ON July 10, 1995, after 2,180 days in detention, Aung San Suu Kyi was suddenly set free. She emerged a changed woman into a dramatically different world.
The day after her release she met the press in Rangoon and read a statement about her hopes for the future. In photographs taken at that press conference she looks a different person. The flesh is taut on her cheekbones, demonstrating how austerely she has lived in her six years alone, but emphasizing her striking beauty, which the privations of detention have done nothing to undermine—no wrinkles, no shadow of fear or self-pity. In the moist heat of July her black fringe is damp on her brow, her cheeks and eyelids ruddy. She has always looked much younger than her years, and that is still true now, three weeks after her fiftieth birthday. But there is a maturity in her face not seen before. It is strange to speak of a fifty-year-old wife and mother-of-two attaining maturity, but that is the impression one gets, comparing this face with her face on the campaign trail in 1989. Then she was a girl on an amazing trip. Now she was a survivor who had emerged from a severe trial not merely alive but purified, as her meditation teacher had promised.
“When I knew I was going to be free, I didn’t know what to think,” she said a few days later. “But once I met my colleagues I was very very happy. The first person I saw after I was free was U Kyi Maung, who led our party to victory in 1990, and his wife, and the moment I saw them, then I was really happy. But before that I didn’t know what to think. I thought, I’m going to be free—that means I’m going to have to work a lot harder!”1
Greeting her release—which made news all over the world—Archbishop Desmond Tutu exulted, “Aung San Suu Kyi is free! How wonderful—quite unbelievable. It is so very like when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison on that February day in 1990 and strode with so much dignity into freedom. And the world thrilled at the sight.”2
In her words to the press, Suu also evoked South Africa. “During the years that I spent under house arrest, many parts of the world have undergone almost unbelievable change, and all changes for the better were brought about through dialogue . . . Once bitter enemies in South Africa are now working together for the betterment of the people. Why can’t we look forward to a similar process?”3
But if she put her hopes of dialogue in the form of a plaintive question rather than an affirmation, it was for good reason. Her counterparts in the freedom struggles that had gripped the world during her years locked in her home—Mandela, Tutu, Havel, Walesa and the rest—were now major players, some of them already in power. But Suu’s release had been so sudden and unexpected—for herself as much as for the rest of the world—that she could only guess what it might lead to.
*
Freedom meant she could get together with those of her colleagues in the party’s Central Executive Committee who had also been released, return with them to the NLD’s decrepit office and get down to work, putting back together the pieces of the party which had been shattered by SLORC since the election. “What I need,” she said, one month after her release, “is a proper office for our democracy party. All I’ve got is a single old typewriter.”4 It also meant she was besieged by requests for interviews. Before her house arrest she had been a figure of sympathetic concern to the rather small number of people around the world interested in Burma. But in her years away she had become a superstar.
It all started modestly enough. “Dear Suu,” read the letter from Rachel Trickett, sent to her care of her husband two weeks after Burma’s election in 1990, “It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the Governing Body of St. Hugh’s College . . . voted to elect you to an Honorary Fellowship.”5 A woman given to bitterness might have raised an eyebrow at this accolade from a college that had twice prevented her from changing subjects then cursed her with a third-class degree, before barring her from undertaking a second BA. However, as Suu was by this time no longer receiving letters, it is unlikely that she heard of the honor till the middle of 1992, when it would have been buried under weightier tidings.
Not long after her college’s announcement came the news that the European Parliament had decided to award her the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, named after the Soviet Union’s most famous dissident when he was still internally exiled in Siberia. The same year she was given the Thorolf Rafto Prize for Human Rights. But an award of even greater moment was in the offing.
It was set in train in December 1989 when John Finnis, professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, sent the nomination off to Oslo. Others backed her as well: Václav Havel, one of her most important and eloquent supporters down the years, eventually became her sponsor. Then on October 14, 1991, the committee in Oslo announced that Suu was the new winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
To suppose that the announcement might have induced SLORC to change their ideas and initiate negotiations is to misunderstand their psychology. But the generals were not unaware of its significance: It was a major declaration of international support, at the very moment when they were doing everything they could think of to make the world forget her. It is said that General Saw Maung, chairman of SLORC at the time, took the award as a personal humiliation, and never recovered. It was two months later that he had an attack of mania on the golf course. Four months after that he was forcibly retired.
