IT is not true that recent Burmese history is an unending catalogue of oppression. Any Burmese over the age of thirty-five can remember a time of perfect liberty, when a free press flourished and trade unions and political parties sprang up like mushrooms after rain.
Unfortunately the Burma Spring lasted less than one month—twenty-six days to be precise. It ended as abruptly as it had begun.
Yet within that brief span in August and September 1988 Aung San Suu Kyi, backed by a shifting and so far nameless coalition of students, intellectuals, old politicians and veteran army officers, succeeded in persuading the regime to push through three reforms which ensured that Burma would never be the same again.
The first was what ushered in the spring, the decision by the Justice Minister to lift martial law—a prelude to and, in Suu’s view, a basic precondition, for her public debut at the Shwedagon pagoda: She wanted the regime’s assurance that nobody who came to listen to her would risk being shot. On August 24th, the request was granted.
The second reform changed Burma’s political matrix forever, even though, more than two decades later, it has yet to produce any of the benefits for which it was promoted: the regime’s commitment, not to the referendum advocated by Dr. Maung Maung but to general elections leading to multiparty democracy.
The third was hardly less momentous: the disestablishment of the BSPP, effectively bringing down the curtain on twenty-six years of one-party rule. Burma would never be the same again. And it was Aung San Suu Kyi—the “governess” as she has been labeled, the Burmese “Mary Poppins,” the “Oxford housewife,” the political ingénue—who brought them about.1
*
The effect of the lifting of martial law was immediate. Troops and riot police disappeared from the streets. All over the country people could suddenly do and say exactly what they pleased. Strikers surged through towns and cities throughout the country, no longer defiant, merely euphoric. Twenty-six years before, in the interest of order and discipline, General Ne Win had fastened a straitjacket on the nation. Now it was flung off, and the urges that had been building since March—to laugh, to swear, to scandalize, to join hands, to dream and plan for a future dramatically different from the past—burst forth in all their jubilant diversity.
The regime’s indigestible daily rag, the Working People’s Daily, until the day before full of articles about ambassadors presenting their credentials and generals opening sewage plants, was suddenly publishing daring political comment pieces and pages of photographs of the demonstrations. An unruly crowd of new papers sprang up to offer competition: Scoop, Liberation Daily, New Victory, Light of Dawn—their titles alone told of the mood of wild optimism sweeping the country.
Not all the news they published could be relied on: One paper called Phone Maw Journal, named after the student whose killing by the army in March had ignited the revolution, informed its readers that a cemetery in a Rangoon suburb where the bodies of many of the victims of army shootings had been unceremoniously buried was now noisily haunted—and that the ghosts were chanting pro-democracy slogans!2 The spirits had also formed a closed shop, barring entry to the mortal remains of members of the ruling party: Anyone brave enough to go close could hear them wailing, “Corpses of BSPP members not to be buried in our cemetery! Stay out! Stay out!”
The movement, which at the start had been the monopoly of students, now drew recruits from every part of society. Martin Morland, British ambassador in Burma at the time, remembered the euphoric mood.
“The Rangoon Bar Association took its courage in both hands and issued a signed protest calling for change,” he recalled.3 “The Medical Association followed suit. The street marches multiplied, with banners identifying the state organization marching. By early September every ministry had joined in. Even the beggars had their march. On the last Sunday before the army struck back even the police band went over to the side of the people and played outside City Hall.”
It was the same all over the country. In the little town of Phekhon, in the Shan States in Burma’s disputed northeast, a student recently returned from Rangoon called Pascal Khoo Thwe was caught up in the excitement; like many others, it was to determine the course of the rest of his life.4 He wrote many years later:
When Aung San Suu Kyi made her great speech . . . on August 26th, she instantly became our leader and inspiration. In the evenings we would listen to the BBC and hope for guidance from our goddess. We formed committees for security, for the food supply, for information, for connecting the different ethnic and religious groups.
Although I busied myself with all this, I knew there was a pompous and officious aspect to it. It also had a dreamlike quality. Only weeks before, to speak in open opposition to the regime would have been unthinkable. Now the whole of Phekhon was talking about the future, about what sort of constitution Burma should have, about the place of the minority peoples. People who had been silent for twenty-six years now wanted to shout, or at least endlessly to debate.
Burma was approaching a state of anarchy, but for a while it worked the way anarchists have always claimed society should naturally work once the state’s machinery of repression is sent to the scrapyard, in messy but euphoric harmony. The army had pulled back to barracks and was nowhere to be seen. The feared and hated riot police, the Lon Htein, was likewise invisible. Ministries and government offices had simply closed; the Burmese state had shut down. And the vacuum filled up with people doing their own thing. A young woman called Hmwe Hmwe who had joined the democracy movement in Rangoon traveled to Mandalay to help coordinate strike centers there, traveling by van and pickup truck.5 “Since everybody was on strike, there was no train service or other regular transport and it was difficult to buy petrol as well,” she said. “But spirits were high and we attended meetings all along the way. We slept in the strike centers and there was one in every town we passed through. The people had taken over the local BSPP offices and government premises and managed their own administration . . . There was feverish activity everywhere: people printing leaflets, making posters, publishing their own local newspapers and preparing meetings, rallies and demonstrations.”
