WITHIN a few weeks of her release in May 2002, Suu put to the test the agreement UN envoy Razali Ismail had prized from the junta, granting her not merely the right to leave her home but perfect liberty to go wherever she chose. She took her democracy show back on the road.
And it was as if she had never been away, as if nothing had happened in the thirteen years since her last election campaign trip in May 1989. If anyone supposed—and some of the most powerful men in the country apparently did suppose—that the Burmese masses had forgotten all about their heroine in the intervening years, it was a rude awakening. As videos shot during her meetings attest, everywhere she went the crowds were again vast and vastly good-humored. Her tours in 1989 had been the most dramatic political manifestations in Burma’s independent history, the most vivid demonstrations, nationwide, of the strength of opposition to the junta and the strength of support for her. The reruns in 2002 and 2003, despite the passing of the years, were no less so.
But this time around there was a sinister new element. One of the initiatives taken by Than Shwe soon after supplanting Saw Maung at the head of the junta in 1992 (as described in Part Four) was the creation of a mass organization to counter the influence of the NLD. The Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), which has since mutated into the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), now Burma’s notional ruling party, is the military’s civilian proxy: its means of securing the allegiance of millions of ordinary Burmese at every level of society by giving them favorable access to services and facilities, ranging from paved roads to courses in computing, from which the masses of those who don’t belong are excluded.
That is the relatively respectable face of the organization. But there is another side to the USDA which is not respectable at all. When occasion demands, it provides hoodlums, thieves, drunks, drug addicts and other men with nothing to lose with the weapons and training to do the dirty jobs which the regime does not care to sully the military’s fair name by entrusting to soldiers. The USDA can rapidly mutate into a force of mercenary vigilantes, given a vicious edge by opening the gates of the jails, offering drink, drugs, crude weapons and meager bribes to the inmates, then sitting back and watching the mayhem.
Suu had long experience of their tactics. “The USDA has become a very dangerous organization,” she said in 1996. “It is now being used in the way Hitler used his Brownshirts . . . [it] is being used to crush the democratic movement.”1 The same year, when Suu and her colleagues were driving from her house in University Avenue to address a meeting nearby, a USDA gang attacked the car and smashed the windows; two years later other thugs from the organization forced her car off the road. And during her new tours of the country, this shadowy militia dogged Suu and her colleagues every step of the way.
The new calendar of visits, submitted to and approved by the military authorities in advance, covered much the same ground as the earlier ones. The journeys began in June 2002; Suu traveled in a new Toyota Land Cruiser, and to counter the USDA threat her team included a significantly larger number of student bodyguards than previously.
They visited Mon state, to the east of Rangoon, where Ma Thanegi had noted in 1989 that the crowds were the biggest in the country; the watery land of the Irrawaddy Delta west and north of Rangoon, where Suu was born and where, in February 1989 in the village of Danubyu, she had narrowly avoided being shot dead. They went southeast to Karen state, bordering Thailand, where she paid a second visit to U Vinaya in the town of Thamanya, the celebrated anti-regime monk, now ninety-two and increasingly frail, whom she had first met after her release in 1995 and whose work in creating a town animated by metta she had described in her “Letters from Burma.”
They visited Arakan state on the border with Bangladesh, Chin state, bordering India in the northwest, Shan state to the northeast, site of her father’s agreement with Burma’s ethnic races in 1947, and many places in between—some ninety-five townships altogether, as the regime later recorded.
On May 6, 2003, she arrived in Mandalay, Burma’s old capital, for the second time since her release, and made a number of sorties into the surrounding countryside, the last of which began on May 29th and would take her west to the town of Monywa.
The journey was planned as carefully as a military manoeuver—which in a sense it resembled, despite the authorities’ formal approval of the itinerary. Suu had warned her companions that if they were attacked by the USDA, they were not to retaliate. So their only hope of safety was in careful planning, and in numbers.
