THEY were practically born on the move, but as the English winter slowly gave way to spring at the end of March 1988, the exotic family that lived at number 15 Park Town, a road of stately Victorian houses in north Oxford, seemed at last to have reached a sort of equilibrium.
After more than twenty years of struggle, Michael Aris was closing in on his ambitions. He had been a lonely pioneer in the madly difficult and obscure subject of Tibetan language and culture; and he had found within that rarified discipline an even more obscure and rarified niche of his own—the history and culture of the kingdom of Bhutan, an offshoot of Tibet high in the Indian Himalayas, the last Tibetan kingdom to open its doors to the modern world. But there is something to be said for obscure niches: For six years, until interrupted by the call of love, he had been able to pursue his studies in the heart of the kingdom itself, as private tutor to the sons of the king.
That night, as their sons Alexander and Kim slept upstairs, Michael was, as usual, deep in a book. If his attention strayed it was perhaps to the comfortable thought that things were looking up. After years of genteel poverty in an increasingly cramped and crowded apartment, they had managed to buy a decent house. His most cherished personal project, a foundation to promote the study of Tibetan, was still no more than a gleam in his eye, but his career was on a firmer footing now: With his doctorate behind him, he had recently obtained tenure at St. Antony’s College.
Beside him on the sofa, equally engrossed in a book of her own, was the reason he was no longer in Bhutan, the reason he needed a decentsized house, the reason a country only very tenuously connected to Tibet called Burma had come to bulk almost as large in his life as Bhutan—the woman he had fallen in love with when he first ran into her in the home of a college friend in Chelsea.
Her name was Suu, pronounced “Sue.” One of her best Oxford friends, to distinguish her from other friends with the very common name of Sue, called her “Suu Burmese.” For everyone who encountered her, Suu combined the familiar and the exotic in a way that was uniquely her own. As one who had spent most of her adolescent years in the diplomatic circles of New Delhi, she spoke English like an upper-class Indian—that is to say, with more clarity and precision than most English people have spoken it for about fifty years. And in Delhi she had had the sort of “finishing” normal for privileged young Indian ladies but which, in England, went out with the debutantes: sewing, embroidery, flower-arranging, piano, equitation.1
Yet there was nothing Indian about her appearance: Petite, with fine bones, pale skin, almond eyes and pronounced cheekbones, there was no doubting that she came from the other side of the line that divides the subcontinent from Southeast Asia. And despite the graces imparted by an old-fashioned education, she gave off no sense of entitlement, none of the languor common among those with nothing to wait for but a suitable man and a legacy. She was extraordinarily beautiful, and composed, and warm—and funny, too, with a streak of mischief that seemed to go with the unruly fringe that fell across her strong black eyebrows. But there was something else that people noticed when they got to know her a little better: a shadow that fell across her face when she was alone or when the conversation flagged, a grave look that came into her eyes that spoke of sadness and preoccupation beyond her years.
Michael soon learned, as his old-fashioned courtship of Suu proceeded, that she was heir not to an Asian fortune but to a complex and tragic family story. Her father Aung San, brilliant, mercurial and fiercely ambitious, was the father of modern Burma, assassinated with half his cabinet less than a year before he was due to hoist the new nation’s flag.
Suu thus bore the most famous name in the country, a name that evoked pride and grief among her countrymen in equal proportions. And as the chaotic teething years of Burmese democracy were swept aside by a military dictatorship, Aung San increasingly became a symbol of Burma’s lost opportunities and lost hopes.
Suu was one of three children, but although she was the only girl she was also the only one for whom the family name became an inspiration and a challenge. Her older brother never showed any sustained interest in answering its promptings; the younger one, who was two years older than her and to whom she had been very close, died tragically when he was only five, drowning in a pond in the garden of the family’s first house, a death which cast another dark shadow on her young life.