Older systems of authority re-emerged to fill the place of those that had vanished. Bertil Lintner wrote:
In Mandalay, the young monks’ organization . . . had resurfaced.6 The monks organized day-to-day affairs like rubbish collection, made sure the water supply was working and, according to some reports, even acted as traffic policemen. The maintenance of law and order was also in the hands of the monks—and the criminals who had been caught were often given rather unorthodox sentences. One visitor to Mandalay in August saw a man chained to a lamp post outside the railway station who shouted all day, “I’m a thief! I’m a thief! . . .”
Yet the appearance of a vacuum of power was itself illusory. The military regime was rocking, it is true; its pseudo-civilian governing apparatus was crumbling. But in the months and years to come, proof emerged of a controlling mind behind what was going on during the weeks of freedom—the same cynical and ruthless military mind that had ruled the country for the past generation.
On the same day that Aung San Suu Kyi gave her maiden speech at the Shwedagon, truckloads of troops poured into central Rangoon and removed 600 million kyats from the Myanma Foreign Trade Bank: to pay the army for the coming six months and ensure its continuing loyalty.
The following day, in a cynical coda to the lifting of martial law, Insein Jail, the Victorian panopticon in a leafy Rangoon suburb that is the nation’s most infamous prison, evacuated its inmates on what the authorities called “parole,” sending them out into the lawless capital with neither money nor food. They were released from the jail after inmates threw in their lot with the strikers outside the walls and attacked the prison guards. The guards replied by shooting the protesters, a fire broke out and it was claimed that 1,000 died and 500 were wounded. Whatever the truth about the riot and its suppression, the mass release of prisoners added a new element of peril and anarchy to the dangerously combustible elements outside. The pattern was repeated around the country, leading to the sudden discharge into the community of more than 10,000 footloose criminals.
The result was predictable—and almost certainly anticipated and indeed plotted by the regime. As Martin Morland put it, “The army evidently hoped that things would get so out of hand that the people would have had enough and beg the old regime to come back.”7 Certainly the sudden appearance en masse of the most desperate people in society added an extra element of terror to the unstable situation, an element to which some of the protesters responded brutally. Lintner wrote:
On September 5th, four men and one woman were caught outside a children’s hospital [in Rangoon].8 After a rough interrogation, two of them confessed that the gang had tried to poison the water tank outside the hospital, and they were released. But the remaining three refused to say anything and an angry crowd beat them in the street. A man came forward with a sword, decapitated the three and held up their blood-dripping severed heads to the applause of the mob. Public executions—mostly beheadings—of suspected DDSI [i.e. Military Intelligence] agents became an almost daily occurrence in Rangoon. What had started as a carnival-like, Philippine-style “people’s power uprising” was . . . coming more and more to resemble the hunt for the tonton macoutes in Haiti after the fall of “Baby Doc” Duvalier . . .
But the descent into savagery was strictly localized and, when reported in time, it was strongly opposed. Suu took no immediate steps to capitalize on the success of her performance at the Shwedagon; on the contrary, in her first-ever interviews she expressed reluctance about getting involved in politics. But her home was ever more of a hurly-burly, with throngs of strikers besieging the gates asking to talk to her and think tanks in permanent session in her downstairs dining room-cum-office. Many of the students who had been her escort on August 26th were now camping out in the garden. And when Suu learned of lynch parties at large she repeatedly sent the students to try to restore sanity and calm. Often they succeeded.
The BSPP government was still notionally in power, but the central strike committee in Rangoon called for it to resign and for a neutral interim government to take its place, capable of supervising the free, multiparty democratic elections that were now the goal everyone had in mind. The call was taken up across the country. But President Maung Maung refused to take this step, instead announcing a second emergency conference of the ruling party for September 12th.
The outbreaks of lynching underlined the fact that, if the military had pulled in its claws and the BSPP was on the point of collapse, the democracy movement had yet to take a definite shape or coalesce around particular leaders. The movement’s challenge was to prove that the military dictatorship was not merely enfeebled but that it could be superseded. But it was a challenge that it was slow to meet.
The students were the first to make a stab at it. A charismatic biology student called Baw Oo Tun had become their de facto leader in many protests, taking the nom de guerre of Min Ko Naing—“Conqueror of Kings.” In late August they set up the All-Burma Students’ Union under his leadership—an initiative weakened by the fact that a quite separate organization with the same name already existed.