Wunna Maung, one of her bodyguards, said later in testimony to the US Congress:
Before our journey we heard many rumors that local officials of the military regime were training their troops with blunt weapons, including clubs, spears and iron spikes. For this reason, Daw Suu advised us to absolutely avoid any words or behavior that might lead to confrontation with any members of the military. She told us that if we were attacked we must not fight back. Even if we are struck or killed, she said, we should absolutely not fight back.2
Suu was well aware of the potential danger they faced. During one of the most tense periods of her previous spell of freedom, in November 1996, the secretary of the USDA, U Win Sein, who was also Minister of Transport, had told a meeting of villagers near Mandalay that killing Aung San Suu Kyi was their duty. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, “the creator of internal political disturbances” must be “eradicated,” he said. “Do you understand what is meant by eradicated?” he asked them. “Eradicated means to kill. Dare you kill Daw Suu Kyi?” Villagers within earshot later testified that he repeated the question five or six times but received no reply.
Given this high-level interest in her elimination, Suu was taking no chances. At 9 AM on May 29th, seven NLD cars and twenty motorcycles rolled out of Mandalay on the road west. In the lead, a few hundred yards ahead of the rest, was a scout car; next came Suu’s dark green Toyota, driven by a law student called Kyaw Soe Lin, one of the party’s legal staff, followed by two other cars filled with senior NLD figures, including party vice-chairman U Tin Oo, then the cars of local supporters. The group consisted of about a hundred people in all.
The trouble that awaited them had been carefully prepared. Starting six days earlier, the military authorities in the area, under the command of plump, pasty-faced Lieutenant Colonel Than Han, had mustered local USDA members from townships around the town of Shwebo, sixty miles north of Mandalay, a total it is claimed of about 5,000 men, and brought them to the grounds of Depayin High School along with more than fifty lorries and ten pickup trucks, to train them for the assault. On the day of the attack they were issued with their weapons: bamboo staves, baseball bats, sharpened iron rods, and similar crude implements, many of them specially made by a local blacksmith.
Less than two hours after the NLD party’s departure, as they approached the town of Sagaing, hundreds of USDA members were waiting for them. “Before entering Sagaing,” said Wunna Maung, “we witnessed about six hundred people holding signs that read, ‘We don’t want people who don’t support the USDA.’” They were chanting the same slogan, as if they had learned it by rote. But their numbers were dwarfed by thousands of townspeople behind them, who were drowning them out with cries of “Long Live Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.”
More USDA members had massed at another stop the party reached in midafternoon, but again their numbers were swamped by Suu’s supporters and their action came to nothing. Suu and her colleagues carried out their prearranged program, reopening local NLD offices closed years before by the authorities, hanging up signboards outside them, making speeches to large crowds, then moving on to the next stop. All the time they were closely observed and filmed by local police and agents from Military Intelligence.
By 6 PM the NLD entourage reached Monywa. The military made them welcome by cutting off the town’s electricity supply—or so Suu’s supporters charge, though it may just have been one of the regular power cuts. They also made sure that the abbot of a local monastery whom Suu intended to visit was away on official business. None of this inhibited the local people from turning out in huge numbers to greet the visitors, and the next morning, after spending the night at a supporter’s home in the town, Suu addressed them from the balcony of a building in the town center. No one present could have known that this would be her last speech before a Burmese crowd for more than seven years.
She began talking soon after 8:30 AM. Early May, before the rains break, is the hottest time of the year in upper Burma, and even at this hour of the morning her listeners were fanning themselves to keep cool. But the heat had not discouraged them from turning up: Practically the entire population of the town was there, packing the square in front of the building, spilling back into the streets and lanes leading away from it, standing in solemn silence in the full sunshine—only one umbrella was visible—then breaking into raucous applause when she said something they liked. There might have been twenty thousand people packed into that roasting hot public space. A few of them drifted away before she finished, but of the state-sponsored critics who had turned out to abuse her the day before there was no sign.