As Suu was unable to receive the award in person, Alexander and Kim accepted it for her at the ceremony held in Oslo on December 10, 1991. Explaining why Suu had been chosen, the chairman of the committee, Professor Francis Sejersted, gave a speech that was both subtle and strongly felt.
The occasion, he said, “gives rise to many and partly conflicting emotions. The Peace Prize Laureate is unable to be here herself. The great work we are acknowledging has yet to be concluded. She is still fighting the good fight . . . Her absence fills us with fear and anxiety . . .”
Lacking power and even the faintest prospect of power, what sort of function did a figure of her evident courage and resolution fulfill? “In the good fight for peace and reconciliation,” Sejersted went on, “we are dependent on persons who set examples, persons who can symbolize what we are seeking and mobilize the best in us. Aung San Suu Kyi is such a person. She unites deep commitment with a vision in which the end and the means form a single unit . . .”
He noted how strongly she had been inspired by her father and Mahatma Gandhi. And he made the difficult but essential point that, for visionaries as courageous as these, success was not necessarily to be measured in the terms that worldly politics admits. “Aung San was shot in the midst of his struggle,” he reminded the audience. “But if those who arranged his assassination thought it would remove him from Burmese politics, they were wrong. He became the unifying symbol of a free Burma and an inspiration to those who are now fighting for a free society . . . His example and inspiration . . . over forty years after his death, gave Aung San Suu Kyi the political point of departure she needed.”
It is the profoundest thing that can be said about her struggle, and the one that confounds all those who demand to know, even today, what are her chances of gaining power. To figures like Gandhi, Aung San and his daughter, the categories of life and death are only of relative importance.
Professor Sejersted also addressed any possible charges that by awarding her the Nobel Prize, Norway was somehow claiming her for the West. “In its most basic form the concept of human rights is not just a Western idea, but one common to all major cultures,” he said. And he quoted favorite lines of Suu’s, expressing the preeminence of moral values in terms peculiarly well-suited to the Burmese heat:
The shade of a tree is cool indeed
The shade of parents is cooler
The shade of teachers is cooler still
The shade of the ruler is yet more cool
But coolest of all is the shade of the Buddha’s teachings.
Alexander, now eighteen, stood up to speak in his mother’s place. It was an intensely moving moment, given the cruel manner in which Suu’s destiny had forced the family apart, with untold emotional consequences for him and his fourteen-year-old brother. In his speech, Alexander showed a keen understanding of why his mother had made the choices she had. “Although my mother is often described as a political dissident,” he said, “we should remember that her quest is basically spiritual. As she has said, ‘the quintessential revolution is that of the spirit’ . . . ‘To live the full life,’ she says, ‘one must have the courage to bear the responsibility of the needs of others . . . one must want to bear this responsibility . . .’”
His words cast us back to the moment described by Ma Thanegi when Suu returned to the tiny cabin the two women shared on a riverboat in the midst of one campaign trip, and Suu, patching the tattered shirts of her student bodyguards, said how at home in Oxford, in another life, she had sewn name tags on her sons’ school shirts—and then her eyes filled with tears.
Bertil Lintner was in the audience to see the prize awarded. “Alexander was extraordinary,” he said. “The whole audience was spellbound. There was a standing ovation afterwards which never seemed to end. And everyone was looking at each other and saying, who is this kid? And I asked Michael afterwards, ‘Did you write that speech for him?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I wrote something but he changed all of it.’ And he was very impressive. People on the Nobel Prize committee said they had never heard a speech like that.”6
*
If it was indeed the Nobel Committee’s choice that pushed Saw Maung over the edge into insanity, Oslo can claim the credit for the most significant development in Burmese politics since the birth of SLORC—though sadly not one that has helped turn Burma into a more civilized country.
