THE generals dismissed Aung San Suu Kyi as an alien and an agent of the West: The Nobel Peace Prize Committee had made the award to “a follower they [i.e. the West] had raised,” they said, but SLORC would “never accept the leadership of a person under foreign influence who will dance to the tune of a foreign power.”1
In one sense they were perhaps right. Suu was a believer in progress. She wanted to see her society improve, with better education, better standards of living, better roads, happier people, and she did not see such improvements as inconsistent with their Buddhist faith. They were perhaps right in seeing themselves as faithful to Myanmar tradition, where a king’s duty was to win wars, build pagodas, feed monks and bask in glory; where it was accepted by the people that rulers were one of the “five evils” and if the rains came on time and the king’s tax farmers left one with enough to eat, that was about the best one could hope for. “Stagnation” is a term of criticism when applied to governments in the West; in Burma it means business as usual.
The seven years between 1995 and 2002 were for Burma in general and Suu in particular a long lacuna, a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” during which the brave but vague promise of her release was followed by nothing but disappointment, exploitation, abuse, persecution and loss.2 The junta shelved attempts to write a new constitution, changed its name, cut ceasefire deals with most of the ethnic groups on its borders, conducted a fire sale of teak, jade, oil and gas, joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and played sad, absurdist games of cat and mouse with Aung San Suu Kyi. The brave hopes that had brought Suu worldwide fame and the Nobel Peace Prize threatened to curdle completely.
*
When Suu and her colleagues in the NLD announced in November 1995 that they were pulling their handful of MPs-elect out of the National Convention, the structure set up to draft a new constitution for Burma, it soon became clear that they had crossed an invisible line. Whatever SLORC had expected from Suu when they released her, it wasn’t that. Perhaps they imagined that she and her colleagues had been so cowed by their years in prison, or so grateful for their release, or both, that they would now be prepared to toe the line. But by ordering a walkout from the Convention, Suu gave them clear warning that she was going to be just as difficult to manage this time around as last.
The junta retorted that, on the contrary, it was the NLD that had been expelled. The departure from the Convention of much the most important political party in the country gave them the excuse to put the process on ice, and the Convention remained in suspension for most of the following eight years. And in the meantime SLORC again took up the task of limiting the damage “that woman” could do.
Khin Nyunt is often seen—partly on account of that grinning front page he shared with Suu after their “dialogue” in 1994—as the relatively tender face of SLORC, but while she was in detention he had warned of the danger she posed because (according to a fifteenth-century treatise from which he quoted) if a female were to take power “the country will be in ruins.”3 And now it was clear that Suu and her party’s brief and unconsummated honeymoon with SLORC was over.
In November Alan Clements, a former Buddhist monk hoping to conduct a series of interviews with Suu, was in Rangoon, waiting for an appointment. “For six weeks I had been holed up in a hotel room in Rangoon waiting for a telephone call from Aung San Suu Kyi’s office,” he wrote.4 At their preliminary meeting, Suu had told him, “Our situation is unpredictable under the SLORC, so please be patient . . . My father used to say, ‘Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.’ I think this is always the best approach.”
Towards the end of that month it began to look as if the interviews would never happen because Suu would be back under lock and key. By late November, Clements went on, Suu and her party colleagues “came under increasing attack in . . . the New Light of Myanmar . . . Almost daily half-page editorials denounced Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues in violent terms. The military promised to ‘annihilate’ those ‘destructionists’ who disrupted the ‘tranquility of the nation.’”
On November 30th, Clements went to visit U Tin Oo, the party’s chairman, whom he had known when they were both monks in the same Burmese monastery. But when he rang the bell, the former general’s wife came to the door with a grim look on her face and told him, “He’s upstairs gathering medicines and a few belongings. I’ll get him for you.”5
Tin Oo was getting ready for the authorities to come and take him off to jail again. When he came down, he said to the American, “Don’t worry. You shouldn’t be here. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is preparing to be re-arrested too . . .”
In the event it was a false alarm. But it marked the beginning of an ugly new phase.
*
Months before Suu’s release, the junta had begun touting 1995 as “Visit Myanmar Year”: Khin Nyunt’s favorite theme was attracting foreign investment, and he alone of the top three generals dreamed of emulating Thailand’s success as a tourist destination. It was a proposal that went against the grain of a regime always tempted to withdraw into its shell at the first sign of foreign trouble; the Ne Win approach, marshalling tourists in groups and flying them around the more famous sights then showing them the door, was much more their way of doing things. But the promise of tourist dollars got the better of their prudence.