Michael was left in no doubt about how much it meant to Suu that she was her father’s daughter, and how much her father’s name meant to her countrymen. Their courtship might have been old-fashioned—Suu made no secret of the fact that she believed a woman should never sleep with a man until her wedding night—but it was quintessentially modern in the way that most of it was conducted over thousands of miles of separation. After graduating from St. Hugh’s in Oxford, Suu had found work with the UN in New York; Michael, meanwhile, had returned to his job as royal tutor in Thimphu, Bhutan’s toy capital. After they became engaged, they exchanged hundreds of letters. Practically all of them remain under lock and key in a private university archive, but telling snippets of some have been made public.
In one of them Suu wrote, “Sometimes I am beset by fears that circumstances might tear us apart just when we are so happy in each other that separation would be a torment . . .”
There was no doubt, although she had not lived in the country since she was fourteen, that Suu felt powerful ties to Burma. But the implication of those ties for her future life remained very hazy. She returned to Rangoon every year, to spend time with her aging mother, to introduce her sons to her homeland, and give them a flavor of its culture and religion. She gave the boys Burmese as well as English names, and on their most recent visit, to cement their second identity, had put them through shinbyu, the coming-of-age ceremony which all Burmese Buddhist boys undergo, in which their heads are shaved by a monk and they spend weeks or months in a monastery, learning the rudiments of the religious life.2
In these ways she remained in touch with her country—but in the meantime she was a hard-pressed north Oxford housewife. She might continue to wear aingyi, the flimsy Burmese cotton blouse with detachable buttons and htamein, the ankle-length woman’s longyi, she might continue to be a vivid, exotic splash among the grey and beige and drizzle of England—but where was she headed, as she wobbled back from the supermarket on her bicycle, laden with shopping?
She was a mother with two school-age sons and a heroically impractical husband, his head high in the Bhutanese clouds, incapable of mending a puncture or changing a fuse—but she was also Aung San Suu Kyi, child of the father of a country under the boot of a military regime whose viciousness was only matched by its stupidity.
One gets a sense, observing the choices Suu made in the late seventies and early eighties, of a woman struggling to understand her destiny, and coming up with a series of unsatisfactory answers. She applied for a second BA degree at Oxford but was rejected. She was commissioned to write slim travel books for children: Let’s Visit Burma, Let’s Visit Nepal, Let’s Visit Bhutan. She wrote an equally slim study of her father, Aung San, published by the University of Queensland.
But these must have seemed timid, diffident steps in the direction she wanted to go, because now the restlessness that had taken her to New York after graduating from Oxford attacked her again: In 1985 she won a fellowship in Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, threw herself into studying Japanese, then went with her younger son, Kim, to Japan. She immersed herself in the Burma archives there, to try to understand better the relationship between her father and Japan’s militaristic wartime regime, which trained him to be a soldier and took him back to Burma to participate in their eviction of the British.
She then spent several months with the family in Shimla, the north Indian hill station that had been the summer seat of the colonial administration during the British Raj, where she and Michael were Fellows at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. The result: much the most pregnant and interesting things she had written, two long papers comparing intellectual life in India and in Burma under colonialism, which tried to tease out why India, intellectually speaking at least, had flourished under the foreigner’s yoke, while her own country had only languished.
Now, aged forty-two, she had finally begun to find her way home through the medium of scholarship. It was the natural approach for one who had already spent so many years immersed in the academic atmosphere of Oxford, married to a man with a passion for study. Like Michael with Bhutan she would devote herself to making sense of her country: For her own sake, for the outside world, and also for the generations of young Burmese intellectuals puzzled and frustrated by their nation’s failure to fulfill its potential. That seemed to be the contribution she could make, while remaining true and useful to her husband and children. As a next step she applied to London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London to take an MPhil in modern Burmese literature, and was readily accepted.3 She had already drafted one chapter. Meetings with her supervisor would take her away from home, but not far and not for long: London was little more than an hour away by train.
Meanwhile, like Michael with his center for Tibetan studies, she could dream her dreams. Hers were to launch a chain of public libraries across Burma, that institution taken for granted in England but absent from Burma except in Rangoon and Mandalay, and to set up a scheme to enable bright young Burmese to study abroad. These were the ideas she could brood on while doing the washing-up or sewing name tags on to her sons’ school shirts. Even if brought to fruition they would only be a pale shadow of what her father had achieved. But what more could a woman in her situation hope to do?