Suu wore a sky-blue silk htamein and a large cluster of yellow jasmine flowers in her hair, and her heavy fringe flopped down over her eyebrows.3 Lines under her eyes betrayed the fatigue of the trip, which had already lasted nearly a month, her longest outing since her release, but as usual she spoke vigorously, fluently and without notes. When the audience clapped and cheered, she smiled and wobbled her head from side to side appreciatively, a charming, unconscious gesture she had perhaps picked up during her teenage years in Delhi.
She was recognizably the same woman who had galvanized a million listeners—even those who could not hear a word she said—in the grounds of the Shwedagon pagoda nearly fifteen years before. But she was not the stern, girlish, shouting figure of that occasion. Here was a mature leader, familiar with the rigors as well as the pleasures of being a public figure; familiar also and apparently quite relaxed about being the unique focus of the hatred of the most powerful men in the country. It was a burden she had grown accustomed to; now, with her husband gone and her sons grown up, bearing it had become her life.
She began, as so often before, with a reference to her father. He had visited the town in 1947, when he was “quite tired,” she said, and came to Monywa for a rest; he had commented that he found the people “very prudent.” “I have to say,” she went on, “that [for me] Monywa is strong and firm rather than prudent. . . . In 1988 Monywa was extraordinarily firm, and I feel that it is now even stronger.” The place went wild.
“The reason for this,” she pursued, “. . . is because the people don’t like injustice. They don’t like bullying.” But during her trips around Mandalay earlier in the month, she said, “members of the USDA tried every method to destroy our works by means of bullying. We had to be very patient.”
Now she chose her words carefully. “We believe that everyone has the right to demonstrate,” she went on. “. . . But they are not staging true demonstrations. They forced some people to join them.”
It was clear that the USDA’s persistent intimidation had become the dominant theme of the tour, one it was impossible to avoid. So, in her characteristic way, she met it head on.
“We do not react to them,” she said. “We only report them to the authorities. But the authorities are taking no action . . . because they argue that they are doing things within legal boundaries. As the authorities are taking no action, the members of the USDA are becoming more daring.” She told the crowd that at several villages in previous days,
they threatened our supporters with sticks, machetes and catapults. But we didn’t react to them. We only reported the case to the police station. The next day they increased the harassment . . . When we came to Monywa we heard about the one-sided bullying [here], we heard how the USDA was mobilizing its members . . . We also saw them do it along the way: There were cars with many [USDA] demonstrators. Other people are banned from using cars, are not allowed to hire cars, but they have many cars . . .
Yet the size and warmth of the crowds that came out to greet her gave her heart, she said. Everywhere she went, “The people have been supporting us in massive numbers. I believe they support us because they can’t stand bullying and injustice . . .”
The speech over and the ceremonies of reopening the town’s NLD office concluded, the party set off again, bound for Shwebo district, thirty miles to the northeast. As usual, they had obtained full authorization for this journey in advance, but as the jabs and taunts of their enemies intensified, they must have felt like an army patrol traveling through hostile guerrilla country: never sure when the next attack would come or what form it would take.
And now, as they headed towards Depayin township, the army joined in the harassment. “When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi arrived near Zeedaw village,” an eyewitness later testified, “military authorities from the Northern Command headquarters stopped the convoy including the cars of the people of Monywa who had come to see them off.” Suu and her party were permitted to proceed, but when her supporters returned later to the same village on their way back to Monywa, “the police waiting in readiness beat them up and put them under arrest.”
Unaware of this, Suu and her team drove on to the town of Butalin, where she once again performed the ceremonial reopening of the local party office. They were now deep into the flat paddy fields of the countryside, far from any sizeable town and even further from the gaze of foreign diplomats and journalists. They stopped at the little town of Saingpyin, where Suu had an emotional encounter with the family of the local NLD MP-elect, who was still serving a jail sentence. Meanwhile her minders sent a car on to scout the road ahead. Ominously, it failed to return. Motorcycles were sent to find out what had happened to it, but they too disappeared.
Still miles from their destination, with darkness closing in, Suu and her team were driving blind into terra incognita, with a hostile army presence behind them and no way of knowing what lay ahead.