By releasing Suu, Khin Nyunt cleared away the most glaring obstacle to a successful tourist drive, which was postponed for a year and renamed “Visit Myanmar Year 1996.” But of course Suu free meant Suu at liberty to talk to her foreign friends. And in March 1996 she told the world exactly what she thought of Khin Nyunt’s stunt. Suu, reported Harriet O’Brien in the Independent on March 17, 1996, “had previously taken the attitude that some foreign investment and tourism would help to ease the military’s grip on the country, but she has changed her mind. [She said,] ‘Make 1996 a year for not visiting Burma.’”
In Burma’s best-known beauty spots, new hotels were already being thrown up in readiness for the hoped-for tourist influx, O’Brien reported—but here was the world’s most famous Burmese telling everyone not to bother.
“Burma will always be here,” Ms. Suu Kyi said, announcing the boycott. “Visitors should come later.” She went on, “Most materials for hotels are imported. The result is that each hotel signifies a lot of money, but really only for overseas suppliers. Some construction companies have even been bringing in workers from abroad. Within the country there’s really only one privileged group making money.”
The previous month, in one of her “Letters from Burma” in Tokyo’s Mainichi Daily News, Suu had argued that it was “not yet time to invest” in Burma.6 And in the Independent interview she made a more wide-ranging attack on foreign investment, condemning a recent visit by a British trade delegation. “It’s not right for the British government to do all it can to support human rights here and then to promote trade with Burma against democracy,” she said. “The sort of involvement being suggested won’t help to bring about sustained economic and social development.”
The issue of investment and sanctions has continued to provoke fierce debate ever since. In the spring of 2011, Suu’s declaration that she was still opposed to the lifting of sanctions provoked the New Light of Myanmar to warn that she and her party “will meet their tragic ends” if they continued in this vein. It was the first threat to her since her release in 2010: proof that, even though sanctions have not achieved their goal of inducing the regime to negotiate, they remain a very touchy subject.
Ma Thanegi, Suu’s friend and companion who kept the intimate diary of their campaign travels in 1989, claims that the permanent rift that opened up between the two women was caused by their conflicting views on sanctions. Freed from Insein Jail in 1992, Ma Thanegi had gone round to greet Suu when she emerged from detention, and resumed helping out in the party’s office a couple of days a week. But soon, she said, she found herself in disagreement with Suu’s policy pronouncements.
“When she began telling foreign investors to stay away, I told her that it would hurt the people, who need jobs. She replied, ‘People will just have to tighten their belts.’ I said, ‘There are no more notches.’ I insisted on this issue but she said, ‘It’s not true.’” And there the discussion ended.7
Ma Thanegi claimed that this was another case in which Suu’s instincts for moderation were trumped by the more hard-line demands of others in the party—the same process, she says, that happened before Suu’s house arrest, when young party members opposed U Kyi Maung’s suggestion that they try to negotiate with SLORC and Suu agreed to adopt their tougher approach. She also maintains that Suu naively read too much into Madeleine Albright’s vigorous statements of support after her visit in September 1995. Ma Thanegi noted in her diary:
The first two or three days when she spoke from her gate she talked of reconciliation, and I heard through a US Embassy official who was the CIA Chief that his Burmese MI contacts said SLORC was pleased, but still had a “let’s wait and see” attitude. Some NLD members were angry with her for being “soft” and asked her if she were “surrendering.” Her speeches turned hard-line. I told her she should not openly criticize [SLORC] but should wait to discuss these things when she meets them. She said she must be honest. I told her some people do not deserve honesty.
Madeleine Albright . . . came and said we are behind you all the way, and not being a political person, Ma Suu doesn’t see that “behind you all the way” is just politics, just happy talk—they are not going to send in the Marines to shoot the military down and impose democracy.
Since 1995 Ma Thanegi has repeated her attack on Suu’s line on sanctions and the tourism boycott many times and very publicly, perhaps most damagingly for the NLD’s cause in the pages of Lonely Planet’s controversial Burma guide book. “Ma Thanegi . . . told us many NLD members have always been against the [tourism] boycott,” the guide’s editors wrote in the 2009 edition. “Many people around Aung San Suu Kyi tried to dissuade her on the boycott,” they quoted her as saying. “In ’96, ’97, ’98, ’99. I gave up trying around then.”
Suu may at first have regarded Ma Thanegi’s opinions as worthy of her attention but not necessarily more than that: After all, the two of them had become friendly during the campaign tours, but Ma Thanegi was not even a member of the party, let alone of its Central Executive Committee. But when Ma Thanegi began repeating them to any foreign journalist willing to listen—the “no more notches” line has been recycled many times over the years—she must have considered the possibility that her closest companion, the one to whom she had given soap, toothpaste and a good pair of sandals before she was taken to jail, had to all intents and purposes gone over to the other side.