Michael and Suu were about to turn in for the night—there was school in the morning, they would need to be up early—when the telephone rang.4 As a consequence of that call, all the plans and expectations of their lives were turned upside down. On the line from Rangoon was an old Anglo-Burmese friend known to everyone in Suu’s family as Uncle Leo. He rang with terrible news: Suu’s mother had suffered a major stroke and had been taken to Rangoon General Hospital in a critical condition.
Suu went upstairs and packed a suitcase. Years later Michael Aris wrote of that evening, “I had a premonition that our lives would change for ever.”
*
The next morning Suu did what she had done so often before, alone or with Michael or the children, in the family’s life of frequent, far-flung journeys. She took the bus from north Oxford down to the town center, walked briskly to the station, then took the train down to London and another one on to Heathrow: a journey through the sedate and comfortable scenery of the city that had become her home and the gentle countryside of the Thames Valley, waking now from its winter sleep, with yellow forsythia bursting into life here and there in the gardens. In places like Oxford, England has the gift of appearing immune to change, as if it has always been like this: so quietly sure of its identity and its institutions that it is set for eternity. Of course it’s an illusion—nowhere escapes the Buddhist law of impermanence—but it’s a persuasive one. The landscape that had been her home for half her life now was not often sunny, not often blazing with joy, but it was solid and safe and decent. And it was the home of humanist values that had affected her profoundly. As she traveled down those familiar railway tracks with her freight of anxiety, there was no way she could know that this was the last sight she would have of semi-detached villas, privet hedges, red pillar boxes, the meandering Thames and the chalk Chiltern Hills for another twenty years and more; that it might be the last time she would ever see such sights in her life.
Back in 1988 there were no direct flights from London to Rangoon; there are still none today. The normal procedure, then as now, is to fly to Bangkok, capital of a nation the Burmans had once, long ago, vanquished in war but whose liberalized, free-market economy now dwarfed its neighbor’s, and wait to take another short flight from there.
The country she was going to had become one of the most peculiar in Asia, if not the world: as reclusive and little-known as Albania or North Korea, those hermits of the Cold War. “To the west Burma is still a virtual unknown,” Lonely Planet wrote in the 1988 edition of their backpackers’ guide to the country, “a slightly exotic eastern country that has been on some sort of total seclusion plus mad socialism binge since WWII . . .”
The weirdness, the guide advises, begins at the airport, where an ingenious solution had been devised for the problem of how to equip oneself with the local currency, kyats, pronounced “chats,” at the good black market rate (about 35 kyats to the dollar) instead of the terrible official rate (6.6 kyats) without breaking the law. “From Bangkok it goes like this,” the book advised. “At the duty-free counter in Bangkok airport buy a carton of 555 cigarettes and a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label whisky. Total cost $15 . . . the first words you are going to hear from a non-government Burmese are, ‘Want to sell your whisky and cigarettes?’ You will hear this actually inside the airport terminal . . . You will very soon know what the going price is and will have disposed of both—all seemingly quite legal.”
But in one respect the 1988 edition of the guide was already out of date. “In paper currency, K1, K5, K10, K25 and K75 bills are common . . .” the guide advised. But on September 5, 1987, the secretary of Burma’s State Council, Sein Lwin, signed an order demonetizing all the higher value notes without warning or compensation. In the first half of the 1980s, Burma’s command economy had plunged into a downward spiral, the national debt doubling and the value of exports halving. By abolishing the high value notes, the regime hoped to pull the rug from under the black marketeers whose undercutting of official prices had, they claimed, sabotaged the economy. But like many other measures taken by the incompetents at the state’s controls, the effects were quite different from what they had anticipated, and far more devastating. Ordinary Burmese had a deep and well-founded mistrust of banks and preferred to keep their savings under their mattresses, in cash. So the demonetization further pauperized a population that was already one of the poorest in Asia, wiping out 80 percent of the cash in circulation at a stroke, rendering the cash savings of millions worthless overnight.
