AUNG SAN SUU KYI had not lived in Burma since she was fifteen, nearly thirty years before, but her connections to her homeland were far from tenuous. Her presence was expected on July 19th, when, accompanied by the most senior generals in the Tatmadaw, the Burmese Army, she laid a wreath at the Martyrs’ Memorial in central Rangoon, to commemorate her father’s death. It was the most resonant day in the young republic’s calendar, and Suu was one of the principal actors in it.
There were other reasons, too, for Suu to spend as much time as she could in the city of her birth. Her mother was aging and grateful for regular visits; Suu’s surviving brother Aung San Oo came over far less frequently from the United States. On a recent visit she had stayed four months. As a result Suu’s Rangoon life was perhaps as rich and full as her life in England. Her Burmese was not merely fluent but up to date and idiomatic. She was in town often enough and long enough to have a social life; she saw the high-ranking people her mother saw. And that gave her access to a very particular set of people.
Daw Khin Kyi’s appointment as Burma’s first-ever woman ambassador was a signal honor, and one she could hardly have declined. One can understand why General Ne Win wanted her out of the way in the run-up to his coup d’état: Though never a political figure in her own right, she represented a certain vision of her nation, one symbolized by her late husband and by the man who took his place to become independent Burma’s first prime minister, U Nu, a vision in stark contrast to Ne Win’s. She must also have known the truth behind the rumor that on one occasion her husband, disgusted by Ne Win’s compulsive womanizing, had ordered another officer in the Burma Independence Army to kill him.1 But the officer flunked the task, for which, it was said, Aung San gave him such a ferocious kicking that decades later he still bore the scars.
Despite remaining silent in public, Daw Khin Kyi’s disdain for Ne Win and his behavior were well known—which is why it suited Ne Win for her to be packed off to India. Other prominent figures he feared could cause him problems were also given diplomatic appointments far away. Seven years later, as Suu was preparing to sit her Finals in Oxford, Daw Khin Kyi took early retirement and returned to Rangoon.
Back in University Avenue she lived extremely quietly, rarely leaving home except for an annual medical check. As in Delhi, she continued to entertain: Ne Win himself was among the people she invited over for lunch. At least once he and his then wife, Kitty Ba Than, accepted the invitation. Both Suu and her brother were present on that occasion; Suu remembered Kitty Ba Than making light conversation. But Ne Win himself merely ate and said not a word.2
Perhaps he had noticed the flag flying at her gate, the original flag of the Union of Burma, with five small stars circling a single large one, which he had abolished and replaced in 1974.3 It was her discreet symbol of defiance: Over the years, and very unostentatiously, her home on Inya Lake became a point of reference for the growing number of influential people—academics, journalists, senior army officers in disgrace—who had reached the conclusion that Burma was in need of a new direction. And at least a handful of them had encountered Daw Khin Kyi’s daughter, listened to her conversation, noted her qualities and drawn certain conclusions.
As early as 1974, when the dishonorable treatment given by the regime to the corpse of its most famous son, the late Secretary General of the UN, U Thant, provoked violent demonstrations, the regime had called Suu in and enquired if she intended to get involved in anti-government activities. “I replied that I would never do anything from abroad, and that if I were to engage in any political movement I would do so from within the country,” she wrote later.4 U Kyi Maung, a colonel in the army who had been imprisoned for years for opposing Ne Win’s coup and who later became one of the founders of the NLD, said that he first heard that Suu was thinking of going into politics from a mutual friend in 1987.5 Twice the friend, U Htwe Myint, mentioned her interest. U Kyi Maung however was unmoved.
The fact is that, until Ne Win’s stunning speech of July 23, 1988, there was no way into Burmese politics: With only one party permitted by law, it was the ultimate closed shop. Then suddenly, as the nation’s political and economic crisis reached a head, the doors were thrown open. From being a no-man’s-land, overnight Burmese politics became a free-for-all. And the elegant and sober lady of 54 University Avenue became the focus of intense speculation.
