ON the evening of Tuesday, May 7, 2002, I flew into Rangoon for the second time in my life, the first time in eleven years. That same day Suu had again been released from house arrest. With a tourist visa for Myanmar, obtained the previous week after the usual anxious wait, I left Delhi and flew to Bangkok in the hope of becoming one of the first British reporters to interview her. At Bangkok airport I bought a ticket to Rangoon and boarded the half-empty plane.
You take off from the concrete megalopolis of Bangkok, its Buddhist heart practically entombed in cement, and although you are flying from one Asian capital to another—from the capital of one Asian country to its neighbor which is actually substantially larger, and which once held Siam in thrall—it’s like going from a real city to a country town. Bangkok disappears into its own smog. Within half an hour, as you begin to descend, the waters of the delta are grey and turbid under the plane’s lights; the few, faint lights of Rangoon and its suburbs wink dimly, a civilization away from the blazing furnace of Thailand. A few vehicles crawl along the narrow roads. There are no traffic jams.
Yet although still the country cousin, it was soon clear that Rangoon was a different city from the one I had visited before. Mingaladon Airport had a new international terminal which looked like an airport terminal in any country in the world, made of concrete, glass and marble, well lit and with none of the dinginess and betel juice-stained corners of the old building. The taxis waiting outside were the same beaten-up 1970s Nissans and Toyotas as before, but the hotel I had been recommended, the Sofitel Plaza, was new: a bland, shiny, gilded multistory palace with uniformed doormen, obsequious reception staff and swift, hissing lifts. It cost $40 a night with breakfast—next to nothing.
Burma had clearly been going through some changes. I had been the South Asia correspondent of the Independent for nearly five years but Burma had been so quiet compared with the rest of the region that I had found no occasion to come before. The last occasion I had written about it was in 2000, during Suu’s nine-day stand-off with the army, which culminated in her return to detention.
That story had made it sound as if nothing significant had changed since the last time I was here in 1991; it was still stuck in the mud of confrontation and repression. But all this modernity was something new. And now Suu free again—what was the story? What was going on?
As I did the rounds of Western diplomats, aid agency staff and Burmese insiders willing to talk to me, it became clear that Suu’s release this time was different from that of 1995. The first time was a stunt: an attempt to prod the Japanese into resuming aid, perhaps a genuine misunderstanding by the regime of what a “gesture” was, and that a gesture with no substance behind it would yield very limited results. Back then neither Suu nor anyone else had been given advance warning of her release; it was preceded by very little diplomatic activity, and after it happened all Suu’s requests for dialogue with the regime were met with stony silence.
“In 1995 the country was booming,” Leon de Riedmatten, an international mediator, head of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue and right-hand man of UN envoy Razali Ismail, explained soon after I arrived. “The generals thought they would succeed economically, so they had no need to deal with the opposition.”
That was the period, with Military Intelligence chief Khin Nyunt making his presence felt, when the smart new airport building and hotels like the Sofitel and the even swankier Traders were built, when the ceasefire deals were cut with the insurgent groups, when the doors were thrown open to tourists for Visit Myanmar Year, when Burma was given observer status in ASEAN—when it must have seemed to SLORC that they were on the brink of being accepted by the rest of the world on their own terms. Releasing Suu was the icing on the gingerbread, a sop to the West and one which would not require any follow-up because—as the generals must have assured each other, still sealed into their impregnable conceit—the people had forgotten all about her anyway. In the New Light of Myanmar they depicted her in cartoons as a gap-toothed crone, boring Rangoon street urchins to death with her interminable rants—and that was what they really thought of her. The Achilles heel of regimes such as this is the reluctance of junior officers, who are in touch with reality, to tell their superiors uncomfortable truths.
But after Suu’s release in 1995, any hopes SLORC may have entertained of pain-free international integration rapidly unraveled. Suu’s charisma proved as powerful as ever, and her message no less disagreeable. Generals brought up in Burma’s closed socialist system struggled to make sense of the rules of international capitalism and fiercely resisted the loss of control which they brought with them: Burma remained an impossible working environment for foreign businesses. Rangoon and the other towns and cities on the tourist route were smartened up for Visit Myanmar Year, but then in 1997 the Asian financial crisis struck and Burma’s frail recovery was hit along with the far more robust economies of its neighbors. The flashy new hotels were now half-empty most of the time.
De Riedmatten, who had first begun brokering talks between Suu and the regime in June 2001, explained to me his view of the country’s political prospects. “There is no other choice than cooperation between the NLD and the regime,” he said. “The first priority is how to improve the living conditions of the people. Then they should start talking about the future of the country. Today the situation is completely different from ’95: Now they have to cooperate, both sides need the other.”