Next to throw his hat in the ring was the great veteran of Burmese democratic politics, the first and indeed only prime minister elected under the old multiparty system, eighty-two-year-old U Nu, who had held office until the coup of 1962. At the end of August he defied the constitution by announcing the establishment of Burma’s first independent political party in twenty-six years, the League for Democracy and Peace (Provisional). But on September 9th, he critically overplayed his hand, telling the world that he had now formed a parallel government, and calling for general elections. In a press conference to relaunch a career that he had renounced years before in favor of religious devotion, he claimed that Burma’s only legal constitution was the one passed in 1947, according to which he was still in charge. “I’m still the legitimate prime minister,” he insisted.
If anything was designed to give the democracy movement a bad name, this was it. The announcement stunned U Nu’s political friends and enemies alike. “Preposterous” was the verdict of Aung Gyi, the general who had written dissenting letters to Ne Win earlier in the year, while at a press conference in University Road Suu rejected it just as firmly. She was “astonished” by U Nu’s claim, she said, adding “the future of the people will be decided by the masses of the people.”9
This was the theme she had hammered home at the Shwedagon: Burma’s future lay in a multiparty democracy; the only way for the country to emerge from the nightmare of military tyranny was for the people to have the opportunity to choose their rulers. And the very next day, in the second important victory she won before even declaring her intention of entering politics, her wish was granted.
The occasion was a second extraordinary congress of the still-just-about ruling BSPP, following the one in July when Ne Win had spoken of his intention to step down. President Maung Maung’s offer of a referendum on single- or multiparty systems was still on the table, but as tens of thousands of protesters chanted outside, the congress threw it out, opting instead for “free, fair, multiparty elections.” Under Suu’s urging and that of millions of other Burmese, the party that had ruled the country very badly for a generation had now written its suicide note.
But it was jam tomorrow, not jam today. The regime, however battered and bruised, clung to what little remained of its authority. There was to be no interim government to see the election process through.
*
The history of Burma is littered with “ifs,” and one of the biggest of them looms over the events of the subsequent week.
The democracy movement that had begun obscurely in March—that had been hardened under army fire in which thousands died and that was now groping towards the attainment of some clear political shape—was continuing to grow. With army and police still absent from the streets, the strikers’ demonstrations grew larger, more vocal, more militant, more ambitious. So much had already been wrung from the tyrants: One more heave, it seemed, and the rotten superstructure of army rule would come crashing down. What was needed now was for the army itself, or significant portions of it, to switch sides. And with the daughter of the army’s founder ever more prominent in the revolt, that was no longer a pipe dream.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s emotional appeal for disillusioned members of the armed forces was already apparent. Maung Thaw Ka, the ex-naval officer who had stood alongside her during her speech at Rangoon General Hospital, was one of them. And now other senior figures closely associated with the armed forces were coming over to her side.
Suu with NLD cofounder U Kyi Maung.
U Kyi Maung was to become one of the central figures in Suu’s early political life in Burma, the chairman of her party who led it to triumph in the election when Suu and all the other top leaders were in jail or detention. A plump, quizzical figure approaching retirement age with a biting wit and a phlegmatic approach to the terrors visited on him and his colleagues by the regime, he was as devout as he was irreverent: His pithy formulations of how to apply the simple truths of Buddhism to solitary confinement had a powerful influence on Suu herself.10
A career soldier, Kyi Maung had reached the rank of colonel before being sacked from the army for opposing Ne Win’s coup. He had spent a total of eleven years in jail for his hostility to the dictatorship and had just emerged from a brief third term when he got the message that Suu wanted to see him.
“I thought to myself, let’s see what this lady is up to,” he said later.11 “Now is the time, a revolution is stirring . . . I was a veteran jailbird and well over twenty years her senior. Later on I learned that she was watching people, looking in all directions for people who could be trusted—candidates, you know, for the struggle. She was born with revolution in her blood but she needed all the help possible to see it through. So from then on we began to meet frequently.” At their first meeting he remembered telling her, “Suu, if you’re prepared to enter Burmese politics and to go the distance, you must be tolerant and be prepared for the worst.” She listened, he said, “attentively.”
Even more ominous to the regime was the arrival at Suu’s side of a man who had been one of Burma’s most senior and distinguished soldiers before falling out with Ne Win.
Bony and bespectacled, U Tin Oo stood out among the professors and journalists swirling around Suu like a commando at a cocktail party. A decade after being sacked and jailed by Ne Win, there was still a parade-ground gleam in his eye and the abrasiveness of the battle-hardened soldier in his manner.
Suu, U Tin Oo (third right) and other members of the NLD’s Central Executive Committee outside Suu’s house in early 1989.
“From the age of seventeen until nearly fifty, my life was a struggle,” he later explained.12 “I had a very rough life. I had to stay many years in dense jungles during the war. I’ve been wounded in battle numerous times . . . I lost my father, and my son died at a young age. After being promoted to chief of staff I was betrayed, sacked and imprisoned. I lacked politeness, and felt aggressive.”