U Kyi Maung, though he later became one of her closest colleagues, is scathing in his early estimate of her. He met her first, he said, “by chance, at the home of a mutual friend here in Rangoon. It was back in 1986 . . . We spoke for only a few minutes. My most lasting impression was how shy and reticent she was. She seemed like a decent girl who had no interest in frivolous talk or gossip. In fact, I remember thinking how peculiar it was that I never saw her laugh . . . Anyway the point is that she didn’t impress me at all. Except by how young she looked. She must have been about forty-two at the time but she could have passed for a girl of seventeen.”6
But a man known to the Burmese public as Maung Thaw Ka saw far more in her than that. A Burmese Muslim whose tall figure and craggy face betrayed his roots in the subcontinent, he had been a captain in the Burmese Navy;7 after his vessel was wrecked he survived twelve days at sea without food or water until rescued by a passing Japanese ship. His account of the ordeal became a bestseller. Invalided out of the service, he reinvented himself as a witty and popular journalist and an acclaimed poet. He became head of the Burmese Literary Society, and traveled around the country giving talks about books and writing. He was a known opponent of the regime, and Military Intelligence agents always occupied the first row at his lectures.
It was only natural for the woman now embarked on a postgraduate degree in modern Burmese literature to seek out this substantial literary figure. But whatever information he gave Suu about books and writers, of more immediate value was his detailed knowledge of the first five months of the Burmese insurgency. “He took her around Rangoon,” said Bertil Lintner, who subsequently got to know him, “and showed her, ‘Look, this is where people were shot.’ He took her to the site of the so-called Red Bridge incident, the White Bridge incident, Sule pagoda, everywhere that students were killed.”8 It was a crash course in the political story so far.
The journalist, poet and political activist Maung Thaw Ka, standing to Suu’s left.
*
And there was to be no respite. Within days of “Butcher” Sein Lwin taking over the top job, he made his intentions clear. Aung Gyi, the ex-general who had shattered the taboo against criticizing Ne Win with his hostile open letters, was arrested, as was Sein Win, one of the country’s most respected journalists. But the resistance, too, was organizing, its efforts given new focus and urgency by the formerly unimaginable hope of returning to multiparty democracy.
A BBC journalist called Christopher Gunness had flown into Rangoon to cover the ruling party’s extraordinary congress in July and stayed on to try to find out what was stirring behind the city’s shabby walls—because it was already clear that Ne Win’s declaration was not the end of something but only the beginning. “My impression when I arrived was that the situation was extremely tense,” he said later. “People were frustrated and angry and there was a feeling of unfinished business; it was easy to sense that something big was about to happen. But there was a feeling of doom as well. I was enormously depressed by what I heard and what I saw.”9
Gunness became the first foreign correspondent to give the world details of the beatings, tortures and rapes that arrested students had suffered in custody, as well as the medical disasters and the plummeting morale among Burmese troops fighting Karen rebels near the Thai border. But his most vital news was not about the past but the future: The students, he reported, were calling for a nationwide general strike on the auspicious date of August 8, 1988—8/8/88 as the date has been known in Burma ever since: exactly fifty years after a general strike led by militant students, including Aung San, against the British in August 1938. The BBC’s Burmese language service had millions of regular listeners in Burma, who depended on it to learn facts the regime preferred to hide. Gunness’s report ensured that on 8/8/88 there would be a good turnout.
But the students were not sitting around waiting for the big event: The uprising was already under way. “The first serious demonstration actually occurred on the afternoon of August 3,” wrote Dominic Faulder, one of the few undercover foreign journalists to witness it.10 “It took me completely by surprise as it swept down Shwedagon Pagoda Road towards the city center then turned east going past Sule Pagoda and City Hall, before sweeping round to roar back past the Indian and US Embassies . . . As a display of raw courage it was spine-tingling . . . There were no security forces in sight and no attempt was made to stop the demonstration, which faded into the wet afternoon with astonishing speed.”
That same day, the junta clamped martial law on Rangoon. But the next day and the day after thousands of demonstrators ignored the restrictions, marching through downtown, while further north in the capital students began digging themselves in close to the Shwedagon pagoda, the nation’s Holy of Holies which had been the rallying-point for anti-regime protests since British days. Demonstrations were now breaking out, not merely in the capital and Mandalay but across the country. And everywhere the protesters’ indignation and hunger for change were met by casual, murderous violence.
A fifteen-year-old schoolboy called Ko Ko took to the streets of central Rangoon on August 6th along with thousands of others. He recalled many years later:
Before 1988 I loved the army. My grandfather and grandmother came from the same part of the country as Ne Win. So when I saw what they did to us protesters I was shocked. At the time we were not demanding democracy. We just wanted our friends to be released from prison.
As I joined the demonstration I was afraid, but I thought they could not shoot me if I was carrying a picture of General Aung San. So I went into a cinema in the city center and asked them to give me the large framed photo of Aung San that was hanging on the wall. With thousands of others I walked along the road towards Sule Pagoda in the center of Rangoon holding the portrait in front of me. We were all shouting slogans, walking along in the rain.