The demonetization announcement came as Rangoon’s students were preparing to pay their annual university fees: Overnight most of their cash became worthless. Their reaction was instantaneous: In a reflex of rage, hundreds of students from the elite Rangoon Institute of Technology poured out of their campus onto the streets, smashing traffic lights and burning government vehicles. Political trouble in Burma always began with the students. The next day, to prevent the unrest spreading, the government ordered schools and colleges all over the country to close, laying on buses to send up-country students back to their homes. The protests died out as rapidly as they had started.
But that was not the end of the trouble. As many other socialist command economies were to learn over the next two years, unrest like that in Rangoon was more than a little local difficulty, to be crushed by a few cans of tear gas and some baton charges. All over the world, centrally planned economies on the Soviet model were suddenly finding it impossible to make ends meet. Within three years of those Rangoon students taking to the streets on September 5, 1987, the political map of the world would be entirely redrawn. And it was with Burma of all places—poor, obscure, out-of-the-way Burma, whose hermit regime had succeeded in insulating their country from the effects of the last geopolitical earthquake to hit the region, the Vietnam War—that it began.
Burma’s tragedy is that, although it was the first, it is now the last: While corrupt and tyrannical regimes across the world collapsed, Burma’s clung on. It is still clinging on today.
*
After suffering her stroke, Suu’s mother, Daw Khin Kyi, had been taken to Rangoon General Hospital, the great red-brick Victorian institution where she had worked during the war as a nurse and where she first met her future husband. Suu found the staff desperately short of everything they needed to do their work. The stroke had left her mother partially paralyzed; her condition was stable but the doctors were discouraging about the possibilities of recovery. Meanwhile Suu and her relatives would be required to provide everything she needed, medicines included. “In Burma health care is ostensibly provided free of charge,” she later wrote. “But . . . now [state hospitals] provide merely services while patients have to provide almost everything else: medicines, cotton wool, surgical spirit, bandages and even equipment necessary for surgery.”5 Depleted by decades of economic decline and mismanagement, and systematically starved of funds, the Burmese health system depended on family members to keep their patients alive. Suu prepared for an indefinite period of camping out in her mother’s hospital room.
Outside on the city streets, the mood was dark and growing darker.6 Prices of essentials were soaring, and the anger of ordinary Burmese was rising. The protests in September had been quickly extinguished, but in March a town-versus-gown brawl in a tea shop near Rangoon University had sparked more unrest, which the army stifled by opening fire, killing a twenty-three-year-old Rangoon student called Maung Phone Maw—the first young martyr of 1988.
These were the petty beginnings of the greatest uprising in Burma’s modern history, one that still resonates today. Emotions were further inflamed when it emerged in April that the regime had sought and obtained from the UN the humiliating status of “least-developed nation,” a fact they had been at pains to keep from the public—because, after all, a mere generation ago independent Burma had been expected to become the richest nation in Southeast Asia.7 Protests spread rapidly across the city and around the country. The regime replied with extreme violence: Hundreds of students died, shot dead on the street by troops; dozens were crammed into a van and taken to jail and forty of them suffocated to death on the way. Many of the dead were hauled away and cremated en masse to prevent a clear picture of the fatalities emerging. To stifle the protests the junta again closed the nation’s colleges.
By the time Suu arrived in the capital and installed herself in her mother’s hospital room, Burma was in a state of suspended animation, quiet on the surface but with bitterness and fury festering underneath. Rumors swirled, as they always swirl there. The summer heated to boiling point, the air was thick with dust, the whole land desperate for rain. In April, New Year was celebrated as usual with the annual bacchanalia of the water festival, called Thingyan, when for several days the whole population sheds its inhibitions and arms itself with buckets and hoses to spray and splash everybody else. But when it ended, the hot and exhausting wait for rain—the wait for change—resumed.
If brutality is one of the distinguishing marks of the Burmese regime, the other is complacency: It has long had the bully’s serene confidence that fear will triumph. So sure was General Ne Win, known as “the Old Man” or “Number One,” that the latest spasm of rebellion had been crushed that on April 11th he slipped out of the country and flew to Europe, to relax in the cool, clean air of his favorite Swiss and West German spas. Meanwhile an Inquiry Commission the regime had appointed to look into the death of the first victim of the violence was going about its work.