In the short term, however, the ascent of General Than Shwe to the chairmanship of SLORC in Saw Maung’s place was a boon for Suu and her family.7 Than Shwe’s career is an object lesson in how, in paranoid military dictatorships, it is often the most mediocre and unpromising candidates who get to the top.
General Than Shwe, who ruled Burma for eighteen years.
Born in 1933 in the central Burmese town of Kyaukse, which was for months the bloody front line between Allied and Japanese forces in the last months of the war, Than Shwe quietly rose through the ranks despite laying claim to no striking military successes, until he was appointed Deputy Defense Minister in July 1988, at the party congress where Ne Win dangled the promise of multiparty democracy before his people. After Saw Maung had put himself out of contention, the role of generalissimo became a contest between Than Shwe and military intelligence chief Khin Nyunt.
The latter, he of the seven-hour press conferences, the movie star manqué who led the regime’s chorus of slander and abuse against Suu Kyi, was the most articulate, wily and ambitious of Burma’s top generals. He had been very close to Ne Win, and was friendly and approachable with foreign diplomats. His English was weak—at the end of one of his interminable harangues to the press he barked, “Any answers?” when he meant, “Any questions?”—but that didn’t stop him trying to speak it. But despite all these attributes, Khin Nyunt had two handicaps: As head of Military Intelligence he knew where all the bodies were buried—an asset in turf wars against his peers until it became a dreadful liability; and he had no battlefield experience from fighting insurgencies on the country’s borders, which put him at a grave disadvantage compared with those who did have it. Even those as unappetizing as General Than Shwe.
Than Shwe’s rise is also another proof of Suu’s insight that fear corrupts those who wield power quite as much as those who are subject to it. Only in a system dominated by fear could a man like Than Shwe rise to the top and stay there: Throughout his career he gave the impression of being so unimpeachably mediocre as to be without ambition or hope of success. He was a man incapable of provoking fear—until suddenly he was at the top of the tree.
The comments of those who had dealings with him are uniformly unflattering. “Short and fat with not a strong voice,” says one. “Relatively boring,” says another. “No evident personality.” “Our leader is a very uneducated man.” “There were many intelligent soldiers but he was not one of them . . . a bit of a thug.” “You feel that he’s got there by accident . . .” The closest Than Shwe gets to being complimented is in the description of a former World Bank official. “He is such an old fox,” he said.8
Burma was now ruled by a military triumvirate consisting of Than Shwe, Khin Nyunt and General Maung Aye, this last another “obdurate and unimaginative” soldier according to a retired British diplomat, who “kept on making the most idiotic decisions about export licenses and the like—he really didn’t understand economics.”9 The aging Ne Win remained a shadowy figure in the background, and in the absence of any kiss-and-tell military memoirs or top-level defectors it is impossible to say how far he influenced events. But between them, the new rulers clearly felt it was necessary to turn over a new leaf.
General Maung Aye, who shared power with Than Shwe after Khin Nyunt was purged.
Accordingly, once Than Shwe was in office he agreed to the repatriation of 250,000 Muslim Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh, whence they had fled to escape waves of brutal sectarian persecution by the Burmese Army;10 and he released hundreds of political prisoners, including former prime minister U Nu. He ordered a cosmetic relaunch of the Working People’s Daily, which was now titled the New Light of Myanmar, though the contents remained as turgid and one-sided as before.
Most significantly of all, in 1993 he set up an organization called the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA). Although not a political party, the USDA was a bid to claw back the civilian support that the regime had ceded so disastrously to the NLD. In form it was a sort of giant social organization. State employees were required to join it or lose their jobs; once they were inside it offered everything from courses in computers, sports, art, music and Buddhism to subsidies for farmers. It worked to wean members away from the NLD, exerted close control over all other social organizations in the country and incubated a militia force that the army was to use repeatedly to do its dirty work.
The USDA was to prove the regime’s most effective tool for combating its massive post-election unpopularity: By a mixture of bribery and coercion, millions of Burmese were induced to come over to the army’s side, at least superficially, providing the regime with the legitimacy—“opinion of interest,” in Hume’s terms, but also to an extent “opinion of right”—that it so painfully lacked in the aftermath of the election. Its patronage by the army was so generous that within fifteen years it had swelled to embrace more than half the population.