We were hoarse from shouting so much and a girl came up offering wedges of lemon for our sore throats. I was holding the photograph so she put the lemon directly in my mouth. Then I said to her, please hold the photograph, I have to re-tie my longyi, so she took the photograph and gave me the bag of lemons to hold. And after I had re-tied my longyi she kept holding on to the photograph while I held the lemons. Then I heard the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire and she was lying on the ground dead and the photograph was full of bullet holes.
I was so upset by this event that I ran away from the capital and joined the Kachin rebels on the border in the north of the country.11
*
The 8/8/88 general strike would have been a big event anyway, given the incendiary state of the nation. But now it had been trailed on the BBC, no one could doubt that it would be the cue for a mass, nationwide uprising.
The protest that day began when dockworkers in Rangoon port marched off the job at precisely eight minutes past eight. The movement that had begun with a student fracas in a tea shop had now spiraled out to include the most vital workers in the economy. Hundreds of thousands marched on City Hall in defiance of martial law.
Throughout the hours of daylight the soldiers and riot police stayed in the background. “Despite its overwhelming superiority of force, the regime is today under siege by its people,” Seth Mydans wrote in the New York Times, reporting on the cataclysmic day. “The protests . . . have spread to every major city . . . led by students and joined by large numbers of workers and Buddhist monks, as well as by a cross-section of citizens, including government employees.”12
“No one likes this brutal government,” Mydans reported the owner of a curry shop saying. “It has no respect for the people, no respect for human rights. All the people are angry now. All the people support the students.”
The huge demonstration, matched by similar shows of popular force all over the country, continued all day in a mood closer to a carnival than a riot. “Happy New Year,” Mydans reported one demonstrator shouting to him. “This is our revolution day!” “The euphoric atmosphere prevailed all day,” wrote Bertil Lintner. “In the evening, thousands of people moved to the Shwedagon, where a meeting was being held. Meanwhile, Bren carriers and trucks full of armed soldiers were parked in the compound of City Hall . . . But nobody really thought that the troops would be called out.”13
Then at 11:30, after the last of many “last warnings” issued to the protesters over loudspeakers, the army suddenly went into action. “The tanks roared at top speed past [Sule] pagoda, followed by armored cars and twenty-four truckloads of soldiers,” Mydans wrote.14 “The protesters scattered screaming into alleys and doorways, stumbling over open gutters, crouching by walls and then, in a new wave of panic, running again.” The shooting continued until 3 AM. No one knows how many died. The Butcher had lived up to his name.
But if the protesters, who remained as amorphous and apparently leaderless as they had been since the upheaval began, had not achieved the revolution which astrologers had promised and which they had been dreaming of, neither had Sein Lwin succeeded in imposing his will, despite all the bloodshed. The strike continued into the next day. By now the hermit state, till weeks before one of the least-known countries on the planet, was splashed all over the world’s news bulletins day after day. While the regime claimed that only a hundred people had been killed in Rangoon, diplomats put the figure ten times higher, while hospital workers in the capital, who were closest to the butchery, said the true figure was more than 3,000.15 The US Senate, in a shocking blow to Burma’s amour propre, passed a motion unanimously condemning the regime and the killings for which they were responsible.
Then on August 12th, after less than three weeks in power, the Butcher threw in the towel.
*
Aung San Suu Kyi played no part in the demonstrations.16 “It’s not my sort of thing,” she replied with a touch of memsahib haughtiness when asked why not. One might say, given her presence in the country all this time, and the power of her name, that her absence from the protests was conspicuous. As Bo Kyi, one of the leaders of the students, put it, “When we staged demonstrations in 1988, in March, April, May, June, July and August, at that time there was no Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. But all the time that we were holding demonstrations, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was in Burma . . .”17
But she had not closed her eyes to the sufferings of her people. On the contrary, it is clear that she was thinking very hard about what role she could and ought to play.
Sein Lwin’s stunning resignation prompted dancing in the street. He was replaced one week later, on August 19th, by Dr. Maung Maung, a London-trained barrister, a former chief justice, an academic who had done research at Yale, one of the very few civilians of stature in Ne Win’s circle. But Maung Maung had lost whatever intellectual respectability he might once have claimed when he wrote the official hagiography of Number One—which included a sly reworking of the life of Aung San, depicting him as a supporter of Japanese-style fascism and an opponent of democracy.18 If Ne Win and his advisers imagined that the appointment of this ex-military pseudo-moderate would buy off the protesters’ anger, they were rudely disappointed. It barely bought them twenty-four hours of calm.