The Commission presented its report on May 6th. It admitted that Maung Phone Maw and one other student had been killed by gunfire—but anyone hoping for a clear account of what happened subsequently would have felt badly let down. The report blamed “some students who wanted to create disturbances” for the chaos, gave gross underestimates of the number injured and arrested, and instead invited sympathy for the twenty-eight riot police it said had been wounded by stones. Of the hundreds more students shot dead and the dozens who suffocated in the police van there was not a word. “Rather than soothing the already inflamed tempers,” wrote the Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner in his book about the uprising, the report “added insult to injury.”8
The impudent lies in the report provoked an old critic of the regime, silent for many years, to return to the offensive. U Aung Gyi, aged sixty-seven, a senior brigadier who had been sacked from the army back in the early 1960s for publicly attacking the regime’s policies—he had spent two terms in jail, though he still seemed to be on affable terms with Ne Win—suddenly piped up again, sending his old boss a blistering open letter condemning the Inquiry Commission’s report and estimating that 282 people had been killed in March. In his conclusion he attempted to draw the sting, exculpating his former boss from direct responsibility—“Sir, may I request you . . . not to get involved or you will regret it,” he wrote fawningly.9 “These violations of human rights will be infamous. You actually were not involved.” But even so, his condemnation of the report gave new heart to the growing resistance movement.
At the end of May the silence of the streets persuaded the regime to allow schools and colleges to reopen. This was its final act of folly: Back on their campuses again the students could for the first time see who and how many of them were missing, could hear from the injured the stories of who had died and how, and could once again stoke the fires of anger that had been stifled since the second week of March. Within two weeks the streets again exploded, with demonstrations and running battles which pitched the protesters, who now included textile workers and Buddhist monks as well as students, against the hated riot police.
After almost a week of clashes, the government again slammed down the shutters, ordering classes on all four of Rangoon University’s campuses closed—but neglecting to do the same for the two campuses of the Institute of Medicine, one of which was just across the road from the hospital where Suu had for ten weeks been nursing her mother. Without skipping a beat the protests shifted there, taking in also the Institute of Dental Medicine which was next door.
“We held a big meeting on the Prome Road campus [north of the city center] on June 21st,” remembered Soe Win, a medical student.10 “Thousands of people were there and suddenly someone got the idea that we should march down town to the main Institute of Medicine in central Rangoon, where another meeting was being held. We marched off at 1 pm, a solid column of several thousand students. We took our peacock and student union flags and someone went inside the teachers’ office [and] brought out Aung San’s portrait to be carried in front of the demonstration.”
But before the marchers could get close to the city center, they found themselves hemmed in by riot police with rifles and batons and by soldiers with machine guns. Remembering the massacre in March, when the students had been trapped and shot dead by troops, the demonstrators scattered into the lanes and nearby houses before the soldiers could open fire. Most of them survived—but on the same day elsewhere in the city many died.
Word of the new clashes flashed across the city. Down at the Institute of Medicine the student meeting was still in progress, and a witness of the violence further north burst in with the news. Suspected spies inside the hall were pointed out by angry students, and grabbed and hauled to the front of the meeting for summary justice; one of them narrowly escaped being lynched. A hundred or more people died in the clashes that day, according to diplomats’ estimates, and many dozens were wounded, and now they streamed into the hospital in ambulances and cars and rickshaws and carried on the shoulders of friends. These were the first protests to erupt since Suu’s arrival in the country at the beginning of April, and at the hospital she found herself with a ringside seat. Burma’s bloody tragedy was unfolding before her eyes.
The regime acted fast to end the protests, shutting the medical and dental campuses, making hundreds more arrests, and for the first time clamping a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the city. This brought mayhem to markets whose stallholders were accustomed to setting up their stalls and laying out their wares in the early hours of the morning. Forced to start work later, they raised their prices to make up for the loss of trade, adding another new element to the cocktail of misery and fury that was steadily rendering Burma ungovernable.