Yet as our conversation progressed it became clear that there was still a long way to go before anyone could start claiming results. “They [Suu and the regime] have talked, but they have not yet agreed to do things together,” he admitted. “Until last Monday”—when Suu was still in detention—“they talked to each other, and found some understanding, some room; now it’s the test. They say: Let’s see if, when she’s out, [her actions] correspond to what we thought. On her side she wants to see how far she can do what she wants.”
But then the optimism came steaming back into his voice. “I think the process is irreversible,” he said, “the question now is the pace . . . They all need to go quite fast.”
It was clear that I had arrived in Rangoon at an interesting moment. Change was bursting out all over. For thirty years, ever since Ne Win closed down the free press after his coup, Burmese newspapers had been as dreary, mendacious and slavish as any in the world. But even that seemed to be changing: A bald, blunt-mannered Australian called Ross Dunkley who had spent seven years building up the Vietnam Investment Review in Ho Chi Minh City, arrived to launch an English language weekly, Burma’s first, called the Myanmar Times.
In the paper’s newsroom—“the biggest in the country” he boasted—Dunkley explained to me how he had reached this point. “I sold the Vietnam paper to James Packer, the son of Kerry [Packer, the media and cricket tycoon],” he said. “In ’99 I started to think what I was going to do next, I had Myanmar in mind anyway, I came for a week in ’99 to have a look around. It’s a virgin market.”
On holiday in California, Dunkley chanced to meet a Burmese expatriate called Sonny Swe, the son of Brigadier General Thein Swe, a high official in Military Intelligence, which was of course headed by Khin Nyunt. Dunkley had been knocking around Asia long enough to know the value of a well-placed patron, and Sonny seemed the ideal person to help him break into Burma. “Coming into a market like this you have to have a political umbrella,” he pointed out. “Our general is a diplomatic assistant to Khin Nyunt.”
The Myanmar Times was quite unlike any other Burmese paper on the market. The front page was not dominated by a picture of a general handing out an award or inspecting something, the editors clearly understood the difference between a news story and a hole in the head, the headlines encouraged you to read on, and one got the impression that some of the reporting might even be true. I asked Dunkley, “What about censorship?” He replied: “I said [to Sonny] I will refuse to submit to press censorship. Sonny assured me it wouldn’t happen.” Then, a little later in the conversation: “It’s a question of how to put the right spin on things.” And later still: “Now it’s a new ball game. We have to think about the right to press freedom or we cannot move forward. It’s one of the fundamental rights. I see the Myanmar Times as a litmus test to determine how fast [the country is] moving forward. We’re the first paper in the country to talk about the NLD, the first to talk about HIV/AIDS . . .”
And if his generals were purged or Sonny went missing—did Dunkley have an exit strategy, a plan for extracting himself from Burma and getting back to Perth with the loot? “I’ve got no exit strategy,” he said. “I see this as my family business.”
*
I met Dunkley on the morning of Thursday, May 9, 2002 and when the interview was over I took a taxi from his office a couple of miles to a shabby-looking two-story house with an overhanging roof on a broad and busy main road near the Shwedagon pagoda, the headquarters of the NDL. The entrance was crowded with party members: students, grizzled political veterans, women on their haunches with babies, all flapping fans and chatting in the pre-monsoon heat and waiting for a particular event. I had a pretty good idea what it was.
Inside the long dingy oblong of the ground floor the scene was no less busy, with an impromptu English class under way in one corner, party women running up peacock flags on treadle sewing machines in another, the librarian shelving battered paperbacks in her small collection. A few foreign journalists were sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the main event.
In my notebook I recorded Suu’s arrival at the office:
1 PM: She’s approaching. Staff pull themselves into shape, pin on red arm bands, line up either side of door, staring out watchfully, drumming fingers, gulping water from water pot. One electric fan going is the only sound.
1:10: No action. There is a poster of Suu next to Aung San on the wall behind the grill of a Post Office type desk at the entrance.
1:23: Everyone suddenly re-mustered—she comes striding in at the head of a group of four, quick, definite, unhesitating, arms swinging like a soldier, smiling lightly, and vanishes up the stairs.
After waiting most of the afternoon it was eventually my turn to go up the stairs.
“The door to the long, shabby, boiling hot committee room squeaks open,” I wrote in the Independent on May 13, 2002,
and the famous lady in the blue Burmese jacket and longyi is discovered sitting at one corner of a long table.