One of the first recruits to Aung San’s Patriot Burmese Forces in 1943 when he was only sixteen, Tin Oo rose rapidly through the ranks. He was twice decorated for valor in battle and was a popular hero of the regime when he was made Minister of Defense in 1974. But during the abortive uprising of that year, his was the name shouted by the crowds calling for Ne Win to step down and be replaced. Two years later, accused of involvement in an abortive coup, he was sacked and jailed.13
On coming out of prison, he spent two years as a monk, then took a degree in law. As the democracy revolt erupted around him, he was reluctant to get involved: “My [old army] colleagues urged me to address the public. At first I declined. I wanted to continue living quietly practicing vipassana [insight] meditation. I think I was a bit attached to the tranquility and peace of the practice. But my colleagues would not give up, and after many discussions we agreed to form the All-Burma Patriotic Old Comrades’ League. Nearly all the retired officers from all over the country came to our headquarters, which was my house, to offer their services.”14
Tin Oo himself, after much arm-twisting, followed in Suu’s footsteps and made a public speech to a “huge, energetic crowd” outside Rangoon General Hospital on August 27th. But although he represented a formidably prestigious sector of this highly militarized society, Tin Oo recognized that the old soldiers could not stand alone. “Although our group was large, consisting of military personnel and some portion of the population, I knew that I could not lead the entire country along with the ethnic races,” he said. “We needed a leader, a strong leader, who could lead the whole show . . . We needed somebody who understood democracy, who had really lived it.”
A colleague played him a tape of Suu’s speech at Shwedagon. “Her words were strong and clear,” he recalled, “and there was no hitch at all. Some people who live abroad a long time can hardly speak Burmese when they come back to Burma, but she spoke fluently and with daily Burmese usage. She was clearly a very rare person. I realized that the people were eager for democracy, and that they were thinking that she was the unifying force that could lead the movement. We didn’t say ‘leader’—she was the lady who could try . . . to guide our people to what they desired so much.”
The old soldiers in Tin Oo’s League decided that the only hope for the revolution was for the different opposition groups that had sprung up to band together under a single figure. Increasingly Suu was seen as the only plausible candidate. “We agreed that I would meet her,” he remembered, “and that I would go alone. . . . When I came to her house she was sitting on the corner of the sofa in the main room. She was alone. I paid my respects . . .”15
The old soldier and the daughter of his first commander talked over the desperate straits their country was in. “The way she talked, her complexion, her features and gestures were strikingly similar to those of her father,” he said. “She resembled him in almost every way. I thought that she was a female replica . . . I said, ‘I listened to your first public speech. We cannot make it alone. We need unity within the struggle for human rights and democracy.’ She agreed. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘fine, let’s go forward together and work together.’ That’s all.”
It was an encounter of military terseness and efficiency, worthy of Aung San himself, famous for his economy with words. Both were holding in their emotions, but as the general headed for the door, Suu blurted out, “Did you meet my father? Did you know him?”
Tin Oo replied, “Yes of course, I knew him well.” Suu asked him how that came about. “I told her that I had known him from my days as a cadet and an officer in his Patriot Force. I said, ‘The last time I met your father was at Maymyo, he was the Deputy Chairman of the Governor’s Executive Council, and I, a lieutenant. At that time your father was visiting with the Chief of Yawngshwe state . . . And I saw your mother too. That was the last time I saw your father alive.’ So she asked, ‘Did you notice at that time a small girl being carried by somebody?’” Tin Oo confessed that he had not, but the coincidence further strengthened the bond between them. The general told her how sad it was that Aung San had not lived to bring his work of nation-building to a conclusion. “Now I have to serve and cooperate with you,” he told her, “so that you, his only daughter, may enjoy the great fruits of Burma’s independence.” More than two decades and many years of detention later, Tin Oo remains the most stalwartly loyal of all Suu’s colleagues.
The third veteran to stand alongside Suu in the tense days of mid-September 1988 was U Aung Gyi, the gadfly general who, by publishing his anti-regime tirades in the spring, had broken the taboo against open criticism. Aung Gyi himself had spoken at Shwedagon one day before Suu, though his efforts to persuade the crowd to go easy on President Maung Maung were met with stony silence.
Now, for the first time, Aung San Suu Kyi, Aung Gyi and Tin Oo, the emerging leaders of the uprising, banded together. They went to meet the election commission that had been set up following the BSPP’s decision to hold multiparty elections, to learn what arrangements were being made to ensure that they were indeed free and fair. But they came away unsatisfied, and in a public letter to President Maung Maung signed by all three they explained why.
They pointed out that new political parties formed to fight the election would find themselves up against the BSPP, which had had a lock on power for twenty-six years and was still in charge. That could never be a fair fight. Furthermore the BSPP had a massive captive vote bank, consisting of the entire armed forces, all of them members of the party by compulsion, as well as millions of civilian employees of the state. Lacking funding and independent supervision, what kind of a chance would the opposition parties have?
The only solution, as the Rangoon strike committee and others had been arguing, was for the replacement of the present administration with an interim government “acceptable to all the people” to be sworn in to see the elections through.