The point of no return came when the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh quoted the “no more notches” line in a piece about Burma published by the New Yorker in August 1996.8 After that, communication between the two women ceased.
“I didn’t want to really quarrel with [Suu],” Ma Thanegi told me, “so I stopped going to see her. Then after the New Yorker article came out Michael [Aris] wrote me a letter accusing me of disloyalty.” Ma Thanegi became persona non grata for the party: She must have done a deal with the devil.
As her diaries on Suu’s campaign trail make clear, Ma Thanegi is a very robust, self-confident, plain-spoken woman, never one to hide her views for fear of causing offence: One of the reasons she made such a good companion for Suu was that she was incapable of flattering her. On the other hand she admitted to me that she had been subjected to several periods of interrogation during her time in jail, including at least one that went on all night. Given the importance to the regime of weakening Suu’s prestige abroad, transforming her most sophisticated Burmese friend into a highly articulate enemy would be a goal worth pursuing.
Ma Thanegi denies that she was acting on the orders of SLORC in attacking Suu. “They did not try to put any words into my mouth,” she told me. “They knew they couldn’t influence me at all. I knew that if I stopped being involved in politics my life would be okay.”
But her frequent and uniformly anti-NLD comments to foreign media show that she has by no means “stopped being involved in politics.” A former friend said he knew that Ma Thanegi had been “turned” by MI in prison, and even knew the person responsible. “Khin Nyunt’s man worked on Ma Thanegi successfully,” he said. “Colonel Hla Min was her main contact as he was one of the most polished, by the military’s standards, and US-high schooled.”9 This information was confirmed by Aung Lynn Htut, a former senior officer in Military Intelligence and number two in the Burmese Embassy in Washington, who sought political asylum in the United States in 2005, after the fall of Khin Nyunt, his boss. “All political matters were under the control of Counter-Intelligence Department,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Khin Nyunt allowed Colonel Hla Min to keep in touch with Ma Thanegi.”10
Why would she succumb? In return MI would have promised to leave her in peace, the former friend suggested. “Being left alone is no small reward if you are an artist, a writer, who has many foreign visitors. You’d be surprised how weak-kneed professionals and intellectuals get in these situations, especially if there is both pressure and the seduction of access to power. Picking up the phone and talking to an MI agent and getting one’s Internet line fixed is a huge privilege, and a concrete allure of being in the good books of the regime.” He said the 2006 film about informers in communist East Germany, The Lives of Others, gives a good idea of the Burmese situation.
Ma Thanegi denied having been given any material inducements to attack her old friend. “I have a comfortable living because of my inheritance,” she said, “I’m fine, I don’t need to live in a huge house.” But Ma Thanegi has never had any political aspirations of her own, so what possible reason could there be to attack Suu and her ideas so publicly if not to weaken her standing and improve that of the regime? If she remained as fond of Suu as she evidently was throughout the trips they took together but felt that she had recently taken some wrong turnings, surely she would have taken care to make her views known only to the close circle of people in the party who were in a position to influence her? Going public with her denunciations appears to be the clearest possible declaration of enmity.
The larger question is: Was Ma Thanegi right? Was Suu justified in supporting sanctions which could further damage the already miserable living standards of ordinary Burmese? By yielding (as Ma Thanegi claims Suu did) to the demands of her more hot-headed colleagues, was she not backing a policy that would only antagonize the regime while condemning her people to unrelenting poverty? Should she not have been prepared to sacrifice her revolution for the sake of her people’s prosperity?
But Suu’s insight was that, under this regime, economic liberalization could not be expected to produce any significant degree of freedom or democracy—or even more generalized affluence. SLORC’s most significant reform was to allow foreign companies to invest in Burma, but from the outset they ensured that all the investment was done through them personally or through cronies in their control: No foreigner was allowed to get an independent toehold in the country. Profits went straight into the generals’ pockets and any sign of independence was promptly punished.
Suu only began speaking out in favor of sanctions once the faint hopes of dialogue after her release had come to nothing and her party had pulled out of the National Convention. By speaking out now she was putting in play the one tool that guaranteed her a hearing and a standing both in Rangoon and the world outside. Had she opposed sanctions she would have gained nothing, and there would have been little besides moral squeamishness to prevent the rest of the world forming an orderly queue at the border to do business with SLORC: After all, Western businessmen do business with plenty of other vile regimes around the world. But if Burma had gone the way of Indonesia under Suharto, the Philippines under Marcos, Zaire under Mobutu or Libya under Gaddafi with her blessing—what would have been the point of her entering politics in the first place?