Aung San Suu Kyi was also on Than Shwe’s “to do” list, but not because he had any interest in opening a dialogue with the hated NLD. In 1992, Japan, Burma’s biggest donor of foreign aid and its closest ally ever since bailing out its stricken economy with war reparations in 1955, had, under American pressure, signed the official Development Assistance Charter, which required donors to pay attention to the state of human rights and democracy in the countries they helped. Japan was now the world’s second largest economy after its hectic years of growth in the 1980s, but it remained susceptible to moral pressure from the United States, and had shocked the junta by suspending all aid to Burma in January 1989. Japan had, however, also been one of the first to recognize SLORC as legitimate, just the next month; both Burma and Japan were keen to do business together again, and now Japan impressed on the generals the need to overcome this human rights hurdle.
The obvious way was to do as the whole Western world demanded and let that woman out. But the regime’s stinging humiliation in the elections was still too fresh in their minds. So Than Shwe temporized. He announced that he would hold talks with the NLD, but took no steps towards doing so. And in the meantime, for the first time in more than two years, he granted Suu’s family permission to visit.
Michael came first, in May 1992. He stayed for two weeks, banned as before from having contact with anyone outside her house—essentially sharing her conditions of detention. On his return to Bangkok he told a press conference that Suu was “in good health, but not particularly robust” and committed to staying in Burma. “Things have not been easy for her,” he went on, “but in the days we spent together she repeatedly pointed out to me that others have suffered much more than she has.”
It was an acutely political statement: giving little hint of the health scares, the weight loss and hair loss, the outright poverty of her solitary life once she had resolved to refuse all offers of help from the regime, but at the same time underscoring that she was far from the pampered poster child of the West depicted in the state’s propaganda. “Hers is an austere and disciplined life,” he said. Under house arrest Suu spent her time “reading politics, philosophy, literature, Buddhist writings and listening to the radio.” She had also “with her own hands” sewn curtains for every room in the house. Regarding the government’s intentions, he said, she had “an open mind.”
Of course the mind of the government itself was anything but open: The only satisfactory solution for the generals was for Suu to disappear—without leaving any blood on their hands. In March 1991, while General Saw Maung was still in charge, the Burmese Embassy in London had called Michael in and proposed that he write to her and ask her to come home. He turned them down flat, saying he knew well what her response would be.
SLORC did not give up there. They had clearly learned from their numerous in situ spies that Suu had taken up meditation, and was in general showing more signs of Buddhist piety than in the past. So in the same year they prevailed on a senior Buddhist monk called U Rewata Dhamma to visit Suu and request her on the regime’s behalf to leave the country.
The choice of this divine was not random: The connections between U Rewata Dhamma and Suu’s family went back decades. They had first got to know him in Rangoon, then when they moved to Delhi the acquaintance was renewed: The monk had gone to India’s Varanasi University to study Sanskrit and Hindi, as well as to learn more about Mahayana Buddhism. And when Suu settled down in Oxford with Michael and their first child, it so happened that Rewata Dhamma moved to England to set up the Birmingham Buddhist Vihara. The strong karmic connection was revived.
Apart from her husband, therefore, the regime could not have picked a more influential person to try to persuade Suu to leave. And it is a reflection of the great respect in which Suu held the monk that she did not turn him down flat. Instead she agreed that she would indeed do as he proposed and leave Burma—on four conditions: the transfer of power to civilians; the release of all political prisoners; fifty minutes of broadcast time on government-run TV and radio stations; and, finally, to be allowed to walk to the airport, a distance of more than ten miles.11
In the depths of the toughest period of her detention, with a regime billboard outside her house that screamed, in Burmese and English, CRUSH EVERY DISRUPTIVE ELEMENT, Suu had not lost her sense of humor.
*
U Rewata Dhamma did not give up there. He realized the futility of trying to get her to depart, but understood the urgent need to get Suu and the regime talking. And it was thanks to pressure from him, as well as pressure from Japan and the world at large, that the two sides finally met, for the first time since the funeral of Suu’s mother in January 1989.