The date was September 13th, a Tuesday.
What is tantalizing, seen from a perspective of more than twenty years on, is to observe how President Maung Maung, in these tumultuous days, seems to be edging towards the same conclusions as his adversaries in the opposition. In a speech after the BSPP’s extraordinary congress, the president conceded that his party was not up to the present challenges. “The weakness of the party is that it was born as a ruling party and grew up as one,” he told the assembled delegates. “In practice, it lacked the experience of making sacrifices, taking risks and working hard to overcome difficulties.” He appeared to be dictating his own party’s obituary.
Then, on Friday, September 16th, three days after the publication of the openly hostile letter by Suu and her two colleagues, the regime conceded one of the letter’s principal demands. It was the third victory Suu had wrung from them in less than a month. “On September 16th,” as Burma historian Michael Charney records, “the State Council announced that since government servants should ‘be loyal to the state and only serve the people’ and in keeping with the multiparty system that the government now promised to create, all state employees, including the military, could no longer be members of a political party.”16 That meant they could not belong to the BSPP. Another huge clump of the ruined state’s masonry came crashing down. Optimists, including Michael Aris, were gladly anticipating the revolution’s triumph. “Dear Everyone,” he faxed home on September 15th, “an enormous thank you to you all for helping so much with Alexander and Kim . . . We still have high hopes of bringing them here for Christmas . . . Both of us are convinced that by then peace will have firmly arrived. Even now the final cracks in the edifice of this monstrous regime are appearing. Wish us luck!”
Meanwhile the 600 million kyats the regime had forcibly withdrawn from the bank to pay the army’s wages appeared to be losing its adhesive power. The regime might discount the arrival at Suu’s side of a figure like Tin Oo, long gone from the army and identified with Ne Win’s enemies for more than a decade. But what about the sixteen privates from the 16th Light Infantry who marched through Rangoon in their uniforms though without weapons on September 7th, chanting, “Our military skills are not for killing the people”? What of the officers of the immigration and customs police, marching through the capital in their uniforms bearing banners to demand democracy? Or the Railway Police likewise in uniform and marching in formation behind a woman officer carrying the obligatory photo of Aung San?
Small fry, the senior generals might scoff, lower rankers, easily excited but just as easily scared back into line. But what about the air force flyers who started moving in the same direction? On September 9th, 150 airmen of the Mingaladon Maintenance Air Base went on strike followed by airmen from two other units. In the speech in which he pointed out the failings of the BSPP, Dr. Maung Maung had gone on to conjure a hellish image of the barbarous forces of revolt, those determined to “sweep everything aside, bring everything down, rush in on human waves shouting their war cries to the cheers of outsiders, and establish their occupation.”17 But what of these new recruits to the revolt, marching through the capital behind their drummers and buglers in crisp military order, demanding change?
At this point in the story the opposed forces seemed almost perfectly matched: A feather would have been enough to bring the scale down on the side of revolution. “Any high-ranking army officer who had taken an armed infantry unit into the capital and declared his support for the uprising would have become a national hero immediately,” argued Bertil Lintner, “and the tables would have been turned.”18 Rangoon, and Burma, held their breath, waiting.
*
The terrible events of the following few days raise the question: How did General Ne Win and his cronies view the events that had overtaken the country over the preceding months?
In her speech at the Shwedagon, Suu had gone out of her way to honor the army her father had founded. “I feel strong attachment to the armed forces,” she had said. “. . . I would therefore not want to see any splits or struggles between the army . . . and the people . . . May I appeal to the armed forces to become a force in which the people place their trust and reliance?” With her long years spent in India and the UK, where the armed forces have an honored place but one that is strictly set apart from the levers of power, Suu was doing what she could to induce the troops to go back to barracks so that a civil and civilized Burma could re-emerge. No threat to the existence or military prerogatives of the army was contained in her message.
But from what took place on the evening of September 18th and the days that followed, it is clear that those in power saw things very differently. Ne Win was the army and the army was Ne Win: An attack on one was an attack on all. The army would not be divided: It had gained too much from a generation in power—too much privilege, too much wealth, a dominant position over the rest of society comparable to the hated British—to risk having it all ripped away. As they saw it, Suu had declared war not on the overweening power of a dictator but on all of them and on everything they had worked so hard to plunder. And now the armed forces responded in kind, with a declaration of war.