In the New Yorker piece where Ma Thanegi ventilated her opposition to sanctions, Amitav Ghosh noted how Suu’s manner had changed since her release. In their first interview, soon after she emerged from house arrest, they had laughed and joked together; in the second, nearly a year later, she rebuffed his arguments bluntly. For example, she refused to accept that the governments of ASEAN should be condemned for launching a policy of “constructive engagement” with Burma. “Just because [these governments] have decided on a policy of constructive engagement, there is no need for us to think of them as our enemies,” she told him.
“I was witnessing, I realized, Suu the tactician,” he wrote. “She was choosing her words with such care because she wanted to ensure that she did not alienate the leaders of nations who might otherwise think of her as a threat.
“. . . She now seemed much more the politician. Suu now had a party line.”11
Ghosh gives the impression of being rather upset by the change—as a fellow Oxford graduate and an old acquaintance he seems to think he deserved something rather more intimate and, dare we say, feminine in the way of conversation than what he got the second time around.
But within the very narrow scope the regime had left her, Suu was learning the ropes.
*
The other issue Suu raised in her interview with Harriet O’Brien has been just as hotly debated as trade sanctions: the question of whether or not tourists should visit Burma. Since Ne Win’s coup in 1962, the vast majority of Burmese have been isolated from the rest of the world, which has left them ill-informed, culturally impoverished, and at the mercy of the state’s propaganda. By opposing tourism, it was argued, Suu exacerbated that isolating effect, helping to keep her people mentally shackled in a country that has become a prison for them, closing off valuable sources of free information. At the same time she put a moral obstacle in the way of non-Burmese learning more about her country at first hand.
Suu’s supporters countered that most tourists who visit tropical destinations have no real interest in what is going on in the places they visit and have no significantly beneficial effect on the lives of the people they come in contact with. In Burma they travel on roads built by forced labor and stay in hotels built on land obtained by bulldozing the villages of the poor. And because of the generals’ stranglehold on the economy, most of the money they spend ends up in the regime’s pockets.
Suu and her party’s opposition to tourism, amplified in the West by the Burma Campaign UK and the US Campaign for Burma, has certainly helped to keep the growth of Burma’s tourism sector in check: It remains minuscule compared with that of neighboring Thailand—Burma gets only 1.4 percent of the number of tourists who visit Thailand, 200,000 compared with its neighbor’s fourteen million12—but the regime’s failure to create a modern tourist infrastructure and an environment in which foreign businesses can work without fear of having their assets stolen are probably more significant factors than the boycott.
In November 2010, in the run-up to Suu’s release, the NLD announced a U-turn on tourism. Win Tin, the veteran journalist and member of the party’s Central Executive Committee who had served nineteen years in prison, said in an interview that the NLD had changed its policy. “We want people to come to Burma,” he said, “not to help the junta but to help the people by understanding the situation . . . For the outside world to see, to know our situation, that can help our cause a lot.”13 Later Suu herself endorsed the change. While not encouraging package tours and cruises, she said, she believes that “individuals coming in to see the country, to study the situation in the country, might be a good idea.”14 And in June 2011 the NLD formally reversed its policy on the issue.
However this does not mean the floodgates are about to open: Lonely Planet will continue to enjoy a near-monopoly of the market for guidebooks. Rough Guides’ publishing director Clare Currie said she hoped that Suu’s release “will ultimately help open Burma to travelers. However, we think it is too soon for a complete change of mind. We are not currently planning to publish a guidebook to Burma—such a guide would really depend upon sustained improvements in the political situation as well as on a proven and robust travel infrastructure.”15
*
Suu’s declarations on trade and tourism were her response to the regime’s failure to make good on their promise of talks. She had tried being accommodating; now she tried exerting a little pressure. But that did not work any better: The regime quickly gave notice that the change in leadership four years before had not made it any more yielding. In May 1996, when the NLD summoned party members to the capital to attend a National Convention, SLORC struck preemptively, arresting 258 party members, 238 of them elected MPs. Suu and her colleagues went ahead with the conference anyway, attended by fourteen delegates. Its final communiqué warned that if the regime did not release all political prisoners and convene the parliament elected in 1990, the party would go ahead and draft a constitution itself.