There were two encounters, the first on September 20, 1994, with both Than Shwe and Khin Nyunt present, the second with Khin Nyunt and two other generals. This second meeting, on October 28th, was splashed across the front page of the following day’s New Light of Myanmar. Senior General Than Shwe got the top spot in that day’s paper, with a short piece in which it was reported that he had sent “felicitations to the Republic of Turkey” on its national day. Other senior junta figures also made it onto the front page: We learn of deputy-prime minister Vice Admiral Maung Maung Khin meeting Japanese businessmen to discuss investment, the American chargé d’affaires calling on the Minister for Forestry, and the Minister of Transport receiving the Ambassador of Pakistan.
But readers were left in no doubt about the day’s top story: “Dialogue between the State Law and Order Restoration Council Secretary-1, Lt-Gen Khin Nyunt and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi” as the headline put it. It was immortalized in no fewer than three front-page photographs, in the largest of which they beam at each other across an oversize bowl of flowers. No background was given, no mention of Suu’s role in her party—no mention of the party at all, in fact—and no mention of the fact that she had spent five years and more detained at the regime’s pleasure. But here it was, at last: “Dialogue” according to the headline.
“The discussions, which were frank and cordial,” ran the report, “covered the current political and economic situation of the country, the political and economic reforms . . . and steps that should be taken with a view to the long-term welfare of the nation.” The absence of grammatical errors suggests that Suu may have looked over the draft.
And that was it. After the talks finished she was driven back to University Avenue and house arrest. It was the closest she would come to negotiating with Burma’s military rulers for the next eight years, and they went precisely nowhere. When rumors began to circulate that the two parties had reached an undisclosed agreement—the first step towards her release and an ongoing dialogue—she smuggled out a statement denying it. “There has not been and there will not be any secret deal with regard to either my release or to any other issue,” she insisted.
Both the empty “dialogue” and Suu’s release nine months later reveal the importance of Japan’s influence on the regime.12 The Japanese ambassador’s residence is within sight of Suu’s house; on July 10, 1995, Japanese diplomats were the first foreigners to be tipped off about what was unfolding, and witnessed the white car carrying the chief of police pull into 54 University Avenue at 4 PM to inform Suu that she was free. The Japanese government then did as it had promised, welcoming her release, and indicating that aid to Burma would soon be resumed.
Although Japan’s wartime control of Burma ended in disaster, the two countries for many years enjoyed a unique bilateral relationship. Not only had Aung San, Ne Win and other young anti-imperialists trained there, but many Burmese students were given scholarships to study in Japan during the war years, and formed an influential cadre of leadership afterwards. As the first Asian country to modernize and challenge the West, Japan felt under an avuncular obligation to help Burma as it took its first faltering steps as an independent nation.
Burma’s generals learned much from the Japanese approach to dealing with the West. Japan’s brutal experience during and after the Pacific War had taught it that the bullying demands of the West could not be ignored, but did not have to dictate the way the state behaved. They must be honored in form, but the substance was another matter. Japan was always urging the regime to do as Japan did after its surrender and erect a decorous constitutional facade, one which was acceptable to the United States in particular. For the same reason, they tried to get the regime to understand the importance of releasing Aung San Suu Kyi—not as a first step to negotiating with her, let alone ceding power to the NLD, but as a sop to the West. What mattered was to concede the symbolic demand. By doing the minimum necessary, the generals could carry on ruling and doing business just as before.
The junta eventually went along with Japan’s ideas. Yet in the long run such diplomacy of gestures brings only grief. The gesture—in this case, the release of Suu—seems to contain the promise of further development, yet on further examination proves empty. What has been presented as promising proves to be treacherous, and what has been claimed to be a demonstration of sincerity turns out to be the opposite.
The straight-talking American ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, was to make that clear to the generals very soon. Visiting Rangoon in September 1995, two months after Suu’s release, the highest-ranking American to meet the regime since 1988 told Khin Nyunt that merely releasing Suu was not nearly enough to persuade the world that it was making progress towards democracy. She urged other countries including Japan to hold back on investing in Burma until more serious steps were seen.