*
Sunday, September 18th, was another day of mass demonstrations—the new normality in free Burma. The strike that had begun early in August then spread across the country still held firm. Rangoon’s forty-odd daily and weekly newspapers were on sale, brimming with news, rumor and uninhibited polemic. At Rangoon University, students impatient with Dr. Maung Maung’s foot-dragging announced that they had formed an interim government—student nonsense intended to prod the president into action. No riots occurred, no beheadings were recorded that day; the capital, its government in limbo, continued to tick over. As Martin Morland recalled, “The city of Rangoon, and indeed the whole country, ran disturbingly smoothly without Big Brother.”19 Over at University Avenue the dozens of students and others who had taken up residence in Suu’s house continued to thrash out with “big sister” their vision of the nation’s future. It was not all glamorous: Nyo Ohn Myint recalled, “My first job was buying fried rice at the restaurant nearby. And then I was driving. And every day we had so many meetings . . .”20
The first sign that today would be any different came at 4 PM when a male voice suddenly broke in to the state radio’s afternoon music program. “In order to bring a timely halt to the deteriorating conditions on all sides all over the country,” the announcer said, “and in the interests of the people, the defense forces have assumed all power in the state with effect from today.”21
Martial law was back with a vengeance. With immediate effect, the man said, a curfew was in force between 8 PM and 4 AM. And during the hours of daylight the following activities were now banned: “gathering, walking, marching in procession, chanting slogans, delivering speeches, agitating and creating disturbances in the streets by five or more people, regardless of whether the act is with the intention of creating disturbances or of committing a crime or not.”
But over the past month the people had become used to defying the army, and they did so again. “It had started drizzling shortly after the brief radio announcement,” Bertil Lintner wrote, “and the late-afternoon sky was now heavy with dark rain clouds. Once again, throughout the city, people began felling trees and overturning street-side wooden stalls to make barricades as they had done in August. Their faces were downcast and the atmosphere electrifyingly tense . . . Electric wires were cut and street lights destroyed to hamper the movements of the troops everyone was expecting to appear at any minute.”22
Terry McCarthy, a correspondent for the Independent who had arrived from Bangkok the previous day on a fake tourist visa, wrote:
Walking through Rangoon was an eerie experience. Most roads were blocked at every intersection with trees, concrete pipes, wooden gates and blocks of concrete. Only a few of the major roads were still passable . . . At every barricade there were young men with an assortment of weapons, including wooden spears, knives, catapults that fire sharpened bicycle spokes, bottles of acid mixed with gravel, billhooks and Molotov cocktails.
The change in atmosphere in the space of a few hours was frightening. Earlier in the day, opposition leaders were talking buoyantly of an interim government being in reach . . . Intermediaries were regularly conveying messages between the opposition and the civilian government of Maung Maung, and students were jubilant as they marched through the streets, calling for democracy.23
Now all that was over. Bertil Lintner wrote:
Some people began banging pots and pans inside their houses in a desperate show of defiance. Others took to the streets with their crossbows, swords and jinglees [the sharpened bicycle spokes mentioned by McCarthy, fired from slingshots] ready for a fight with the army . . . Bands of thousands of enraged demonstrators . . . surged down the streets in the eerie evening twilight. Waving banners, flags and crude home-made weapons, they shouted at the tops of their voices “Sit-khway aso-ya phyok-cha-yay!” “Down with the dog government!”24
The thunderous rumbling, when it finally came, could be heard from afar: Late in the evening hundreds of army lorries, cranes mounted on trucks, armored personnel carriers and Bren carriers left the military cantonment in the north of the city and headed in convoy downtown. And this time there was to be no standoff, no games of chicken, no polite waiting for the crowds to disperse. In July Ne Win had issued his grim warning—“when the army fires, it shoots to hit”—and this time his troops were to obey it to the letter.
“Through loudspeakers mounted on the military vehicles, the people were ordered to remove the barricades,” Lintner reports. “If the order was not heeded, a machine gunner sprayed the nearest house with bullets . . . If the protesters themselves had not complied after the first salvo of machine-gun fire, cranes moved in and dismantled the flimsy road blocks.”25
Anybody out on the streets was in breach of martial law and fair game. “Any crowd of people in sight was mowed down methodically as the army trucks and Bren carriers rumbled down the streets in perfect formation, shooting in all directions,” Lintner records. “The dead who were left in the street were trucked away by the army during lulls in the shooting. Sporadic gunfire could be heard here and there in Rangoon throughout that night.”
Among the principal targets of the invasion force was Aung San Suu Kyi. For her and her colleagues in the ad hoc opposition movement, the military crackdown had come out of a clear blue sky. A spokesman for Tin Oo commented, “This is a coup d’état by another name. This ruins everything.”26 Suu, Tin Oo and the third member of their triumvirate, Aung Gyi, held an emergency meeting after they had digested the radio announcement, but offered no comment when it broke up. Late the same evening dozens of soldiers and an armored personnel carrier with a .275 machine gun mounted took up position outside Suu’s home in University Avenue. No one was allowed to enter or leave, and the phone line was cut.
“All through the night we were kept awake by the noise of machine gun fire,” Nyo Ohn Myint, one of the many trapped inside the grounds, remembered.27
Suu told the students and others in her compound to offer no violence to the army. “It is better that I should be taken off to prison,” she told them. “It is better that we should all be taken off to prison.”28 But Nyo Ohn Myint and the rest quietly ignored her admonitions, and like other activists prepared as best they could for the coming confrontation.