By the time they arrived at the little village of Kyi it was pitch-dark. They had not planned to stop here, but a little way beyond the village the headlights of Suu’s car picked up two elderly monks sitting on the roadside, who hailed them as they approached.
“They asked if Suu could address a gathering,” Kyaw Soe Lin, her driver, recalled. “I told Daw Daw”—“aunty” Suu—“that we shouldn’t stop as we usually get harassed around dusk. But the monks said they had been waiting for Suu Kyi since the evening before and requested that she give a speech and greet them.” To turn down such a request from two old monks would be the height of bad manners, whatever the circumstances. Suu fell into the trap. According to Kyaw Soe Lin, “Daw Daw said we should stop for them.”
But the old men were not monks at all but imposters from the USDA. And as the convoy halted on the road while Suu decided how best to accede to their request, the full fury of the USDA fell upon them.
Four vehicles which had been tailing them, two lorries and two pickup trucks, now roared up alongside the convoy and armed men poured out, shouting anti-Suu slogans. When the local villagers, who had come out of their houses to see what was going on, started shouting back at them, the USDA thugs attacked them with iron rods, bamboo staves and baseball bats. One of the USDA lorries took a run at the villagers in its headlights, and the villagers scattered in terror—whereupon a much larger USDA force—four thousand according to some eye-witnesses, though the figure is impossible to verify—who had been waiting to ambush the convoy poured from the sides of the road and attacked the NLD cars and their motorcycle outriders and local supporters.
“We watched helplessly and tried to show courage,” said Wunna Maung, the bodyguard.
Because we had been told to never use violence, we tried to protect Suu’s car by surrounding [it] with our bodies in two layers. As we waited, all the cars behind us were being attacked, and the USDA members beat the NLD members mercilessly. The attackers appeared to be either on drugs or drunk.
The USDA members struck down everyone, including youths and women. They used the iron rods to strike inside the cars. I saw the attackers beat [NLD vice-chairman] U Tin Oo and hit him on the head before they dragged him away. He had a wound on his head and was bleeding.
The attackers beat women and pulled off their longyi and their blouses. When victims, covered in blood, fell to the ground, the attackers grabbed their hair and pounded their heads on the pavement until their bodies stopped moving. The whole time the attackers were screaming the words, “Die, die, die . . .” There was so much blood. I still cannot get rid of the sight of people, covered in blood, being beaten mercilessly to death.4
What saved Suu’s life, according to Aung Lynn Htut, the senior MI officer who later defected to the United States, was that the officers in charge of the attack had not expected her car to be at the front—which was why the initial attack was concentrated on the cars in the middle and the rear. But it was not long before they realized their mistake.
“As the USDA members approached Daw Suu’s car, we braced ourselves for the attacks,” Wunna Maung recalled. “The attackers first beat the outer ring of my colleagues on the left side of Daw Suu’s car, and smashed the window . . . As my colleagues collapsed one by one, the attackers then started beating the inner ring of security. The attackers hit my colleagues ferociously, because they knew we would not fight back.” Wunna Maung was only saved because he was on the right side of the car, while the attacks were concentrated on the left.
Inside the car Suu’s driver pleaded with the attackers, telling them who exactly he was carrying in the back—but that only inflamed them further. “My anger exploded,” he admitted, “I wanted to run them over.” He put the vehicle into reverse, stamped on the accelerator and the car hurtled back; the assailants reacted by raining blows on the car, breaking the windows both in the front and the back, where Suu was traveling, as well as the wing mirrors and the headlights, and battering the car’s bodywork.
Over his shoulder as he roared backwards Kyaw Soe Lin saw wounded colleagues sprawled across the road, in his path; frightened that he might run them over, he again reversed direction—but now the road ahead was blocked by trucks.
Pulling over to the verge he succeeded in squeezing past them, but then found himself faced by dozens more trucks, their lights illuminating more attackers—two to three hundred was his estimate—“there were so many of them,” he said—some of them holding banners with anti-NLD slogans.