What was now plain was that Burma confronted a gaping power vacuum. And it was during these strange days that a young Rangoon University history teacher met Suu for the first time.
Nyo Ohn Myint: as a young history professor at Rangoon University, in August 1988, he was one of the first intellectuals to urge Suu to seize the opportunity to lead the democracy movement. He is now foreign affairs spokesman for the NLD-Liberated Areas, based in Thailand.
“I was twenty-six,” Nyo Ohn Myint remembered.19 Today, still looking barely out of his twenties, he is head of the NLD-LA’s foreign affairs department and lives in exile in Thailand. “I had been a teacher for three years. My colleagues and I were mulling over what part we should play in the uprising. We produced pamphlets and wall posters, stuff like that. Then finally I met her. There were seven of us around the table.”
So far the only role Suu had conceived for herself was one behind the scenes. For Nyo Ohn Myint that was not enough. “I raised the fact that our movement really needed a leader,” he said. “And she said, no, I have just asked the general secretary of the Burma Socialist Program Party to stop killing the students and other innocent people. That is my role.”
Nyo Ohn Myint did not leave it at that. “I appealed to her to meet the student movement. She said no. Then I explained the nature of Burmese political culture to her, which is that you sacrifice a lot. She seemed quite reluctant to do as we asked. Some of us thought that she was an opportunist. She said she just wanted to mediate between the government and the students and the people.20
“I said then, ‘Okay, so why have we bothered you to come here and talk?’ I was quite fed up: I thought, oh my God, I’ve wasted my time. Because we believed that she was Aung San’s daughter, our hero, our mentor, we grew up with stories of Aung San’s morality, Aung San’s bravery—everything.”
Now Suu offered a compromise. “She said to us, ‘Why don’t you join with me, come and work with me. Come tomorrow, and then every day after that.’ She said she would open a small office in her house, in the dining room—the room that became the party’s main political office.” The others in the discussion group welcomed her proposal eagerly; walking down the road back to the bus stop, they were “very excited that they were going to be working with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” Nyo Ohn Myint recalled. But he remained unimpressed. “I told my colleagues, ‘I’m not coming tomorrow.’” For her to say that she wanted to work with them, he told them, was
a lie: She’s not a leader. She refused to lead. We need a leader. The rest wanted to join with her but I said no, I’m still looking for a leader.
But then two days later a friend of mine who was also a colleague called in on me and said, Daw Suu wants to talk to you. He rang her number and gave me the phone and I said, “How are you, sister?” (because at university it’s our custom to call any girl our age or somewhat older Ma Ma, “big sister”). And she said, “Will you come to my home? We need to talk.” I said, “No, I already heard you say that you didn’t want to lead the movement.” She said, “Shall we sit down and talk about it?”
So I went there on August 16th with two others, a high school student called Aung Gyi and a university student, one of the leaders of the student movement, called Koko Gyi, and we sat down with Suu and she explained that she didn’t want to be an opportunist, she didn’t want to take over a movement that was already going on—but if people really needed Aung San’s daughter, she said, “I will do it.” But then she said there were so many other considerations, her family life, her two kids, her ailing mother, etcetera. So I said, “The point is, we really need you. We expected your elder brother, Aung San Oo, to be available to help us”—and there were a lot of rumors [about him] in Burma at that point. But he was never interested in Burma or in Burmese political issues or anything. He just happens to be the son of Aung San.
So then she said, “All right, let’s start working, because I know something about the Burmese situation through my books and my research, but I have been away from the country so maybe you can fill me in on that part.” So we decided to work together as a team. And that’s her skill as a leader, as I see it. She never takes the upper hand, she never uses her family background to dominate. She never acts like that.
In fact, in the time it took Suu to persuade this young academic to give her a second chance, she had already made her first political intervention, behind the scenes as she preferred. It was as modest and decorous in form as it was ambitious in content. On August 15th, she and Hwe Myint, one of her earliest political allies, wrote to the Council of State, the circle of elderly generals grouped around Ne Win, to propose that they set up a “People’s Consultative Committee,” made up of people outside the BSPP, “to present the aspirations of the people in a peaceful manner within the framework of the law.”21 The letter went on, “In the words of the song which roused the patriotism of our people . . . ‘For the good of those to follow/without regard for ourselves,’ so is this proposal presented with the good of future generations in mind.”