Far from signalling a thaw in American–Burmese relations, Albright’s visit saw them go into the deep freeze, with President Clinton agreeing to Congress’s demand for the first American commercial sanctions against Burma since the ban on arms sales back in 1988.
*
One reason SLORC felt able to free Suu was because they had convinced themselves that she no longer mattered: The election result was a flash in the pan, six years is a long time, the demonising efforts of state propaganda had done their job—and besides, she was a woman! It was the same cocktail of wishful thinking and male chauvinism that had led them down the garden path in 1990. And it was to make them look just as foolish very quickly.
Suu never planned to give impromptu talks from the slightly undignified position of her front gate, teetering on a table and hanging on to the spikes; it just happened that way. On the day of her release, as the news raced through Rangoon, people began making their way to University Avenue. Inside, Suu had been joined by U Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung, two of her most senior colleagues, released from jail a few months earlier, and U Aung Shwe, who had been acting leader of the party while the rest were out of action. Soon her former student bodyguards and office assistants, many of whom had spent years in jail, were also streaming back along the road to sign up for duty again. Ma Thanegi, her personal assistant during the campaigning months, had told her before they parted in 1989 that she wanted to go back to painting full time and would not be available to help any more. But after Suu’s release in 1995 Ma Thanegi was asked if she could help out for a few days until Suu found someone else. She agreed, and turned up the next day.
And the ordinary people of Rangoon came too. By July 11th, the day after her release, thousands were milling around the gates of Suu’s house, hoping for a glimpse of her. Her first instinct was to go and mingle with them, but Tin Oo and Kyi Maung discouraged it: She was still frail after her years of austerity, and some crackpot, or regime agent, could take advantage of her proximity to do her harm. So instead a table was taken out of the house and pressed up against the steel gate and, to the delight of those gathered on the other side, suddenly her head appeared above it, flanked by her lieutenants. They clapped and roared their welcome.
She spoke for ten minutes, telling them that democracy could still be achieved, that patience was required, and that she and her party hoped soon to be in dialogue with the regime. Then she got down again. But if the Military Intelligence agents in their pressed white shirts and sunglasses, beadily observing the goings-on, imagined that that would be the end of it, they were soon to be disabused. Some of the crowd went away but more arrived. They stayed all night. By the morning there were even more. Out of simple politeness, Suu got up on her table and spoke again. And still they didn’t go home. A microphone and loudspeakers were rigged up so it was more like a proper meeting. They were still there the following day, so she addressed them again. And so on.
This went on for an entire week and still the crowds did not disperse. Finally Suu and her colleagues realized that no work was going to get done if this continued, so instead of daily meetings they persuaded people to come only at the weekends, when she and her top colleagues would take it in turns to talk.
Suu at the gates of her house, giving a speech.
The weekend chats quickly became the hottest ticket in Rangoon—metaphorically speaking, because attendance was free. By September they had become a fixture of the city’s week. “Tourists are making a beeline for 54 University Avenue,” Agence France-Press reported on September 12, 1995, “just for a glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi . . . Typical of the tourists is a young woman who told AFP she was a law student who traveled all the way from the United States to see Burma’s Nobel Peace Laureate. ‘Ever since I read her book Freedom from Fear’—the collection of essays by and about her first published in 1991—‘I had this burning desire to meet Aung San Suu Kyi personally,’ she said.”
But the tourists—Suu sometimes tossed them a few words in English—were a small minority. Most who came were the same ordinary citizens who had flocked to her election campaign meetings. “Hundreds gather in the street to hear her preach reconciliation and exchange banter with the crowd,” the Economist reported on November 4th. “The gatherings are more organized now than when she was first freed. An atmosphere of happy spontaneity persists, but in front of her, like bouncers at a pop concert, stands a row of young men in grey T-shirts emblazoned with her portrait.”