The USDA men looked on “in surprise,” he said, as he hurtled towards them. Some of his party’s bodyguards were clinging to the outside of the vehicle, hanging on for dear life. “I was worried that the attackers might pull them off if we got too close,” he said, “so I drove straight at them, pretending I was going to run into them, and they scattered. Then I pulled the car back onto the road and kept on driving.”
In the murk ahead he saw more road blocks, but resolved to get through them without stopping. “I realized that all of us, including Daw Daw, would die if we didn’t get out of this place, so I kept on driving.” As he roared through the hostile mob they threw objects at the car, smashing the remaining windows and one of them striking him.
“Daw Daw asked me if I was okay. I said I was fine and kept on driving. I knew that if I stopped at the road blocks they would beat us to death.” He kept driving as fast as he could, weaving through another barricade of trucks and past a line of police with their guns pointed at the road, and other figures with guns who looked like soldiers. “I drove through them but didn’t hit anyone as they jumped out of the way,” he recalled. “Daw Daw said we should only stop when we reached Depayin.”
But they didn’t make it that far. As they entered the town of Yea U, armed guards forced them to stop, demanded to know who was in the car, and made them wait. Half an hour later a large contingent of soldiers turned up. “One officer, apparently a battalion commander, arrived and put a gun to my temple and ordered us to go with them,” Kyaw Soe Lin said. “Daw Daw nodded at me, so I did as they said. We were taken to Yea U Jail.” Suu’s year of freedom—her year of living more dangerously than ever before—was over.
*
Suu survived the Depayin massacre without serious injury thanks to the courage and skill of her driver, but it cost the lives of about seventy of her supporters. For the outside world, and for most people in Burma, too, it was seen as another disastrous setback for the cause of Burmese democracy. But in the highest, most secretive echelons of the junta, a different story was being played out. Depayin was the worst, bloodiest and most perilous moment in Suu’s career, indeed in her entire life. Yet paradoxically the months that followed brought her and her party closer to a political breakthrough than they have ever been before or since—one which only now, nearly a decade later, is coming to light.
The aftermath of Depayin reveals two things about the Burmese junta. One is the extraordinary brutishness of Senior General Than Shwe, who soon afterwards admitted ordering the massacre, with the aim of “eradicating” Aung San Suu Kyi. The other is the total disarray within the ruling triumvirate. However, as the negative consequences of the massacre unfolded, it was Than Shwe’s rival Khin Nyunt who, against the odds, found himself back in the ascendant. And his longstanding ambition of reaching agreement with Suu and her party finally began to bear fruit.
*
In the days after the attack, Suu was locked up in Insein Jail, all her senior colleagues in the party were put in jail or under house arrest, and party offices throughout the country, including the ones she had been busy reopening in the days leading up to the attack, were closed down again. The brave if vague hopes raised by her release, which had led the insiders I interviewed in May 2002 to predict a power-sharing agreement between her and the junta, were dashed.
The international community, which had been expecting to see results from Suu’s liberation, was shocked. The United States and the European Union tightened economic sanctions, the United States banning most imports (although Burma’s three main exports, gas, gems and timber, continued to get through the net), and Japan, as ever a bellwether for what the junta could get away with, suspended economic aid. Even the flaccid councils of ASEAN were bounced into reacting by the United States, demanding Suu’s release for the first time ever.
For UN envoy Razali Ismail, the massacre killed off all the hopes that had been raised during many months of painstaking negotiations. He flew into Rangoon a few days after the massacre, when Suu’s condition and even her whereabouts were still unknown, and demanded to see her. “I was taken in a car with darkened windows, and we changed cars along the way,” he recalled. “Finally we arrived at Insein Prison and I was totally shocked. They had never told me she was in jail: Khin Nyunt had simply told me he had rescued her from the mob.”5
Despite everything that had happened, Suu told the Malaysian diplomat that she was still willing to “turn the page” and use the situation as an opportunity for dialogue. But Ismail could see no redeeming elements in the situation: Instead he anticipated all too clearly the outside world’s reaction. “I came out very angry,” he said. “I told Khin Nyunt, ‘What are you doing? Do you know if I go out and tell the world that Aung San Suu Kyi is in Insein Prison what will happen? What are your intentions? Why are you keeping her like this? Why is she looking so bedraggled?’ The next day she was given clean clothes, better food, and within two weeks she was out.” Suu was taken straight from the prison to her home, where she was once again put under detention.