*
And then the rains came, and Suu and her mother went home.
The month of July has a special meaning in Suu’s story, and that of her family: It is the month when her father was killed, the event commemorated every year on Burma’s Martyrs’ Day. It is when the monsoon, which normally starts in June, increases to its greatest intensity, coinciding with the Burmese lunar months of Wahso and Wagaung. “The word ‘monsoon’ has always sounded beautiful to me,” she wrote eight years later, “possibly because we Burmese, who are rather inclined to indulge in nostalgia, think of the rainy season as most romantic. As a child I would stand on the veranda of the house where I was born and watch the sky darken and listen to the grown-ups wax sentimental over smoky banks of massed rain clouds . . . When bathing in the rain was no longer one of the great pleasures of my existence, I knew I had left my childhood behind me. . . .”11
It is the season when Burma is most quintessentially Burmese—hot and sultry and shriekingly green and fertile, when the rain comes down like a waterfall every morning and evening, and sometimes in the middle of the day as well. It is the season in which ecstasy, melancholy and tragedy seem inextricably mixed—for her nation as a whole, and for Suu and her family in particular.
At Rangoon General Hospital, her doctors discharged Daw Khin Kyi: There was nothing more they could do for her. Suu converted one of the large downstairs rooms at 54 University Avenue into a sickbay and on July 8th, she took her home. Mother and daughter were back together in the villa on the shore of Inya Lake, in the north of Rangoon, where they had moved with Suu’s brother Aung San Oo when she was eight.
54 University Avenue, Rangoon, the family home where Suu was detained for more than fifteen years.
However gloomy the prognosis, it must have been a relief to be back in familiar surroundings. And on July 22nd, to Suu’s joy, the family was reunited when Michael, Alexander and Kim flew out to join them. In a letter to her parents-in-law in June, she had revealed how much she missed them.12 Prior to this, her longest separation from all of them had been a month, and she was looking forward to having them with her again. The house, Michael wrote, was “an island of peace and order under Suu’s firm, loving control. The study downstairs had been transformed into a hospital ward and the old lady’s spirits rallied when she knew her grandsons had arrived.”13 But the preparations had worn Suu out: “When we first arrived,” Michael wrote in a letter to his twin brother Anthony in August, “the boys said that Suu looked as if she had just been released from a concentration camp! She had really exhausted herself trying to renovate the house before her mother’s return. She has put on some weight and is looking much better.”14
The future, though bleak, was now attaining a visible form: Suu would wait out the inevitable, making her mother’s last weeks and months as comfortable as possible. Her family would keep her company until the boys had to go back to school. What were their plans once her mother had passed away? Would Suu shut up the house, perhaps sell it, and close that chapter in her life forever, severing her closest ties to her homeland? With the boys still at school in Oxford and both Michael and Suu committed to their academic work in England, that would have been the logical, almost inevitable course.
But then something happened which stunned the nation.
After the last bout of bloodletting, it seems finally to have dawned on General Ne Win that things could not go on as they were. So on July 23rd—one day after the arrival of Michael and the boys—he convened an extraordinary congress of the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP), the monopolistic political party he had created and through which he ruled the country. Standing on the podium before the thousand delegates, the blubbery-lipped, muscle-bound, imposing but now fading tyrant made the most remarkable speech of his career, transmitted live on state television.
“Dear delegates,” he told the hall, “I believe that the bloody events of March and June show a lack of trust in the government and the party that guides it.”15
People all over the country watched mesmerized as the man with the power of life and death announced that he was rewriting the rules.
“It is necessary,” Ne Win went on, “to find out whether it is the majority or the minority that support the people showing the lack of trust . . . The current congress is requested to approve a national referendum . . . If the choice is for a multiparty system, we must hold elections for a new parliament.”
Burma had been awash with rumors about the state of Ne Win’s mental health ever since the death of his favorite wife some years before. But now this turkey was apparently voting for Christmas: Had he finally cracked?