Suu now found herself in a war of attrition with the regime. SLORC responded to the party’s constitution initiative by issuing a new law, threatening anyone who spoke or acted against the (so-far undrafted) constitution with long prison terms. The crowds attending her weekend talks continued to swell, even when SLORC threatened those who attended with twenty years’ jail. To close them down, in September they put a barricade across the road—so Suu and her colleagues went out to nearby street corners and held the meetings there. SLORC reacted to that by rolling out their thuggish new weapon, the delinquent fringe of the Union Solidarity and Defense Association (USDA), the mass, regime-sponsored organization launched in 1993 by SLORC’s chairman, Senior General Than Shwe; in a nasty incident in November 1996, a 200-strong mob of USDA thugs attacked the cars of Suu and her colleagues when they drove from her house, smashing the windows of one with a bar.
Suu’s reply to the intimidation was one of those statements that have helped turn her into a legend. “If the army really wants to kill me, they can do it without any problems at all, so there is no point in making elaborate security arrangements,” she told the Times of London. “It is not bravado or anything like that. I suppose I am just rather down to earth and I just don’t see the point to this worry.”16
Remarks like this make it more rather than less difficult for non-Burmese to appreciate the climate of fear that passes for normality in Burma. If Suu can be so nonchalant about her personal safety, people think, how bad can things really be? An Australian social anthropologist called Monique Skidmore, who was doing research in Rangoon during those months of late 1996, provided a corrective: “The refusal to allow Aung San Suu Kyi to hold roadside talks . . . meant that a great tension settled upon Rangoon in the latter part of 1996,” she wrote. “Young people, especially students, festered with impotence.”17
She related the story of a diplomatic friend who drove to University Avenue to photograph the road blocks around Suu’s house. When he returned home later that night he found his dog lying dead in front of the house, with its eyes burned out. “It took several weeks to become caught up in the fear that engulfed the city,” she wrote. “I began unconsciously to stay indoors, seeking refuge from the military gaze.”18
But the safety of interiors was illusory. She wrote:
The Generals are not content to control only the flow of information in the public domain, they seek to dominate, reconstruct and regulate urban space in a ceaseless breaking down of barriers that previously signaled sanctuary. The experience of fear occurs in these “open” and regulated spaces as people . . . shuffle from one sanctuary to another . . . When terror becomes a means to enforce domination, violence becomes the primary force that maps social space . . .19
Suu defied the terror and shrugged off the threats of violence; if she was traumatized by the way the regime had violated her domestic space during the previous six years, she took care never to show it or talk about it. But the regime had not given up its quest for ways to hurt her.
One of her family’s oldest friends in Rangoon was an aging businessman called Leo Nichols, part-Scottish, part-Greek, part-Armenian, part-Burmese, “Uncle Leo” to his many friends, and perhaps the only expatriate businessman to have survived the Ice Age of capitalism ushered in by Ne Win. It was Uncle Leo who had phoned Suu in Oxford at the end of March 1988 to inform her of her mother’s illness.
A Roman Catholic and the son of the owner of a Rangoon-based shipping company, he had returned to Burma after the Japanese defeat in the Second World War. In 1972, as the prospects for foreigners in the country crumbled, his family emigrated to Australia, but he insisted on staying on in “the only place he could ever regard as home,” as Michael Aris later put it.20 He was appointed honorary consul to the Scandinavian countries, which gave him a degree of diplomatic protection. While he was forced to sell off his treasured collection of vintage cars, he buried his favorite Bugatti at Pagan—or so he claimed.
Nichols had had his run-ins with the regime in the past: During the uprising of 1988 he had frequently offered Suu advice and practical help, for which he was later subjected to a severe interrogation. After she was released from house arrest in 1995 he met her every Friday for breakfast and resumed his role as helper and adviser, finding a gardener to redeem her ruined garden, for example, and workmen to repair her house, while continuing to support her political campaign. One practical way he helped out was by sending her “Letters from Burma” to the Mainichi Daily News in Tokyo from his fax machine.
And that was how the regime nailed him. He owned two fax machines, one of them registered but the other one not. Possession of a fax machine without a license is a criminal offence in Burma, carrying a maximum sentence of five years. In April Nichols was arrested, interrogated over many days and sentenced to three years’ jail.
Like the sentence given in 1989 to another of Suu’s friends and protectors, the writer and war hero Maung Thaw Ka, it was in effect a sentence of death: He was confined to Insein Jail without the medicines for his heart condition and diabetes. Two months later he fell ill and was taken to Rangoon General Hospital where he died soon afterwards, aged sixty-five, perhaps of a heart attack or a stroke.
Nichols’ death and the betrayal by Ma Thanegi and other friends and colleagues were the occasion for one of Suu’s most painful and strongly felt essays.