Suu’s ad hoc University Avenue think tank was up and running: The proposal carried the endorsement of U Nu, Burma’s first prime minister after independence, and other leading politicians from the pre-Ne Win era. But—as so often in years to come when appeals went out to Burma’s generals from her address—there was no reply. Clearly, more direct methods would be required.
*
As the democracy movement came into existence around her, Suu was still in the bosom of her family, with all that implied—still nursing her gravely ill mother, keeping her sons up to the mark with their studies, stealing spare moments to resume work on her dissertation.22 But at the same time she found herself the beating heart of what would soon become the most important political movement her country had seen since independence.
“The boys are in fine form,” Michael reported. “Alex is relaxed and happy—trouncing me regularly at squash in the Australian Embassy Club, Kim is swimming, both of them spend time reading to their grandmother . . . There is a constant stream of visitors . . .”
A month later, after the children had flown back home to start the new school term, the life of the house had become even more hectic. “You have no idea how every second of the day is occupied,” Michael wrote. “One of my main tasks is to see that Suu gets some sleep.”
U Win Tin, a stubbornly contrarian journalist who had been silenced for years by Ne Win and who was at the time vice president of the journalists’ union, was one of many drawn to Suu’s door.23
Three separate groups formed around her, he explained:
In Rangoon everybody knows everybody and all the union strike committees—from the lawyers’ union, the doctors’ union, the students’ union and so on—wanted to make contact with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. So two or three people from each committee used to come to her house for talks lasting two or three hours, about the political situation outside, the government, the military and so on—that was one group.
After the strike started on August 8th, masses of people started coming into the city from the suburbs of Rangoon, maybe ten miles away, just walking without anything to drink or anything to eat—they did not dare to drink the tap water because there were rumors that it had been poisoned. It was very hard for them because the weather was very hot and humid, but people came down to the middle of town anyway because most of the offices are located in the downtown area. And as they marched and marched they shouted slogans, and anybody passing through from Rangoon’s northern suburbs to the center of town has to pass in front of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s house. So it was very easy for them [to come there] and they shouted slogans and tried to meet Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
There was a man called Thakin Tin Mya, now he’s an old man like me, he’s about ninety, he used to be a communist and a leader of the nationalist organization DoBama before the war. He was a very good organizer, he knew almost everybody in Burmese politics, and he formed a group to talk to all these people coming past the house hoping for a meeting: to ask their names and their leader’s names and their group’s name and whether they are involved in strike action and so on. In the evening he made reports to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and these reports became a sort of briefing in which he explained the contribution people were making to the strike, not only in Rangoon but also in the small towns and so on. And that was the second group.
And the third group was formed of people like me, senior politicians, journalists, writers and so on: We were her political consultants, thinking what we should do and so on.
The pressure of events—the host of people now clamoring for Suu to take some kind of initiative, and the failure of her proposal for a consultative committee to elicit any official reaction—were steadily pushing her towards the point of no return. Every evening, when all the different advisory groups had gone home, she and Michael sat down to talk over the day’s events. Eventually they decided there was no other way out: Suu would have to stand up and be counted. But with troops at every crossroads with orders “to shoot to hit,” in Ne Win’s words, if the martial law ban on assemblies was broken, the last thing she wanted to do was provoke another bloodbath.
So she took steps to prevent it—and in the process discovered the extent of her influence.
Despite his communist background and the help he was providing to Suu, Thakin Tin Mya, her gatekeeper, was a member of the ruling BSPP and in good standing with the country’s political establishment.24 At Suu’s urging he set up a secret meeting for August 23rd between her and U Tin Aung Hein, the Minister of Justice and one of the few people in Ne Win’s inner circle not tainted by corruption. Suu confided in the Minister that she intended to make a public speech aimed at bringing an end to the bloodshed in the country—and she wanted him and his boss to know that she had no political aspirations and no hidden agenda.
The Minister replied with a piece of advice: The troops lining the streets regarded Ne Win as the father of the army, he said. “So please don’t launch any attacks on him, and don’t incite the people to do so, either.”25 Suu readily agreed, but had a specific request to make: To reduce the risk that her first public appearance would precipitate another massacre, she asked the Minister to petition Ne Win to allow the crowd to gather, despite the martial law provisions.
U Tin Aung Hein promised to do what he could. And he was as good as his word. The next day martial law was lifted; Maung Maung, four days into his presidency, announced that, in accordance with Ne Win’s proposal in July, a referendum would be held to decide between a one-party and a multiparty system; and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi gave the first public speech of her life.
