University Avenue, even that comfort would have been denied them.
*
Although Aung San Suu Kyi has spent more than fifteen years in detention, the first years were the hardest to bear. She has said as much on numerous occasions. Soon after she was released in November 2010 she told BBC reporter John Simpson, “the first years were the worst . . . they threw me in at the deep end.”
Every human consolation had been taken from her, one by one: Her party colleagues, her friends, her children, her husband. She had no telephone to compensate. She still had her family’s letters and parcels with books and tasty items of food that would remind her of home. But in the run-up to the election, Khin Nyunt tried to obtain a little of the awza that Suu possessed in such ample quantities by telling the press that the junta was doing her the favor of passing on all these luxury goods that would turn the average Burmese pale with envy. One of the parcels addressed to her was opened and the contents photographed for the New Light of Myanmar: a Jane Fonda work-out video, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, novels, food in tins and jars, laid out for the cameras.
After that, Suu declined to accept any more letters or parcels until her release in 1995. It was a refusal that has been attacked as obdurate and harsh, particularly for its effect on her children, who had no contact with her at all for about two years. But given her desire to live in full solidarity with her imprisoned party colleagues, it is understandable. Receiving mail should be a detainee’s right; instead it was presented as a favor, and she refused all favors that accorded her special status.
Her isolation deepened. She had no visitors, either from elsewhere in Burma or from abroad. To maintain solidarity with her comrades in jail, who would have starved without relatives to provide food for them, she refused to accept food from the regime. Instead, as she had no access to money, she instructed her guards to remove furniture from the house and sell it to buy her food. They went along with the charade—though in fact the furniture was stored in an army warehouse. But the money the fictitious sales yielded was barely enough to keep her alive. She later told an interviewer:
Sometimes I didn’t have enough money to eat. I became so weak from malnourishment that my hair fell out, and I couldn’t get out of bed. I was afraid that I had damaged my heart. Every time I moved my heart went thump-thump-thump and it was hard to breathe. I fell to nearly 90 pounds from my normal weight of 106. I thought to myself that I’d die of heart failure, not of starvation . . . Then my eyes started to go bad. I developed spondylosis, which is a degeneration of the spinal column.14
She paused, then told the interviewer, putting a finger to her head: “But they never got me up here.”
Sometimes she would wake at night in the dilapidated old house, and then her father’s spirit would keep her company, she said. “I would come down at night,” she told another reporter, “and walk around and look up at his photograph, and feel very close to him. I would say to him then, ‘It’s you and me, father, against them,’ and I felt very comforted by his presence. I felt at times as if he was there with me.”15
Suu had already known plenty of sorrow in her life, from the assassination of Aung San to the death of her brother six years later. But she had never been tested like this before. It commanded all her inner resources.
When, years later, she was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Natal—“the equivalent,” she responded appreciatively, “of a cohort of legendary heroes coming to the aid of our cause”—her speech of thanks, delivered by Michael on her behalf, dwelt on the lessons she had learned in those terrible days.16
“Those who have to tread the long and weary path of a life that sometimes seems to promise little beyond suffering and yet more suffering need to develop the capacity to draw strength from the very hardships that trouble their existence,” she wrote. “It is from hardship rather than from ease that we gather wisdom. During my years under house arrest I learned my most precious lesson from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, many of whose verses, even in unsatisfactory translation, reach out to that innermost, elusive land of the spirit that we are not always capable of exploring by ourselves. The title of the poem, ‘Walk Alone,’ is bleak and its message is equally bleak.”
If they answer not your call, walk alone.
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall,
O thou of evil luck,
Open thy mind and speak out alone.
If they turn away and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
O thou of evil luck,
Trample the thorns under thy tread,
And along the blood-lined track travel alone.
If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled by storm,
O thou of evil luck,
With the thunder-flame of pain ignite thine own heart,
And let it burn alone.
Suu went on, “It is not a poem that offers heart’s ease, but it teaches that you can draw strength from your harshest experience, that a citadel of endurance can be built on a foundation of anguish. How can anyone who has learnt to ignite his heart with the thunder-flame of his own pain ever know defeat? Victory is ensured to those who are capable of learning the hardest lessons that life has to offer.”
But what is the nature of the “victory” that these hard lessons ensure? It cannot mean that the generals are going to cave in, simply because a woman has suffered. So what does it mean?