In her writing as much as in her interviews, Suu is generally at pains to put on her best, most cheerful face. That is an Asian reflex, encountered everywhere from Rangoon to Tokyo, but in Suu’s situation it was also sound tactics: If she had shown any hint of anger or misery, the regime could have congratulated itself that its campaign to damage her morale was working. But in “Letter from Burma No. 33, A Friend in Need,” the mask of equanimity slipped.
It is an essay about how persecution subjects friendship to the toughest test of all, pitilessly exposing one’s friends’ true qualities. The process yields surprises. Those one might have considered weak reveal their strengths. But others who seemed infinitely dependable give up the struggle with shocking ease.
Thanks to what she calls “the full force of state persuasion,” concepts previously confined to the covers of books—“villainy and honor, cowardice and heroism”—become the stuff of everyday life. “The glaring light of adversity,” she writes, “reveals all the rainbow hues of the human character and brings out the true colors of people, particularly of those who purport to be your friends.”21
Some, like Nichols, emerge from the test with greater stature than before. “The man stripped of all props except that of his spirit is . . . testing the heights that he can scale,” she wrote. But others shrivel and collapse. “The kiss of Judas is no longer just a metaphor, it is the repeated touch of cool perfidy on one’s own cheek. Those held in trust and esteem show themselves capable of infinite self-deception as they seek to deceive others. Spines ostensibly made of steel soften and bend like wax . . .”
Suu had been brought up with high moral standards, in emulation of her father. In the England of the Sixties, comfortable and prosperous, that didn’t seem to matter very much: Her loud championing of virginity before marriage and her insistence that children strictly obey the rules of party games were regarded as marks of risible eccentricity rather than anything more important.
But in the testing fire of Burma, those standards were the difference between honor and shame, between hope and despair. To be Suu’s friend and supporter in London or Oxford or Washington, DC, is easy. To be her friend in Rangoon or Mandalay is one of the toughest decisions you can ake. True friendship, as she pointed out in the same essay, demands the highest moral qualities: “According to the teachings of Buddhism, a good friend is one who gives things hard to give, does what is hard, bears hard words, tells you his secrets, guards your secrets assiduously, does not forsake you in times of want and does not condemn you when you are ruined. With such friends, one can travel the roughest road.”22
Suu did not want for such friends: It is one of the paradoxes of brutal societies that they inculcate great virtue in those who defy their brutality. But by turning Ma Thanegi and others, and killing Nichols, the Burmese regime discovered in what way and to what extent Suu was vulnerable. And they had an even crueler trick up their sleeve.
*
Throughout the 1990s, Michael Aris plays a shadowy but at the same time a central role in Suu’s story. If ever there was a case of true friendship being tried in the fire of adversity it was their marriage. During their decades as man and wife there were the frictions and irritations that come up in all marriages: Suu disliked his smoking and nagged him to stop, complained to her friends that he was too easygoing to fulfill his potential at university and too tolerant of English social hypocrisy. In family snaps from those years she frequently looks as if she would rather be anywhere on the planet than north Oxford.
Family life certainly had its trials, yet when the real tests came Michael was magnificent. If Suu was born to do what she found herself doing in Burma, Michael was born to be her perfect foil, her perfect other half.
That statement requires immediate qualification: For their sons he could never replace their mother, nor even be a very satisfactory substitute. He knew how to cook an omelette, but it was a great relief for the whole family when he found a pair of Burmese Christian nuns to come and live with them in Oxford and take care of the housekeeping. (SLORC eventually found a way to terminate that arrangement, forcing the nuns to return to Burma.) Nor could he begin to compensate emotionally for Suu’s absence. That was an unfillable void.
But from the start Michael understood the path she had gone down, understood why it was for her an unavoidable decision, and realized that as a result the family’s life had entered an utterly new phase. Never did he show any hint of bafflement, resentment, doubt or hostility, emotions that would be quite understandable for an ambitious man whose career and indeed whose whole life had been thrown out of kilter by his partner flying off at a dangerous, extraordinary tangent.
Instead, without a blip, he became her other half in the world outside: marshalling support, passing on news, giving interviews and then, as Suu’s defiance became a global phenomenon, traveling tirelessly as her personal envoy to collect awards and pass on messages. He was “her knight in shining armor,” said one friend, “the one who was defending and fighting for her and trying to slay the dragon for her.”23 It was at Michael’s suggestion that Ma Thanegi kept her campaign trail diary in 1989; it was Michael who, seven years later, wrote to Ma Thanegi terminating the relationship after she began launching public attacks on Suu and the NLD.
Peter Carey commented:
In the first twenty years of their marriage [Suu] was the north Oxford housewife, but after 1988 that completely turned on its axis and it was not Michael who was the focus any longer, it was Suu, and Michael was there to provide the support, to bring up the children, to drive them to school, to make the meals.