“The machine gun was pointed straight at the front gate,” he recalled. “We were very nervous because we only had slingshots to defend ourselves. There were two 14-gallon tanks of paraffin in the cellar, so we made Molotov cocktails with as many bottles as we could find. Our security inside the house depended on self-defense.”29 They made these preparations furtively, without informing Suu, knowing that she would disapprove if she found out. “She didn’t know about them,” Nyo Ohn Myint remembered. “She was kind of like a mother—when she saw one of the guards with a slingshot she said, don’t touch it again . . .”
But Nyo Ohn Myint and his comrades were desperately afraid for Suu. And the young lecturer conceived a cunning plan to save her from arrest or worse—if necessary against her own will.
“The compound next door was the property of Tass, the Soviet news agency,” he explained. “And the military was not in that spot. The Russian correspondent for Tass spoke to us over the wall, we conversed in broken English and I told him the regime is very dangerous, they want to kill her. So he offered to give her refuge because his house was the property of the Soviet Union, so it was extra-territorial.”
Nyo Ohn Myint raised the idea with Suu. “I requested her to leave if the army started to fire on us. But she said, no. You boys must do nothing to resist, I will talk to the army and I will get arrested. This is the best way to save our lives.
“So I said to my friends—she was very stubborn, we wanted to get her out—I said, let’s smack her on the head, knock her unconscious and slip her over the wall to the Tass agency house. Because our focus was on saving her life, and we didn’t know if the soldiers would shoot her or not.” In the event the siege, which lasted seventy-two hours, ended without violence on either side, and with Suu still conscious, and in her own home.
Despite the blood already shed, the defiant strikers returned to the streets on Monday morning, and the ruthless army response continued. Primed by months of unrest and bloody repression, the outside world was finally paying attention. “At least 100 people—and perhaps four times that number—were shot dead in the streets of Rangoon yesterday,” McCarthy reported in a story carried by the Independent on its front page, “as the city was plunged into terror a day after the Burmese army seized power . . . As the day wore on, with gunfire echoing all over the city, casualties started to crowd into Rangoon General Hospital. A witness said the scene was unreal. ‘There are bodies everywhere. Sometimes it is hard to know who is dead and who is alive.’”30
McCarthy went on:
Although most of the confrontations between the students and the military were brief, with the students retreating quickly when the soldiers opened fire, several pitched battles were reported . . . In one incident, reported by several sources, a crowd in the Tanwe district of Rangoon stormed an armed truck and, although suffering heavy casualties, eventually killed the seventeen soldiers and took their weapons. There are also reports, which have been confirmed by official Burmese radio, that two police stations in Rangoon were stormed by demonstrators . . .
As McCarthy’s list of crude, homemade weapons underlines, those demonstrators resolved to make a fight of it were pathetically ill-equipped; and most were armed with nothing more menacing than a portrait of Aung San or a peacock flag. But the soldiers behaved as if they were confronting the Vietcong. Bertil Lintner wrote:
No one in the large column that marched down past the old meeting spot near the City Hall and Maha Bandoola Park saw the machine-gun nests on the surrounding rooftops. As the marchers turned left, [they found themselves] entrapped between three fire points, the troops at the three rooftop positions opened fire simultaneously. No warning was given. Several demonstrators fell bleeding to the street.
Files of soldiers goose-stepped in perfect formation out from different side streets, followed by Bren carriers. At a barked word of command, the troops assumed the prone firing position, as if they were facing a heavily armed enemy . . .31
“The Burmese Red Cross was working furiously to gather the wounded and dead from the streets,” McCarthy reported. “After one incident in the east of Rangoon, they even asked a Western embassy to send them vehicles to transport the wounded to hospital. ‘They have been showing tremendous courage,’ a diplomat said.”32
It is hard to find the correct word to describe what happened on September 18th. It is usually called a coup d’état, but as one disgusted Western diplomat responded, “What coup d’état? The same people are in charge!” Yet it was far more than just another crackdown: There was none of the hesitation displayed by the army in its previous attacks on demonstrators. Nor were there any more indications of wavering loyalties like those that had appeared during the preceding weeks. The troops took up position and fired their guns the way troops are supposed to, without emotion, like well-programmed automatons.
The difference between the army attacks of August 8th and those of September 18th and 19th was like the difference between the first approximate firing of an artillery round and the second, third and fourth firing, when the gunner has recalibrated his sights. In the little town of Phekhon, Pascal Khoo Thwe, practicing his oratorical skills as one of the leaders of the democrats, saw what was happening at the time. During the public meetings, he said, “police mingled with the crowds to observe us, having prudently abandoned their uniforms. We ought to have realized that they were playing their traditional game of letting the leaders surface so that they could be picked off later . . .”33
Now the army began putting all the intelligence it had gathered to good use—and thousands of activists, fearing what was to come, fled to the border areas to avoid being picked up or killed. Aung Myint was one who sought refuge in the Karen-held areas on the Thai border. “We fled,” he said, “because we realized that this time it was different; not a random massacre as in August. It was meticulously planned and the targets well selected. Because everything had been out in the open during the August–September demonstrations, all the leading activists were known—and the army were looking for us specifically.”34 Now many of those who had stood on improvised stages and urged their fellow students to struggle for democracy turned their backs on all that. Despairing of the nonviolent path, they threw themselves on the mercy of the ethnic armies that had been fighting the Burmese state for years, some of them since before independence. They asked for food, training and guns, and pledged to fight alongside them.