A British diplomat who served in Rangoon from 1996 said that SLORC’s generals weren’t the only ones still in denial about Suu’s popularity. “I was constantly being told by my ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] colleagues that Suu was a complete busted flush, yesterday’s person, that people hadn’t really heard about her anymore,” he recalled. Yet these claims didn’t survive a reality check. “When we traveled around, I was often approached by Burmese villagers who said, ‘It’s great what you are doing for Suu, we all love her, keep it up . . .’”13
*
The frozen détente between Suu and the regime could not last. She demanded dialogue, and got silence. They wanted her silence, and got adoring crowds listening to her speeches. Finally, they wanted her party’s compliance in what they called the National Convention—and the party decided fairly quickly that it would not give it.
The National Convention, set up in 1993 after Than Shwe had taken charge of SLORC, was the junta’s answer to the problem of what to do about 1990’s election result. But as months turned into years and the Convention made no discernible progress, it became clear that it was essentially a way to postpone the whole question of multiparty democracy indefinitely.
The Convention’s task was to draft the principles of a new constitution—the necessary preliminary, the dogma now went, to a handover to a democratically elected government. It consisted of slightly less than a hundred MPs-elect, plus six hundred appointees of the junta, overwhelmingly military men. The NLD had signed up to the Convention while Suu and her top colleagues were in detention. But as soon as she and her old colleagues were able to take a good look at it, they realized it was a device to put a legalistic gloss on the military’s refusal to acknowledge the election result, and to legitimise their rule.
“The military’s primary provision from the inception of the process,” wrote David Steinberg, “was that the military would play the primary role in the society.”14 Chapter I, 6 (f) of the draft constitution which the body was set up to rubber-stamp referred to “enabling the Defense services to be able to participate in the National political leadership of the State.” It was, in other words, a way to enshrine and perpetuate the status quo. And in November 1995, Suu, Tin Oo and Kyi Maung announced that the party was pulling out.
*
If the National Convention was, in the NLD’s view, the wrong way to go, what was the right way? What would a well-governed Burma look like?
Suu’s first excursion outside Rangoon after her release was to the town of Thamanya in the province of Pa’an, a day’s car ride out of the capital to the southeast. Various explanations have been floated as to why it was important for her to go there. One put forward by Gustaaf Houtman is that, given the flat refusal of the junta to agree to start negotiating, it was in search of an intermediary—another Rewata Dhamma, the man who had brought about her first meetings with the generals. “Aung San Suu Kyi’s initial intention,” he wrote, “appeared to have been to visit a monk greatly respected by both the people and the members of the regime, with the aim of working towards reconciliation. Some even speculated that she met with some high-ranking military officials at Thamanya in preparation for future dialogue.”15
Landscape of lakes and hills in Karen state, near Thamanya, the town visited by Suu in 1995 and 2002.
If that was the plan, it came to nothing—on her return from the visit she invited Ne Win to a ceremony to mark the end of “Buddhist Lent” but he did not show up. But in any case there were other good reasons to pay respects to the aged monk who lived in a hut in the monastery at the top of the hill.
The hill of Thamanya, as Suu wrote in the first of her “Letters from Burma,” published in Tokyo’s Mainichi Daily News, “is known throughout Burma as a famous place of pilgrimage, a sanctuary ruled by the metta of the Hsayadaw, the holy teacher, U Vinaya.”
An image of Thamanya Sayadaw, the revered Buddhist teacher whom Suu visited soon after her release from detention in 1995 and again in 2002. His embalmed body near the Thamanya temple was an important pilgrimage site until his corpse was mysteriously stolen by men in military uniforms in 2008, six months after the Saffron Revolution.
In Burmese Buddhism, metta is one of the “Brahmavihara,” the “Divine Abidings,” along with compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—one of the divine qualities which the cultivation of the mind through meditation brings to fruition. “In contrast to the aggressive, destructive quality of hatred,” wrote Sayadaw U Pandita, “metta, loving-kindness, wishes the welfare and happiness of others. When one has tasted the flavor of the Dhamma . . . you want others to have the same experience.”16
As Suu’s Buddhist studies progressed in the solitude of house arrest, metta became for her the most important of the attributes which she felt must be encouraged for Burma to “be built up on the old foundations” (as J.P. Furnivall had put it in 1916 in the Journal of the Burma Research Society). Her stress on the concept gives insight into the way her political thought was developing—how she was knitting together ancient spiritual virtues with ideas about the way people must learn to behave at the social and political level.