The general now handed the microphone to an underling called Htwe Han—who continued to read his boss’s speech, still in the first person. And now came the real bombshell. “As I consider that I am not totally free from responsibility, even if indirectly, for the sad events that took place in March and June,” Htwe Han read out, “and because I am advancing in age, I would like to request party members to allow me to relinquish the duty of party chairman and party member.” As if that was not enough, he added that five other top office-holders, his entire inner circle, the gang who had run Burma for years, would do likewise. “The atmosphere,” Michael wrote, “was electric with hope.”16
Yet anybody who interpreted the speech to mean that the protesters would now have free rein were disabused by his final words—Ne Win had taken the microphone back now—which epitomized the crude menace of his style. “In continuing to maintain control,” he said, “I want the entire nation, the people, to know that if in future there are mob disturbances, if the army shoots, it hits—there is no firing in the air to scare.”
Nonetheless, the simple message was: All change! “The nation,” wrote Bertil Lintner, “and possibly even more so the diplomatic community in Rangoon, was flabbergasted. International wire service reports were euphoric. Public outrage in Burma had forced an end to twenty-six years of one-party rule and one of Asia’s most rigid socialist systems . . . Or had it?”17
Bertil Lintner, the veteran Swedish Burma-watcher based in Thailand, photographed in November 2010 in Chiangmai. Lintner’s book Outrage documented the uprising of 1988 and its bloody repression in great detail.
*
As Lintner indicated, things were not as straightforward as they seemed. By the time the congress ended two days later, it had rejected the idea of a referendum on a multiparty system that Ne Win himself had proposed. The Old Man was probably responsible for that, tugging the strings behind the scenes. It had also turned down four of the six resignations he had offered. Ne Win himself was allowed to bow out—but only to be replaced as president and chairman of the party by the most brutal of his underlings, Sein Lwin, the man who had ordered the killings back in March and who had since been known as “the Butcher” to the protesters.
Sein Lwin, “the Butcher,” who briefly replaced Ne Win as head of state in 1988, until forced from power by mass protests.
“Sein Lwin’s takeover was aimed solely at preventing the loss of [Ne Win’s] own power and security,” Michael later wrote to his brother.18 “As Ne Win’s hit man and crony he’s used to combining the role of court executioner, astrologer, sorcerer and alchemist—literally, not figuratively, in the peculiar mixture of magic and repression that the former regime has depended upon to stay in power, and which will now continue unabated.”
It was like offering the demonstrators a carrot—but then cracking them over the head with a stick before they could take a bite of it. It was like opening Pandora’s Box but then trying to slam it shut again before anything got out.
For whatever reason, acting on whatever senile, cock-eyed calculation, the Old Man had planted a seed, and nothing would be the same again. “Up to then,” diplomat Martin Morland remembered, “the student movement . . . was completely unfocused. It was in essence anti-government: protest against brutality, a frustrated reaction against the inane policies, the demonetization, the hopelessness of the students, the lack of any future. There was no focus to it. Ne Win, unwittingly, provides a focus by calling for a multiparty system, and from there on in, the student cry is for democracy.”
And in that context, substituting the Butcher for the Old Man was like lighting the short fuse of a big bomb. The curfew, so destructive to the local economy, had been lifted at the end of June. Colleges remained closed, but a hard core of protesters had merely moved from their campuses to pavilions around the Shwedagon pagoda, the nation’s most important Buddhist shrine, where they continued to organize. And when Sein Lwin’s appointment was announced, the protests began almost at once. Martial law was declared the day after the congress ended, but instead of scaring people off the streets it simply raised the stakes. “Dissatisfaction among the public gave way to hatred,” wrote Lintner. “‘That man is not going to be the ruler of Burma,’ was a common phrase repeated all over the country.”19 The Old Man himself had acknowledged that his country was ripe for profound change, and the fact that he had tried to eat those words as soon as they were out of his mouth could not alter it. He had indicated that the future did not belong to him and, the Butcher notwithstanding, that it might not even belong to the army. And quite quickly Aung San Suu Kyi became a very busy person indeed.
*
How are we to explain the fact that this elegant, scholarly, middle-aged woman, who had not lived in her country for thirty years and who had never been involved in politics anywhere, suddenly became the focus of political speculation and intrigue?