She rises: a firm handshake, very long fingers; a head rather large for the slim, fragile-looking frame—some say she has lost weight since she was last seen in public, and she is certainly ashy pale. But the gaze of her large brown eyes is bold and steady. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting such a long time,” she says in her cut-glass Oxford accent. “Please give my regards to all our old friends at the Independent.”
I mentioned how struck I was by the amount Rangoon had changed since my last visit. Did she feel that Burma was finally on the move? “I’ve always said I’m a cautious optimist,” she said. “So in one sense I agree with people when they say that. At least we’re somewhere new where we have not been and I would cautiously say that where we are is better than where we have ever been. But I think the more important thing is where we’re going to, and how quickly.”
De Riedmatten, Suu’s go-between with the regime, made the same point during our meeting: Speed was important, her release had put some momentum back into the relationship but for trust to build there must be a follow-up, and soon.
There were some in Rangoon, supposedly well informed, who were sure it was coming. De Riedmatten put me on to one of them, a retired Burmese professor, “a political observer-cum-analyst” as he asked me to describe him, who invited me to his home and told me with serene confidence,
Aung San Suu Kyi has made concessions to the government and they will move towards some kind of democracy on Suharto regime lines, with 25 percent of seats reserved for the military. The government is prepared to go along with recognition of the results of the 1990 election, but will retain veto powers. They are not going to give up all power right away. I believe a lot of details have been agreed. They are now putting finishing touches to the agreement.
As evidence for progress, he pointed to the low profile Suu had maintained in the days since her release. “I don’t think she would have agreed not to hold mass meetings without concessions on the part of the government,” he said.
Suu confirmed that she had been lying rather low, despite her liberty. “I’ve been to see one or two people,” she said, “an old aunt of mine; I went to pay my respects to an abbot who has been very kind to us—but nothing much, because there hasn’t been time.” She confirmed that her party was not going to be dogmatic about 1990—demanding that the military simply relinquish power, which had been the NLD’s theme song in the past. “We are not holding on to the 1990 elections in the sense of using it to gain power,” she insisted. “What we are concerned about is the democratic principle, not so much the question of who holds power. Which means there is obviously room for negotiations as to how they choose to honor the results of the 1990 election.” I pointed out that twelve years had passed since that triumph, so if anyone questioned her party’s claim to represent the views of the Burmese people today they would have a point. “It’s fair to say that,” she conceded. “But who’s to say we won’t get a bigger majority this time?”
But belying the confidence of the “political observer” I had met that agreement was right around the corner, Suu sounded a much more cautious note. In fact she gave me no reason to think that substantive talks had even begun. She had agreed not to hold impromptu meetings at her front gate, as she had done in 1995; the regime had agreed to let her out of her house. As far as I could tell that was the extent of their accord so far.
Suu hinted that she was impatient for things to start. “I believe that in an official statement the authorities said something about turning a new page,” she told me, “and I certainly don’t want the page to remain blank for a long time—blank until it turns grubby. What we want is for the page to be filled up, quickly, with a lot of useful and desirable stuff. The confidence-building stage is over, and it has to be over, you can’t keep on at that stage forever, it becomes counterproductive.”
Did she mean, I pressed, that she was waiting for the regime to make the next move? “I don’t think I would put it like that,” she replied. “I think if it is the right time, either side should be prepared to make the right move. It’s not a question of you first or me first.”
Yet clearly that is what she was waiting for: It was up to the holders of power to give an indication that they were prepared to do more than merely restore her freedom of movement. That meant their taking a first, irreversible step to acknowledging her as an interlocutor, as a person with a just claim to discussing issues of immense moment with them on a basis of something like equality. There is no indication that they had ever taken that step in the past, if you ignore the meaningless “Dialogue” splashed across the New Light of Myanmar eight years before, nor that they had taken it now.
Much has been made down the years of Suu’s alleged stubbornness, her inflexibility, her refusal to concede the slightest thing in the interests of starting a dialogue. Ma Thanegi, whom I met for the first time a couple of days after seeing Suu, made that point. “I think she should be more compromising,” she told me. “She should set up a good relationship with the government. She should talk to them privately and not scold them.” But regardless of whether Suu used sweet words to describe her captors or blasted them to hell, the ball was and would remain in their court. Diplomats, mediators, the UN Envoy, “political analysts,” journalists, all of us could enthuse, encourage, cajole, remonstrate until we were blue in the face. But until a certain general grasped this particular nettle, nothing would happen.
“We have both kept our sides of the bargain,” Suu told me. “I have not been stopped from going wherever I pleased, and they have not followed us, they have not made problems for some of our supporters . . . I think we’ve kept our side of the bargain because we’ve made it clear to our people that we don’t want them to come here and turn every day into a political rally.”