*
Once in detention, the habits of discipline instilled by her mother came to Suu’s help. “I started off on the basis that I would have to be very disciplined and keep to a strict timetable,” she said later. “I thought that I must not waste time and let myself go to seed . . . I would get up at 4:30 and meditate for an hour . . .”17
This was new. It was a practice that began with her detention, more or less: In the time when she suddenly went from being the busiest, most in-demand person in Burma to having all the time in the world, and no one to share it with.
Before this her Buddhist practice had been conventional. In 1987 she had put her sons through the shinbyu ceremony, like every Burman mother in the country. The year before that in the Japanese countryside she had shown sudden devotion before a Burmese shrine. And once a week she told her Buddhist rosary. On the campaign trail, Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary about the mantra Suu recited every week on Tuesday, the day of the week when she was born—when she remembered to do so:
Lights out and I said to Suu thank God it’s not Tuesday. Suu asked why and laughed when I said because on Tuesday she must tell her beads for 45 rounds. I think at the time she was 44 and every Tuesday which is her birthday she would recite a prayer and tell the 108 beads for 45 rounds. She said she only managed 15 at Nyamdu on April 4th—sacrilegious but I deliberately forgot to remind her on subsequent Tuesdays. I don’t believe that charms and sutras and beads can change one’s fate, only metta [loving-kindness] can, and she has the love and prayers of millions.
That was in April 1989. But the terrifying dramas of the subsequent months culminated in Suu’s total isolation. And now she needed something deeper than merely repeating some old words.
Buddhists would say that the teaching you need appears when you need it. “Not long before my house arrest in 1989,” Suu wrote later, “I was granted an audience with the venerable U Pandita, an exceptional teacher in the best tradition of great spiritual mentors whose words act constantly as an aid to a better existence.”18
U Pandita, who is based at a meditation center in Rangoon’s Golden Valley, not far from Suu’s house, is a world-famous teacher of insight meditation. Face to face and in his writings he teaches practical Buddhism with the simplicity and directness of someone teaching cabinet-making or gardening.
“We do not practice meditation to gain admiration from anyone,” he wrote in his book, In This Very Life, which Michael gave Suu at Christmas. “Rather, we practice to contribute to peace in the world. We try to follow the teachings of the Buddha and to take the instructions of trustworthy teachers, in hopes that we too can reach the Buddha’s state of purity. Having realized this purity within ourselves, we can inspire others and share this Dhamma, this truth.”
Before Burma began selling off its oil and gas, meditation was the nation’s most important export. But although the teachings of U Pandita and his late master, Mahasi Sayadaw, closely reflect the dharma of the Buddha, they are revolutionary.
Until about sixty years ago, meditation was something the monks did. Everyone was born, it was believed, with their karmic account book in a better or worse state, depending on their previous incarnations. Those impelled to become monks for life were by definition those closer to the goal of nibbana or liberation; men and women who spent their lives as farmers or shopkeepers were by definition further away from the goal.19
Monks meditated to purify themselves, and to inspire others with Buddha’s truth. Laypeople did not need to bother with such strenuous non-activity. Instead, in order to acquire merit, they gave monks food and clothing. If they were wealthy they could acquire even more merit by building pagodas. Thus emerged the stereotype satirized in Orwell’s Burmese Days of the venal Burmese businessman who, after a life of greed and corruption, hopes to redeem himself by splashing out his ill-gotten money on pagodas.20
Yet even as Orwell was writing, this stereotype was becoming outdated.
When the British abolished the Burmese monarchy in 1885, they did away with a spiritual hierarchy that had survived every other upheaval for a thousand years. The monks lost their royal patrons, which is why monks were at the forefront of every revolt against British rule. Who was to keep them in robes and bowls now? Who was to become their partner in a symbiosis of patronage and sanctification like that which they had enjoyed with the kings?
This vacuum produced a revolutionary idea, which one could define as spiritual republicanism: The people could be the new patrons, the new kings. Individually they might be poor, but en masse they were rich. The revolutionary idea at the heart of this new movement is found in the title of U Pandita’s book: In This Very Life. Laymen did not have to look forward to hundreds more reincarnations before coming to realization. If they behaved like monks—above all, devoting hours every day to meditation—they too could “realize this purity” in a single lifetime. At the same time they would also gain the other benefits of meditation. In particular they could improve morally. “Morality can be looked on as a manifestation of our sense of oneness with other beings,” U Pandita wrote.