In the 1990s the reality began to dawn: He was a single father in Park Town . . . looking after his children, being as good a father as possible, the tides of Burma lapping to the door—faxes and messages and requests for interviews, press releases.24
Carey quotes a Javanese saying about the qualities required to be a good wife: “‘To follow behind and serve as a good woman should’—I think that was the role that Michael adopted, he was following behind and serving but in an incredibly discreet and subtle and effective fashion.”
In photographs and videos Michael always looks much the same: tall, gentle, reflective, a little untidy; perhaps somewhat stern and sad but always calm and composed. But there was a more volatile side to his character that the camera did not see. “Michael stayed with me once in Bangkok after the house arrest started,” said Terry McCarthy, who at the time was the Independent’s correspondent in Bangkok.
We were friends, we got along very well, and I remember him shouting down the phone to the people in the Burma immigration office, his eyebrows going mad . . . He looks very affable and calm in the photographs but he had a fiery side too, and he found the behavior of the generals so irrational that it drove him mad. Suu on the other hand knew where they were coming from, she knew why she had infuriated them so . . . Although he supported her fully, it was very tough for him. That’s why he was so angry with the generals: He blamed them for taking his wife away from him.25
He may also have had an unrealiztic view of Suu’s hopes of coming to power. Soon after her release from detention in the summer of 1995, he and Kim were granted visas—he could not have known that it was the last Burma visa he would receive in his life—and flew to Rangoon. Ma Thanegi said that when she met him there she felt he had convinced himself that power was about to drop into his wife’s hands:
Once in late June or early July 1995, Dr. Aris and I sat on the stairs in the NLD office—there were too many people downstairs and no chairs left—talking about the situation. He was very excited and sure that NLD would soon be in power. He kept saying, the regime must learn to change, they must learn to change. I said, they’re not going to, they’re not going to. We went around in circles like this for about five minutes. I could not penetrate his wild expectations.
Another old friend, Bertil Lintner, found a different flaw in him: excess of prudence:
He was overly cautious. When he and the boys flew from Rangoon to Bangkok in late August 1989, everybody knew they were coming but nobody knew what they looked like: Very few people in Bangkok had met Michael and the kids. And we Bangkok-based reporters were there to meet them and it was sort of agreed that I would identify Michael as I was the only one who knew him. So when he and the boys came out I said, “Hello, Michael!” and he said, “Not you!” So I said all right, and stepped aside.
In the evening he rang me and said, “I’m sorry about that, let’s get together tonight”—he had brought out a load of stuff he wanted me to have. But he didn’t want people to know I even recognized him. It was silly.26
Yet Michael had excellent reason to be very careful: The regime saw Suu’s marriage to him as one of the main chinks in her armor, and never missed an opportunity to insult her for her supposed “treachery” to Burma in marrying a foreigner. Michael was a treasure for her, but in her dealings with her co-nationals he was always a liability.
“The Bogadaw [a term for the wife of a European] has lost her right to inherit her father’s name, Aung San,” the New Light of Myanmar declared in a typically venomous piece on May 9, 1997. “She should be called Daw Michael Aris or Mrs. Michael Aris . . .” Why had she lost the right? Because the English, the writer claimed (in defiance of the historical record) had been behind Aung San’s assassination, and because she had failed to “safeguard [her] own race,” sullying her blood by mixing it with a foreigner’s. For the regime’s propagandists, her marriage to Michael was all the proof they needed that Suu was an agent of foreign powers.
As a result Michael was discreet to the point of invisibility in supporting Suu, and demanded that Alexander and Kim behave likewise. Yet although he continued to work in his beloved Tibetan studies, publishing several specialist books and finally succeeding, with the warm encouragement of the Prince of Wales and the generous support of the Rausing family, of Tetrapak fame, in setting up Britain’s first Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Center at Oxford, no one close to him doubted that it was around Suu and her struggle that his life revolved.27
His sister Lucinda estimates that he spent at least half his time working on Suu’s behalf, and says he had a secretary who worked exclusively on Burmese matters. “I don’t think Suu ever realized how much he did,” she said.28 But as the years passed and every visa application after 1995 was turned down, the strain began to tell. Lintner recalled:
He was offered this teaching fellowship in Sanskrit at Harvard. It suited him perfectly well and Suu was happy with it too. He had this small studio flat in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I visited him there, I went to see him in his room. He was still afraid of Burmese spies: He didn’t want to meet in public.