Suu had kept her side: Her supporters, the thousands and thousands who had crowded around her garden gate seven years before, did as she requested and stayed well away. Now it was up to the generals to take the whole thing a step further. But amid the atmosphere of heady optimism, there were more somber voices. “Is it a developing situation?” a British diplomat queried, not impressed by the excitement. “Nothing concrete has been achieved. There are no easy answers here. The regime have dug themselves a very deep hole. Coming out of that hole is going to be difficult.”
His gloomy words turned out to be prescient. After a week I went home to Delhi, having given the Independent’s readers what I hoped was a pleasant jolt with the news that (as the headline ran) “Burmese junta hints at power-sharing deal with Suu Kyi.” But there was no follow-up, no hint from the generals that talks were planned or under way, no rumors of progress on the diplomatic grapevine. I might have made the whole thing up.
*
The Rangoon-based experts who had stoked hopes of progress were not, however, living in fantasy land: Eight years later, after she emerged from her third spell of house arrest on November 13, 2010, Suu herself revealed, in an interview with a local journalist, that she had had a series of talks with Brigadier General Than Tun, the officer appointed by the regime to liaise with the NLD—the first and only negotiations in more than twenty years to go beyond preliminaries. “We were almost there,” she said. But these talks were a long time starting, and in the end, through no fault of Suu’s, they were aborted before anything could be achieved.
Both the proximity of success and the eventual failure were caused by the particular strengths and weaknesses of Khin Nyunt.
By the time Suu emerged from detention in May 2002, Burma’s Ne Win period was over. The old tyrant Ne Win was still alive, but in the months before Suu’s release two of his children had been accused of plotting a coup and arrested, and he himself had been put under house arrest. He was to die in December, lonely and little-mourned and still in detention. Khin Nyunt’s rise to the top had been facilitated by his patron Ne Win, the man “through whose nostrils” he breathed, as the Burmese said, and Ne Win’s disgrace and death left the protégé exposed. Khin Nyunt held two key jobs—head of Military Intelligence and Secretary-1 of SPDC, the ruling council—and it was he who had rescued the state from bankruptcy by dropping Ne Win’s disastrous economic policies and approving oil and gas deals with foreign companies. He was likewise the force behind the signing of ceasefire agreements with most of the warring groups on Burma’s frontiers, the opening up of the tourism market and the drive to build new hotels: cautiously starting to align the country with its Southeast Asian neighbors, taking some tentative bites out of Burma’s image as a hermit state.
If he was interested in converting Burma from a military autocracy into a democracy, it was a very well-kept secret. On the contrary, all the evidence indicates that what he was really interested in doing—like Burma’s other military rulers before and since—was concentrating as much power and wealth as possible in his own hands. The difference between him and Ne Win or Than Shwe was that Khin Nyunt showed rather more intelligence and imagination in the way he went about it.
Robert Gordon, Britain’s ambassador to Rangoon in the late 1990s, remembers him as the only senior figure in the regime he could really communicate with.
“He was a fascinating figure,” he said, “much more approachable than the other top generals.”1 Not only was he, at the peak of his career, uniquely powerful, but he was also the closest thing to an acceptable face that the regime possessed. “Often key visitors would be introduced to him, and he would make efforts to speak English—badly but intelligibly.” On one occasion, Gordon recalled his young son squirting the general in the face with a water pistol: Khin Nyunt laughed it off, and both father and son lived to tell the tale.
“With Khin Nyunt,” he went on, “I always felt there was a very subtle mind, but too subtle for its own good. Endless amounts of effort would be expended on trying to bring Khin Nyunt and Suu together, and you’d have to go back crab-like through several intermediaries.”
Ingrid Jordt is an American anthropologist, whose unusually deep and close familiarity with Burma began with her taking the Buddhist precepts as a nun in a Burmese monastery in the mid-1980s. She subsequently returned to the United States and followed a career as an academic, writing the first and so far only book in English about Burma’s mass lay meditation movement. As an “old yogi,” a veteran meditator, she makes regular return visits to the country.
As Jordt sees it, Khin Nyunt was the key figure in the regime’s attempts to claw back the religious legitimacy which Ne Win had sacrificed back in the 1960s when he adopted a rigorously secular political structure and deprived the sangha of state patronage.
“Khin Nyunt was the main force behind the revitalization of religion during the 1990s,” she said. “It was during this period that we saw the regime tie its legitimacy ever more closely to the sangha and to religion. His efforts need to be seen as a reaction to the mostly hands-off approach to religion by the military regime during the Ne Win period.”2
In changing the country’s name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, the military regime was seeking to align its rule with that of the precolonial kings. Part of that effort involved undoing the secularizing tendencies of Ne Win and once again knitting the monks into the nation’s political structure. As Jordt sees it, Khin Nyunt was the driving force behind this tendency, and was frequently shown in the state media feeding monks, visiting religious sites and supervising the restoration of old pagodas and the building of new ones.