This revolutionary idea became the seed of a mass movement, Burma’s mass lay-meditation movement.21 This is the movement which has sent Burmese insight meditation around the world, while inside the country around a million people of all ages and classes and both sexes—twice as many as serve in the Burmese Army and around twice the number of full-time monks—come together under teachers like U Pandita, committed to meditation practice which for them is not only a quest for personal purity but a way of purifying society.
These organizations, like the one based at Panditarama, U Pandita’s center in Rangoon, are now rich and powerful, owning large properties in the best parts of the cities, with the allegiance of huge numbers of people, including many professionals and indeed many army officers.
Because these organizations are centered around revered teachers, and have scrupulously avoided overt involvement in political activity, the junta cannot touch them. Intellectually and socially, they are the closest thing to liberated areas the country possesses: the only places people can discuss and reminisce without fear of being spied upon. Through all the violence of 1988 and 1989 and the wild political lurchings of the regime in the years that followed—through the abject failure of the junta in the past fifty years to foster any state institutions worthy of the name—they remained as solid and stable as befits organizations where all the members spend many hours every week cultivating mindfulness. And although, to repeat, they have never taken any political initiatives, in their solidity, wealth and freedom from the otherwise all-pervasive corruption, they retain a potential to influence future change in Burma: an abiding presence for good.
By listening humbly to U Pandita in the summer of 1989, by reading his book and getting up every morning to meditate, Suu herself became a part of that movement. In July 1988 she had made her great exordium with her maiden speech at the Shwedagon. One year later, in the silence and solitude of her home, she took a step that was, from the point of view of consolidating her identity as a modern Burmese, perhaps even more significant.
U Tin Oo, the former Minister of Defense who was the chairman of her party, meditated; indeed he had spent years as a monk after his dismissal by Ne Win. U Kyi Maung, the party’s acting leader, was also an avid meditator, and in conversation with Alan Clements succeeded in putting the benefits of the practice in a nutshell. “You were quite surprised when I told you how much we laughed together on the day of Suu’s arrest,” he said, referring to her house arrest. He continued:
It can be explained by the fact that the narrator had no regrets at all for what had happened in the past. The “I” and the “me” of the past are dead and gone. By the same token, the narrator of the present is not worried about what might happen to “him” of the future. In fact, “he” is not status-conscious at all. What I strive for is to live a life of complete awareness from moment to moment and to provide the best service I possibly can to all living beings without discrimination and with a detached mind. Does religion serve politics? I do not speculate. I just try to do my best.22
Now Suu had joined them. “Like many of my Buddhist colleagues, I decided to put my time under detention to good use by practicing meditation,” she wrote. “It was not an easy process.”23 But after getting hold of U Pandita’s book, she improved. “. . . There were times when I did more meditation because I was getting better at it,” she said. “. . . Once you have discovered the joys of meditation . . . you do tend to spend longer periods at it.”24
What she learned from her teachers and from her hours every day on the cushions was, more than any other influence, to determine her political trajectory in the years ahead. “We want a better democracy, a fuller democracy with compassion and loving kindness,” she was to say years later. “We should not be ashamed about talking about loving kindness and compassion in political terms. Values like love and compassion should be part of politics because justice must always be tempered by mercy. We prefer the word ‘compassion.’ That is warmer and more tender than ‘mercy.’”25
In particular, the special vehemence with which she had condemned Ne Win was a tone she would not use again.
“General Ne Win,” she had said in June 1989, “. . . was responsible for alienating the army from the people, fashioning the military into a body answerable only to him . . . U Ne Win is still creating all the problems in this country . . . [He] caused this nation to suffer for twenty-six years.”26
Those were the tough, hurtful, uncompassionate words that had led directly to her detention. “U Pandita spoke of the importance of samma-vaca or right speech,” she wrote years later of her audience with the teacher in 1989. “Not only should one speak only the truth, one’s speech should lead to harmony among beings, it should be kind and pleasant and it should be beneficial.”27
If she had listened to U Pandita before making that speech, those harsh words against the tyrant might have gone unsaid. In which case, could she have escaped being locked up? It is another of Burma’s haunting “ifs.”