Yet although Khin Nyunt was the target of Ismail’s anger—his only interlocutor within the junta—Khin Nyunt was just as livid himself.
It was he who had been the junta’s representative in the talks with Suu and Ismail that had begun well before her release from detention; it was he who saw her integration into Burma’s governing structure as the key to his country’s international rehabilitation. And now his plans, like Ismail’s, were in ruins.
Khin Nyunt and Brigadier General Than Tun, his subordinate who had the job of liaising with Suu, had warned her that it was risky to tour the country so soon after her release, but they had no prior knowledge of what was planned at Depayin. That was because of the intense distrust between the three men at the head of the junta, all of whom had climbed to the top by different routes. Khin Nyunt was a university graduate who had gone on to the Officers’ Training School in Rangoon, Maung Aye was a product of the Defense Academy in Maymyo, the old British hill station near Mandalay, while Than Shwe had no such elite training but had come up through the ranks. Each had their own culture, their own entourage and their own views of Burma’s future, and they guarded their secrets jealously.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the regime tried to claim that what had happened at Depayin was a minor incident provoked by youths and monks who supported the NLD. In a press conference on June 6th, Deputy Foreign Minister U Khin Maung Win said that Suu’s motorcade “attempted to plough through” a crowd of “townspeople protesting against her visit,” causing injuries to people in the crowd and provoking “clashes between the townspeople and the motorcade” that resulted in four people dying and fifty being hospitalized.
But it was not long before the truth emerged. Soon after the massacre, according to the defector Aung Lynn Htut, “Maung Aye and Khin Nyunt approached Than Shwe and asked him whether he had ordered the assassination of Aung San Suu Kyi. He admitted yes, he had ordered the attack to kill her.”6
Than Shwe, whose ruthlessness is matched by an amazing unawareness of the effect his orders can have on the outside world, later repeated the admission to a larger audience. In a letter to Asian governments, he justified the attack by claiming that Suu and her party had been “conspiring to create an anarchic situation . . . with a view to attaining power” by Suu’s birthday on June 19th. He maintained that he was faced with “a threat to national security by this militant group,” and was compelled to take firm measures “to prevent the country from sliding down the road to anarchy and disintegration.”
But within a month of the attack, as the scale of the outside world’s reaction became clear, Than Shwe was forced onto the defensive. In June, as the true culprits were exposed and the US Congress’s Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Human Rights mounted an investigation, he ordered the closure of USDA offices around the country. It was a sham—none of them stayed closed for long, and soon the organization was once again prospering—but it was a sign that his attempt to bluster his way out of the crisis had failed.
Than Shwe is an intensely superstitious man, like his predecessors, and it is possible that he saw in Suu’s survival of this concerted and well-planned attempt to kill her further proof of her supernatural powers. With the careful work of rebuilding Burma’s prestige now in tatters, he was forced to accept that a new policy was required. And the only man to provide it was Khin Nyunt. The only English speaker at the summit of the junta, the only man willing and able to talk to foreign diplomats, he was put in charge of cleaning up Than Shwe’s mess. And in August, less than three months later, Than Shwe named him prime minister in place of himself, retaining his own positions as head of state and chairman of the State Peace and Development Council.
“Khin Nyunt’s power had been on the wane in the months leading up to the Depayin massacre,” said Dr. Maung Zarni, “but the failure of Depayin, which was intended to get rid of Aung San Suu Kyi, and the negative international reaction to it, put him back in the game: His men were the most polished in the Ministry of Defense and within SPDC as a whole. It was his team’s trouble-shooting prowess that gave Khin Nyunt greater scope.”