It was tragic to see that room. There were pictures of Suu on all the walls. And ashtrays with cigarette butts towering up . . .29
The strain of the years of enforced separation was now telling on him fatally. In the summer of 1998 he suffered appalling backache, which is often associated with some forms of cancer. Tests that he took in September proved negative, but in January 1999 he sent Suu a letter via the daughter of a Rangoon-based friend with the news that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Soon it became clear that his condition was deteriorating quickly, and his attempts to persuade the Burmese regime to give him a visa took on a sudden urgency. All his eminent connections and those of his family were pressed into service: Prince Charles and Countess Mountbatten were only two of the great and good who sent letters to Senior General Than Shwe, pleading with him to issue the dying man a visa so that he and Suu could meet one more time before he died.
It was perhaps inevitable, given the extremely narrow view the regime has always taken of its interests, that they would interpret Suu’s emotional emergency in the cruelest and most stupidly calculating way conceivable: as the best opportunity yet to get her to leave the country.
A Western diplomat who was close to Suu remembers this harrowing period vividly. “They not only said no to these appeals—in fact they never replied—but they cynically used it in psychological warfare,” he recalled. “Towards the very end they started printing stuff saying, of course any time Suu Kyi wants to leave she can go to her dying husband, it’s the duty of every proper wife to go and be at the bed of the dying husband rather than the other way around, etcetera, etcetera. I was so sickened by the way they dealt with this thing that I refused to shake the foreign minister’s hand any more. I thought he was very, very craven in going along with this despicable tactic.”30
Michael was failing fast, and friends of the couple in Rangoon witnessed their tragedy at close quarters. One of them recalled:
Towards the very end Michael was extremely, falsely optimistic—about the visa, about himself: Sure, he said, I shall be getting better soon, the visa will be coming through soon. He may genuinely not have realized how quickly this disease was going to carry him off. It was one of the most ghastly trials that Suu has ever had to face, and she did it with enormous dignity and courage.
Her bravery in such an appallingly difficult time was testimony to her being an exceptional person. Ultimately I think her strong Buddhist faith sustained her.
Back in England, Suu and Michael’s old friend Sir Robin Christopher, at the time the British ambassador to Indonesia, visited Michael in hospital. Both Suu and Michael had always been keenly aware that if she ever left Burma that would be the end of the story—her passport would be cancelled and she would never be readmitted. Now, however, they began to discuss the possibility again in earnest. But the conclusion they reached was the same as before.
Michael Aris died on March 27, 1999, his fifty-third birthday, less than three months after learning that he had the disease. Christopher flew to see Suu in Rangoon soon afterwards. “I arrived as a memorial ceremony to Michael was in progress,” he said. “There were probably about 300 people there in the garden, monks chanting, Suu listening to them.” When it was all over he and Suu talked things over at length. Christopher recalled:
At the end it was tragic that he was not allowed to see her. She talked about it a lot, and how they had discussed it. They both understood that there were an awful lot of her followers in Burma whose livelihoods depended on her being there: If she wasn’t there they would be rounded up and either killed or imprisoned. And a number of families existed on the meager support that she was able to pull together. Food and freedom were the issues: food for the families of those that were imprisoned, who would have completely gone under without her help, while she felt her closest followers would almost certainly have been arrested once she was out of the way. So in other words an awful lot of lives depended on her staying where she was. Michael was going to die anyway. They shared the decision. It was a very strong relationship.
She was grieving. But fundamentally this had not destroyed her. She had seen it coming, they had communicated a lot, she was wracked by the issue of whether she should go back or whether she shouldn’t. But she was consoled by the fact that Michael had said, don’t come. Don’t come. He entirely understood the situation.31
“I am so fortunate to have had such a wonderful husband who always understood my needs,” Suu wrote on the day of his death. “Nothing can take that away from me.”
The military regime, which in 1997, on the advice of an American public relations consultancy, had changed its name, to the State Peace and Development Council or SPDC, had run out of ideas. They had succeeded in confining Suu to Rangoon: Every time she had tried to travel since 1998 they had blocked her at the capital’s outskirts. Her refusal to turn back had led to a series of stand-offs that had their farcical elements, but each time the regime eventually got its way.
But they could not induce her to leave the country. They had tried every trick they could think of, to no avail. Their attempt to exploit her love and grief to get her to fly to Michael’s deathbed was the last throw of the dice.
Eighteen months after his death, on September 21, 2000, she made her most determined attempt yet to break out of the army’s grip, but again she was stymied on the city’s outskirts. For nine days she stayed in her car in the suburb of Dala, to the south of the capital, refusing the regime’s demand that she return home. Eventually, on September 2nd, a 200-strong detachment of Lon Htein (riot police) turned up and forced her to go back. On reaching University Avenue she was once again put under house arrest.