It was a brief affair, delivered in the grounds of Rangoon General Hospital. Suu stood on a petrol drum to speak, wearing a white Burmese blouse and looking, as U Kyi Maung had observed, about seventeen. At her shoulder stood the shipwreck survivor and poet Maung Thaw Ka, with a quizzical expression on his craggy face. Who can say, he seems to be thinking, what this might lead to?
Grasping the microphone, she expressed her desire to see Burma move swiftly to a political system “in accord with the people’s desires.” She said she further wished that the people would show discipline and unity and use only the most pacific methods of demonstration. So far, there was nothing to disturb Ne Win’s sleep. Then she told them that she would be speaking again at greater length two days’ hence—this time at the Shwedagon pagoda.
*
Ralph Fitch, an English merchant who saw the pagoda in 1586, called it “the fairest place, as I suppose, that is in the world.”26 Norman Lewis called it “the heart and soul of Rangoon, the chief place of pilgrimage in the Buddhist world, the Buddhist equivalent of the Kaaba at Mecca, and, in sum, a great and glorious monument.” Its special holiness, he explained, “arises from the fact that it is the only pagoda recognized as enshrining relics not only of Gautama, but of the three Buddhas preceding him.” The value placed on the huge shrine was made manifest in the treasures lavished on it by successive kings, the guaranteed method—according to the somewhat mechanical dictates of traditional Theravada Buddhism—of speeding one’s approach to Nirvana. “It was the habit of the Burmese kings,” Lewis goes on, “to make extravagant gifts for the embellishment of the Shwedagon, diamond vanes, jewel-encrusted finial umbrellas, or at least their weight in gold, to be used in re-gilding the spire. The wealth that other Oriental princes kept in vaults and coffers was here spread out under the sun to astound humanity.” And its impact on the visitor, Lewis discovered, was quite as powerful as its importance suggested it should be. “I plunged suddenly into the most brilliant spectacle I had ever seen,” he reported of his arrival on the pagoda’s expansive terrace. “In the immediate background rises a golden escarpment, a featureless cliff of precious metal, spreading a misty dazzlement.”27
A statue draped in gold inside the Shwedagon shrine.
But the Shwedagon is far more than just a brilliant place of pilgrimage. Affirming the centrality of the Buddhist tradition at the heart of the nation’s identity, it became the focus during the 1920s and 1930s of the first mass demonstrations against British rule.28 Aung San delivered some of his most inflammatory speeches here, and is buried nearby. By announcing that she would speak at the Shwedagon, for the first time Suu showed her willingness to throw the charisma of her name behind the uprising. And the regime’s response was instantaneous.
Relations between Suu and her mother and the regime had never been less than correct all these years. Suu’s frequent appearances at the Martyrs’ Day event in July was the extent of their co-involvement, and both sides handled her father’s name and fame with great care and respect, exquisitely conscious of how much it meant to all of them. But suddenly, as she stepped into the maelstrom, all that was forgotten. Overnight thousands of leaflets were printed, stigmatizing Suu as the puppet of a foreign power, as a “genocidal prostitute,” the whore of a foreign bastard.29 In grotesque caricatures, the first of many to appear over the years, Suu and Michael were depicted having sex. “Take your bastard of a foreigner,” they commanded, “and leave at once!”
Suu and her party left University Avenue at 8:30 AM in a convoy of eleven vehicles. Anonymous bomb scares and assassination threats had heightened the tension of the day. One of her advisers urged her to don a bulletproof vest for protection.30 “Why?” she retorted. “If I was afraid of being killed, I would never speak out against the government.” Already her supporters were getting a glimpse of her mettle. To guard against unpleasant surprises, dozens of the students who had been frequenting her home over the previous weeks, wearing long-sleeved white shirts and dark longyis, formed a large though unarmed bodyguard.
“We didn’t go along the main road,” Nyo Ohn Myint the lecturer recalled, “because there had been many rumors and we were afraid of being attacked—an army captain was arrested in downtown Rangoon with a lot of machine guns, he had supposedly been assigned to assassinate her. He confessed after he was arrested by members of the public, who then beat him.”31
Though well into the monsoon season, August 26th dawned sunny and hot. Word of the event had spread across the city, and thousands camped outside the Shwedagon all night to secure a good place. Many tens of thousands more began arriving at dawn. It is a short ride from University Avenue to the shrine—the two addresses are about a mile apart to the north of the city center—and on a normal day it would not take fifteen minutes. But on this day the crowds were so huge that Suu’s convoy, with a Jeep in front, herself in a Toyota Saloon and Michael and the boys in another car behind, could not even get close. “We couldn’t get through the crowd,” said Nyo Ohn Myint. “Michael was in my car and it took something like forty-five minutes because the street was so crowded.” They were forced to get down and walk the last few hundred yards, the road ahead of them cleared by students waving flags.