Most countries in Asia that became independent after the Second World War found themselves, as the first or second wave of independence leaders died out, confronting the conundrum of legitimacy. When your country has been arbitrarily ruled by foreigners, backed by the gun, for generations or centuries, how does an indigenous leader convince the people of his rightful claim on power?
In many cases, the solution to which people turned was dynastic. In India, the daughter of the first prime minister had fortuitously married a man called Gandhi; he was no kin of the great Mahatma, but that name plus the Nehru bloodline gave Indira Gandhi a claim to power which none of her rivals could match. Next door in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of a charismatic prime minister who had been hanged by a usurping general proved to have both the name and the mass clan following to become prime minister twice, even though she lacked the political gifts to become a great leader. And in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, too, variations on that dynastic theme have had a decisive impact on politics for generations.
In Burma, independent since 1948, Aung San, Suu’s father, was venerated in every corner of the land: No town, at least in the areas dominated by Burmans, was without its “Bogyoke [General] Aung San” road or square. No public office was complete without its portrait of the national hero, killed before he could fulfill his destiny and lead the country to freedom, alongside the equally obligatory portrait of Number One. And for months now, in the absence of anyone of flesh and blood to follow, the protests that had thundered up and down the streets of the nation’s cities and towns were often spearheaded by a young man or woman holding aloft the portrait of Aung San.
So powerful was the desire for a figure around whom the protesters could unite that in July posters were stuck up all over Rangoon, announcing the imminent return from exile of Aung San Oo, Aung San’s oldest child and only surviving son. “He’s coming to lead us,” went the rumors, “he is the one we are waiting for.” But that hope was vain: Many years before Aung San Oo had settled in San Diego with a steady job as an engineer, and had taken American citizenship. During the uprising of 1988 he sent messages of solidarity to Burmese students in Tokyo, where his brother-in-law lived, some of whom cherished the hope that he would galvanize the Burmese diaspora.20 But the hope came to nothing. He “was not cut out to lead the exiles,” says Dr. Maung Zarni, who was a student in Tokyo at the time and read out some of those messages. “Worse still, after his failure to establish himself as the leader of the Burmese exiles he became an annual ‘state guest’ in Rangoon where he and his wife were wined and dined by the generals.”
Maung Zarni, today a sociologist and a prominent activist in the Burmese diaspora, pointed out that the dynastic principle is in fact far weaker in Burma than in many other developing countries, from North Korea to Syria: Neither Ne Win nor his ultimate successor Than Shwe managed to hand over power to their children, despite being the nation’s preeminent rulers for a total of more than forty years.
But then in the Burmese context Aung San was unique, as Maung Zarni explained. “According to my great uncle, who was a friend of Aung San and roomed next to him at Rangoon University when they were both undergraduates in the 1930s, Aung San was from his student days consumed by the single-minded pursuit of Burma’s liberation by any means necessary,” he said. “In place of economic wealth—Aung San left virtually no material possessions to his widow and two surviving children—or a powerful political machine, he left a legacy as unquestionably the most popular and revered nationalist of his time.”
And if Aung San was unique, Aung San Suu Kyi was to prove no less so. Though nobody could have guessed it at the time.
Her home on Inya Lake was directly across the water from the huge villa where General Ne Win resided, surrounded by 700 troops, reclusively holding court. And as a new and even more desperate cycle of protest and repression got under way, a host of people with different ideas and agendas began beating a path to her door.
Watching on television that fateful session of the BSPP at which Ne Win resigned, “She, like the whole country, was electrified,” Michael Aris later recalled. “I think it was at this moment . . . that Suu made up her mind to step forward. However, the idea had gradually taken shape in her mind during the previous fifteen weeks.”21
And now it took shape in the minds of many others, too. After Ne Win announced his decision to resign, “Suu’s house quickly became the main center of political activity in the country and the scene of such continuous comings and going as the curfew allowed,” Aris wrote.22 “Every conceivable type of activist from all walks of life and all generations poured in . . . She began to take her first steps into the maelstrom beyond her gates . . .”