Five days after his promotion, in response to the new sanctions, Khin Nyunt announced the plan that has dominated political discourse in the country ever since: the Seven-Point Road Map to Democracy.
It was an attempt to tackle the bogey of legitimacy which had bedeviled the junta ever since the army crackdown of September 18, 1988. When the newly named SLORC took the place of the old socialist one-party system designed by Ne Win, it was presented as a stopgap to deal with the emergency caused by the popular rising, which would melt away once a new government had been elected.
When the elections were won by the NLD, that plan was aborted and SLORC, later renamed SPDC, clung to power, but still with the understanding that it was a provisional arrangement that would last only until a permanent constitutional framework could be agreed on. But with the NLD’s walkout from the torpid, regimented and pre-cooked National Convention in 1996, all efforts to build that framework were suspended, along with the Convention itself. Khin Nyunt’s road map was an attempt to get the whole process started again.
The first step, as he told his colleagues in the highest levels of the junta at Rangoon’s People’s Assembly Building at 9:30 AM on August 30, 2003, “is to reconvene the National Convention that has been adjourned since 1996.” Subsequent steps would involve the drafting of a constitution by the National Convention, the submission of the constitution to a referendum, the holding of new elections under the constitution and the convening of parliament, followed by the building of “a modern, developed and democratic nation.” This, he told his colleagues, would be the “road map” to “a disciplined democratic system.”
Khin Nyunt only mentioned Suu directly once in the speech, referring to the fact that his senior colleague Than Shwe had “with magnanimity” met her—nine years before plotting her violent death—to try to “find ways to smooth out the differences.” Elsewhere he refers to her obliquely as “an individual” and “a preferred individual,” but her problematic person dominates his discourse. The National Convention had been suspended because her party, overwhelmingly the most important one, had walked out of it; the only way to reconstitute the Convention and gain the credibility of the outside world, in particular of the “big nations” which are “unfairly pressuring our country”—a clear reference to the new sanctions imposed after the Depayin massacre—was to persuade the NLD to sign up for it again. And although no mention was made of this in his speech, and few hints of it were picked up by the foreign press, this was now his urgent priority.
Days after Depayin, Suu had told Razali Ismail that, despite all that had happened, she was prepared to “turn the page.” If, despite everything, she could bring herself to do that, then Khin Nyunt’s road map might actually lead somewhere.
*
The talks went on in the weeks and months after August 2003. It is clear that both protagonists were committed to making real progress. Khin Nyunt was still under the thumb of Than Shwe, but as prime minister he now had greater scope than before to make the concessions Suu required if she was to persuade her party to sign up for some kind of power-sharing arrangement.
Than Shwe had been bruised and weakened by the Depayin outrage, but it remained a perilous undertaking. The senior general’s loathing of Suu had by no means diminished after the failure of his plot to assassinate her. For him she would always and only be “that woman” and, as Razali Ismail attested, he could and did terminate meetings if her name was mentioned. Everyone knew how important she was to the outside world, and (in their view) how arrogant, obstinate and difficult to deal with, even though under house arrest. Somehow, though, she and her party would have to be smuggled into the road map, almost without Than Shwe’s knowledge.
We don’t know where or when the talks occurred or how many there were; all that is certain is that they took place, that Suu’s main interlocutor was Than Tun—and that, as Suu revealed cryptically for the first time in 2010, “we were almost there.”
That revelation came out of the blue, in November 2010. A journalist for the regime-friendly Burmese magazine the Voice, harping on Suu’s proverbial obstinacy in an interview with her soon after her release from detention, asked why she had refused to negotiate with the regime. “But we did,” she replied. “And we were almost there. And the people who were leading these negotiations are still alive. But I can’t reveal anything more.” It was the first time that the existence of the negotiations had been made public. “Than Tun met her many times, sometimes openly, sometimes secretly,” a senior Burmese journalist told me in Rangoon in March 2011, on condition of anonymity.