Nobody knows for sure how many people were gathered outside the Shwedagon pagoda that day. It is part of the reporter’s informal training to gauge the rough size of a crowd, but massive exaggeration is common in many countries, especially when the meetings are of great political importance; equally massive under-reporting by the authorities is also common, for the same reason. But Win Tin, the veteran journalist and close associate of Suu, insists that his own estimate of the numbers was not distorted by his political views. He said:
In those days the population of Rangoon was about three million, and about one million attended the meeting on August 26th. The crowd stretched from the pagoda itself all the way to the market, the people were densely packed, so there might have been a million. It was my duty to inform the international press about the event, but when I sent the news to the BBC I said there might be 600,000 people. I didn’t want to sound too boastful because when Ne Win held a meeting he only drew 100,000 or 200,000 people. So I didn’t want to make too much of the amount.32
Faced with such an unprecedented throng, even her closest supporters did not know what to expect from their “big sister,” dwarfed on the stage by a stylized portrait of her father. Would she dry up? Would her courage fail this frightening test? Would this long-term expatriate, deeply learned in Burmese literature, be incomprehensible to ordinary people?
“As far as I knew she had never done any public speaking,” said Win Tin. “I knew that she could speak Burmese quite well, but we had some misgivings about whether she would be able to speak good Burmese on stage.”
The stage was packed with young people, many wearing yellow armbands; a line of young bodyguards wearing headbands sat or crouched watchfully at the edge. A famous film star called Htun Wai, a comfortable-looking figure in a lilac jacket and longyi, stepped to the microphone and introduced her with a vertical flourish of his arm: “Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!” He lowered the microphone six inches and moved to the side. She took his place center stage, her hands clasped over a folder of documents at her waist. And without preliminaries, without hesitation and without even the ghost of a smile she began to speak, in a high, loud voice.
It has been said with some authority that she read her speech from a prepared text.33 Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor was she reciting parrot-fashion a text she had learned by heart. Instead she spoke spontaneously, without notes, but sticking to a tight and cogent argument; spoke, in other words, on her first real outing, like a seasoned politician.
“She spoke very good Burmese,” said Win Tin, “very fluent and very convincingly and very clear. For a normal person it is not so easy to talk to such a huge crowd, a sea of people. She was not reading, and she talked so wittily—something like Obama. We saw at once that she was a born leader: ‘a star is born,’ something like that.”
“It was so direct and down to earth,” said Bertil Lintner. “Everyone was absolutely taken aback by that speech. Here was this tiny woman talking and everyone was spellbound. It was amazing. She looked like her father and she sounded like him too.”34
The crowd stretched away into the monsoon haze, a sea of dark heads. Close to the stage it was slashed by a broad wedge of maroon: hundreds of monks, shielding their shaved pates from the sun with their robes. “The attendance was so big,” remembered Win Tin. “Never had so many people come together for a political meeting.”
How would this chit of a girl—to judge by her appearance—begin? By regurgitating the consultative committee proposal she had launched ten days before, to no avail? By apologizing for her months of silence and absence? By bemoaning the killings and pleading with the people to return to the path of docility and obedience?
Anyone expecting this sort of thing gravely underestimated the Bogyoke’s daughter.
The very first words were like a cannon blast aimed at the regime’s monopoly of power.
“Reverend monks and people!” she shouted. “This public rally is aimed at informing the whole world of the will of the people . . . Our purpose is to show that the entire people entertain the keenest desire for a multiparty system of government.”35
It was a broadside. Here, she declared, were the people—that was incontrovertible—and here and now the people were going to tell, not merely the Burmese authorities but the “whole world”—the world from which she had returned, and which the regime had for a generation done everything in its power to exclude from its calculations—exactly what they wanted. She herself—she had no hesitation in claiming—was the people’s mouthpiece. And what they wanted was not the cheese-paring referendum Dr. Maung Maung had announced just two days before, but something very clear. “I believe,” she went on, “that all the people who have assembled here have without exception come with the unshakeable desire to strive for and win a multiparty democratic system.”
What business did she, thirty years removed from the fray and married to an Englishman, have sticking her oar in Burmese waters? She addressed that issue, the one raised by the obscene posters, head on. “It is true that I have lived abroad,” she said. “It is also true that I am married to a foreigner. These facts have never interfered and will never interfere with or lessen my love and devotion for my country.” For the first time, two minutes into the speech, applause erupted; the actor Htun Wai at her side beamed and clapped, and Suu paused in her flow.