What is the NLD’s founding principle? she asked delegates to the party conference held in May 1996.
It is metta. Rest assured that if we should lose this metta, the whole democratic party would disintegrate. Metta is not only to be applied to those that are connected with you. It should also be applied to those who are against you. Metta means sympathy for others. Not doing unto others what one does not want done to oneself . . . So our League does not wish to harm anyone. Let me be frank: We don’t even want to harm SLORC.
. . . Power comes with responsibility and I believe that anyone who understands that cannot be power-crazy. I know how much responsibility goes with a democracy. That is why we are not power-crazy people. We are only an organization that wants to do its utmost for the people and the country. We are an organization that is free from grudge and puts metta to the fore.17
Pie in the sky, you might say: the sort of talk that only an enthusiastic ingénue could come out with, still enthusiastic after all these years alone. But in her reflections on her visit to Thamanya, Suu offered an example of how metta was to be applied in the political life of the country.
On October 4, 1995, Suu, along with three cars full of party colleagues, made one of those predawn starts so familiar from her campaigning period and set off towards the Hill of Thamanya—to visit a corner of Burma where metta ruled.
“There is a special charm to journeys undertaken before daybreak in hot lands,” she wrote. “The air is soft and cool and the coming of dawn reveals a landscape fresh from the night dew.” Then dawn broke. “In the distance could be seen the white triangle of a stupa wreathed in morning mist, tipped with a metal ‘umbrella’ that glinted reddish gold in the glow of the morning sun.”18
Suu’s joy at finally breaking free from the city after so many years cooped up illuminates the piece—but countering that is the dire condition of the roads. “The road had become worse as we traveled further and further away from Rangoon,” she wrote. “In compensation the landscape became more beautiful. Our eyes rejoiced at rural Burma in all its natural glory even though our bones were jolted as our car struggled to negotiate the dips and craters in the road.”19
Towards evening they neared their destination.
As we approached Thamanya, the quiet seemed to deepen . . . Suddenly it occurred to us that the quietness and ease had to do with something more than the beauties of nature or our state of mind. We realized that the road had become less rough. Our vehicle was no longer leaping from crater to rut and we were no longer rolling around the car likes peas in a basin.
As soon as we passed under the archway that marked the beginning of the domain of Thamanya, the road became even better: a smooth, well-kept black ribbon winding into the distance . . . The road had been built and maintained by the Hsayadaw for the convenience of the villagers who lived around the hill and of the pilgrims who came in their tens of thousands each year. It was far superior to many a highway to be found in Rangoon.20
What is the connection between a modern, well-maintained road and loving-kindness? In the Burmese context the analogy is vivid. Metta permeates both the mentality of the man who plans the road to benefit his visitors, and of those who contribute their labor to build and look after it. The contrast to the rest of the country, where roads are carelessly planned by disaffected engineers, built by villagers forced to leave their fields and work for nothing, then left to fall apart because of the pervasive corruption, could not be more stark. That, for Suu, was the contrast between a country where metta is cultivated and one where it is not.
“No project could be successfully implemented without the willing cooperation of those concerned,” she concluded.
People will contribute hard work and money cheerfully if they are handled with kindness and care and if they are convinced that their contributions will truly benefit the public.
. . . Some have questioned the appropriateness of talking about such matters as metta and thissa (truth) in the political context. But politics is about people and what we have seen in Thamanya proved that love and truth can move people more strongly than any form of coercion.21
But could love and truth move the stony heart of SLORC? Suu, as Gustaaf Houtman sees it, gave the regime two choices. It could continue to play the part of Devadatta, the cousin of the Buddha who became his disciple but was then plagued by feelings of jealousy and ill-will and plotted to kill the Blessed One. Or it could instead take the role of Angulimala, the serial killer who wore a necklace of his victims’ fingers around his neck, but who on meeting the Buddha renounced his evil ways and became a monk.22
But SLORC’s ruling generals showed no sign of being impressed with the analogy. As far as they were concerned, they were the heirs of the kings. And all they required was submission.