The culmination of these efforts was the restoration of the Shwedagon, the most important religious building in the country, in 1999. It was an undertaking fraught with karmic promise and peril, and the placing of the hti, the delicate golden “umbrella,” on the topmost tip of the stupa was the most tense moment of all: the moment when, if the ruler performing the sacred ceremony was morally unworthy, nature could be expected to rebel. A taxi driver told Jordt that when the Shwedagon’s hti was being put up, everyone was frightened that there would be earthquakes and storms, because they knew the regime was not good. But when the hti was successfully hoisted and nature had made no calamitous objections, everyone felt disheartened, because it meant that these rulers were legitimate—which rendered Burma’s situation even worse. It meant that they were stuck with this government.
“In Burmese thinking, political legitimacy is not based solely on regime performance,” she said, “but is based on the idea of whether rulers have accumulated the spiritual potency—hpoun in Burmese—that sustains power, even if rulers are cruel and oppressive. But eventually a bad king’s store of merit runs out and a virtuous king takes his place, thanks to having a larger store of merit-based hpoun.”
As his Shwedagon project shows, Khin Nyunt was a risk-taker, in contrast to his fanatically cautious colleagues at the head of the junta. And just as he was prepared to risk all by hoisting the Shwedagon’s hti, he was also prepared to talk to Suu. With his rough but workable English, his university education and his trips abroad, he saw clearly that she and her party were the most important obstacles on the road to the junta’s acceptance by the international community. If some kind of accommodation could be reached with them, the rewards in terms of removing sanctions, the inflow of new business and the approval of the West could change the nation’s prospects dramatically.
With his once all-powerful patron finally out of the picture, Khin Nyunt had to move stealthily: hence the elaborate complications involved in bringing him and Suu together. But indirectly the negotiations appeared to be grinding slowly forward. Razali Ismail, the career diplomat from Malaysia who had become the UN Secretary General’s special envoy for Burma, flew in and out of Rangoon frequently, paying at least a dozen visits during this period and always saw both Suu and Khin Nyunt when he did: Coming from a country respected by the junta for President Mahatir’s Look East policy, he enjoyed more prestige and had more leverage than any other UN envoy before or since.
But before any breakthrough could be achieved, the whole process was derailed in the most violent assault on Suu and her colleagues since the party’s creation.
*
Aung San Suu Kyi’s claim to significance rested on two facts: her party’s overwhelming victory in 1990, and her and her party’s continuing popularity with the Burmese masses. While the first fact could not be denied even by the junta, the second might fluctuate as political and social conditions within the country evolved: Suu could not take it for granted, given the regime’s relentless persecution of the NLD’s officers and members around the country. Her rapport with ordinary people all over the country had been the great transforming event of the 1989 election campaign. After the years of isolation she needed to meet them again, to reassure them that even though the revolution had not yet succeeded she was still dedicated to the cause. That is why, on regaining her freedom, it was an urgent priority for her to pick up where she had left off in May 1989 and go back on the road.
But it was an equally urgent priority for the junta to prevent this happening. With the much-touted new constitution still undrafted, and the National Convention that had been given the job of drafting it in suspension for years, no new elections were in view. But the generals had a visceral fear of Suu’s massive popularity and the mandate to rule which it implied, the mandate they had long since betrayed.
Their slogan against Suu was that she “relied on external forces”—that she was a puppet of the West. And it was very disagreeable for them to be presented with new evidence that, on the contrary, what she relied on was internal forces—the overwhelming weight of popular opinion inside the country.
During her last spell of liberty, in the late-1990s, Suu had repeatedly tried to resume her tours of the country but had repeatedly had her car blocked by the military close to Rangoon, resulting in deadlocks which on several occasions lasted for days. For the regime the drawback to this tactic was that, because of the proximity to the capital, these confrontations were quickly picked up by the foreign media. They succeeded in bottling her up, but at the cost each time of conceding another propaganda goal.
The time was ripe for a radically different approach. So now, while Khin Nyunt and his colleagues were creeping in their crab-like fashion towards some kind of an agreement with Suu, his main rival in the ruling triumvirate, Senior General Than Shwe, was developing a very different strategy for dealing with Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularity once and for all. He would have her eliminated.
A video grab of Suu speaking at Monywa, hours before her attempted assassination.