Love and devotion, however sincere, did not explain her presence on the stage. Unlike the democrats and communists who had spent the decades of one-party rule languishing in jail or fighting Ne Win’s troops on the border, Aung San Suu Kyi had been far away from Burma and apparently uninterested in what was happening there. So what had brought her back? “The answer,” she said, “is that the present crisis is the concern of the entire nation. I could not as my father’s daughter remain indifferent to all that was going on. This national crisis could in fact be called the second struggle for national independence.”
This was to step up the attack further. Here was a direct challenge to Ne Win: The standard-bearer of independence, the man who had for so long traded on his closeness to Aung San and who claimed to be his rightful heir, this man—she never named him—was now in her estimation no better than the colonial oppressor, to be resisted and evicted (so it was implied) like the British.
How could she justify such a call to arms? Now she raised the file clasped in her hands and leafed through it to read from a text written by her father. “We must make democracy the popular creed,” she read out. Otherwise, “Burma would one day, like Japan and Germany, be despised.” Democracy, Aung San had declared and now her daughter repeated, was “the only ideology which is consistent with freedom . . . an ideology that promotes and strengthens peace.”
Deafening applause rolled across the stage. The expression on Htun Wai’s face veered between elation and wonderment—with the odd flicker of fright as the speech’s incendiary subtext sunk in.
But she had not finished with the army yet. At her secret meeting with the Justice Minister two days before, U Tin Aung Hein had enjoined Suu not to attack Number One, and not to incite the crowd to attack him. She had agreed, and she remained true to her undertaking—though perhaps not so true to the spirit of it.
“I would like to say one thing,” she went on, with the first hint of circumspection in her voice. “Some may not like what I am going to say. But I believe that my duty is to tell the people what I believe to be true. Therefore I shall speak my mind . . . At this time there is a certain amount of dissension between the people and the army . . .”
For the first time in the speech, Suu was open to the accusation of understatement: After all, staff at the hospital where her mother had once worked believed the army had killed 3,000 civilians in cold blood—a far greater massacre than any for which the former colonial ruler was blamed.36 She could not have been unaware that she was now trespassing on the most delicate and at the same time most vital question confronting the people: not what political system the country might adopt, which after all was a question for the coming weeks and months, but the nightmare of murder and mutilation that the country was living through right now, day after day. It could not be ignored.
And again her hands moved to the documents she had brought with her, leafing through to the words she needed. Again the great Aung San, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, pointed his dread finger at his sanguinary successor. “The armed forces are meant for this nation and this people,” she read out, “and it should be a force having the honor and respect of the people. If instead the armed forces should come to be hated by the people, then the aims with which this army has been built up would have been in vain.”
“My first impression was that she was just another general’s daughter,” said Nita Yin Yin May, the British Embassy’s information officer at the time, “because I’d never met her personally. And then she started talking to the people and I was overwhelmed by her speech. I was shocked: This was the one we were looking for! She was the true leader!”37 She wiped away tears of emotion at the memory. “I was very much impressed. I thought she was very sincere, very charming, very beautiful, very outspoken. It really hit all of us. It really touched all of us. And then I decided, I’m going to support her no matter what.”
There was much more: The crowd listened with keen attention and by the end they were chanting her name. She told them of her “strong attachment” to the army, how soldiers had cared for her as a child. She vowed that she would never be a stalking horse for politicians of the past; echoing her father she exhorted the people over and over again to “unity” and “discipline.” She spelled out, naming the hapless Dr. Maung Maung (who was to survive in power for less than a month), her belief that a referendum was not required. “We want to get rid of the one-party system,” she said. There is “no desire at all for a referendum . . . free and fair elections [should be] arranged as quickly as possible . . .”
General Ne Win was of course not present at this meeting, and it is not known if he was subsequently given a recording of Aung San Suu Kyi’s maiden speech; but if so it is a fair bet that by this point he had switched the machine off, possibly hurling it at the wall. Not only had Bogyoke’s daughter come out of nowhere to make a nuisance of herself; not only did she bear a startling resemblance to the man honored as the father of the nation and of the Tatmadaw. But in pronouncing very particular words uttered by the dead man, she had ripped away what shreds of legitimacy Ne Win and his clique could still lay claim to. It was a declaration of war.
A silkscreen depicting Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father. It decorated the stage during her debut speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda and is now on a wall in her house.