According to the defector Aung Lynn Htut, the agreement was finally drafted in May 2004 and envisaged the NLD rejoining the National Convention that it had walked out of in 1996. But when Khin Nyunt presented the agreement to Than Shwe, the latter got cold feet: He realized that it would change the status quo, and that the prestige of Khin Nyunt would rise while his own position, as Suu’s failed assassin, would inevitably decline. So he simply rejected it, and there was nothing that Khin Nyunt or anyone else could do to get him to change his mind.
“Than Tun had to go back to Aung San Suu Kyi and tell her the deal was off,” an insider said. “She was furious. ‘You all ought to wear htamein!’ she exploded, using a favorite (sexist) Burmese insult, implying that the negotiators were as ‘untrustworthy as women.’” The long-simmering power struggle between Khin Nyunt and Than Shwe now came to a climax, and Than Shwe deployed his superior forces and the well-founded fears that MI and its secret archives engendered among his colleagues to bring his rival down. Military Intelligence was always a thorn in the side of the rest of the army: One of Khin Nyunt’s predecessors during the Ne Win years had been purged just as abruptly when his colleagues decided that he knew too much. Than Shwe, Maung Aye and their cronies have corruptly amassed billions of dollars in kickbacks over the years, so the activities of Khin Nyunt’s agents always posed a potential threat to them.
In July 2004, while Khin Nyunt was away in Singapore, they struck preemptively: A raid on an MI depot in Shan State by officers of a parallel intelligence network set up by Maung Aye found evidence that Khin Nyunt’s network was involved in illicit trade. On his return Khin Nyunt in retaliation angrily ordered his underlings to compile incriminating dossiers on the other top men in the junta, but before he could find an opportunity to blackmail them, he was brought down: On October 18, 2004, he was arrested while on a trip to Mandalay. The following day the state media carried a single-sentence announcement signed by Than Shwe which said that Khin Nyunt, now sixty-four, had been “permitted to retire on health grounds.” This was soon proved to be nonsense when he was put on trial, charged with corruption, and sentenced to forty-four years in jail. The prison sentence was commuted to house arrest, but Than Tun, who had refused to reveal any details of his talks with Suu despite being tortured, was sentenced to 130 years. He is still being held in one of Burma’s most remote jails, in the far north.
A collateral victim of the purge of Khin Nyunt was General Thein Swe, the father of Sonny Swe, who was the friend and patron of the Australian journalist Ross Dunkley. The General, a senior member of Khin Nyunt’s Military Intelligence team, was sentenced to 149 years in prison. As a result, all Dunkley’s dogged brown-nosing over the course of the decade came to nothing. Lacking a reliable protector within the regime, he was painfully exposed, and on February 13, 2011, the inevitable finally occurred when he was arrested at Rangoon airport on returning from abroad. He was remanded in custody in Insein Jail, accused of assaulting a prostitute. Within three weeks, a crony of the regime called Dr. Tin Tun Oo had prized the company from his grasp, taking over as Chief Executive while Dunkley remained in jail, awaiting trial.
The Australian was duly convicted but treated with unusual leniency by Burmese standards: On June 30, 2011, he was sentenced to one month in jail and released because of the time he had already served. He told reporters he would appeal against the conviction.
Khin Nyunt’s weakness was his strength, as mentioned earlier, and his strength was his weakness. As head of MI, a desk-bound officer with no military achievements to boast of, he was at a permanent disadvantage when it came to obtaining the support of the army at large. He had sought to compensate for this by fashioning the most intrusive and ubiquitous domestic intelligence network the world has ever seen, Orwell’s 1984 brought to life; by pacifying, by whatever means necessary, much of the wartorn border, signing ceasefire deals with more than twenty armed groups; and finally, by trying to cut a deal with Suu.
But Than Shwe, alarmed by the prospect of Suu finally dividing the army and taking the spoils, applied brute force and brought the process to an end. As Suu had written many years before, “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it . . .”7
Khin Nyunt as Prime Minister in 2004, shortly before he was purged.