*
By Tuesday night the fight was over; the streets were clear of protesters, the corpses had been carted off, the blood hosed away, might had prevailed again. Ordinary Burmese who wanted to know what had happened were once again thrown back on foreign radio reports: One of the first consequences of the crackdown was the forcible closure of all Burma’s newspapers, including the increasingly insubordinate regime mouthpiece the Working People’s Daily, which only returned to the news-stands, duly castrated, weeks later. But anyone listening to the BBC would have discovered that, since the army takeover, perhaps one thousand people had been killed in Rangoon alone. It was probably an underestimate. Michael Charney wrote, “Suppression associated with the coup led to between 8,000 and 10,000 deaths.”35 It was the worst massacre of civilians in Burma’s blood-soaked modern history, and one of the worst anywhere in the world in the postwar era.
This was how the Ne Win regime chose to greet the emergence of Aung San Suu Kyi as a rival for power; it was her baptism of fire. How did the “Oxford housewife” react?
Terry McCarthy spent many hours with Suu in the immediate aftermath of the crackdown and in the days that followed. “I went up there with a couple of other journalists and we had a long chat in her living room looking over the lake,” he remembered. “Michael [Aris] was there as well—the two boys had been sent back to school in England some weeks before. I found her so compelling that I went back to her house almost every day after that.
“While we were there the first time the shooting started up—the Burmese army use very large caliber guns, they made a lot of noise and it was clear they weren’t shooting at birds. But Suu didn’t flinch at all. She was incredibly composed.”36
At that first meeting she told the Irish journalist that she had been expecting to return to Britain in the autumn, but that the events of the past few months had changed her mind: Now she expected to stay in Burma, “but I would prefer not to remain in politics if I can avoid it.”37 Yet the next moment she acknowledged the impossibility of that. “You can’t pick up something and then drop it,” she said. “You have to see it through. I realized that after the August shootings.
“. . . It’s very different from living in academia in Oxford,” she conceded, a touch ruefully. “We called someone vicious in a review for the Times Literary Supplement. We didn’t know what vicious was.”
*
The events of September 18th were preceded by the most savage purge of the Burmese government since 1962. On the morning of that day President Maung Maung had been summoned to Ne Win’s home and sacked. At the same time, all administrative organs of the state, from the State Council and Council of Ministers at the top down to local authorities throughout the country, were abolished or suspended. They were replaced, not by the neutral, interim administration the people wanted but by the army officers who had been in charge until replaced by a simulacrum of civilian rule in the mid-seventies. The masks of socialism and parliament discarded, the army now confronted the population with its naked power.
Maung Maung’s replacement was General Saw Maung, the army’s chief of staff, quite as much a creature of Ne Win as the two presidents he had succeeded. When the bodies of the dead had all been burned and the blood hosed from the streets, he took to the airwaves and told the nation that the army had merely been doing its duty—and when that duty was complete, the political evolution of the nation would resume.
The army’s immediate job, he said, was to restore law and order and rebuild the state’s administrative machinery. Then it would be the responsibility of corporations, cooperatives and “private concerns” to “alleviate the food, clothing and shelter needs of the people.” Once these jobs were done, multiparty elections would be held as promised and the Military Council would not interfere with the Election Commission in any way. “We do not wish to cling to state power long,” he insisted. On the contrary, he spoke of “handing over power to the government which emerges after the free and fair general elections.” “I am laying the path for the next government,” he said, and “I will lay flowers in the path of the next government.”38
But the Burmese were not fooled: Ne Win, they decided, was merely repeating himself through Saw Maung. “It’s going back to the 1962 formula,” a man near the Sule pagoda in central Rangoon told McCarthy. “Nothing different.”39 After the intense excitement of the past six weeks, a couple of days of hyper-violence had restored the status quo ante. Number One was back on top.
“During the day he carries a revolver,” Terry McCarthy wrote of Ne Win, “and sleeps with a submachine gun on the pillow beside him . . . He is moody and erratic, given to fits of anger followed by periods of weeping. He rarely leaves his compound in Rangoon, issuing orders to the military by radio-telephone. His staff are terrified of him. Just as Burma has been cut off from the outside world, so he is cut off from his own people.”40 A former aide told McCarthy: “He thinks killing is routine, in order for reason to prevail—but not our reason, his reason.” Another former adviser compared him to a viper. “He is not even like a cobra or a rattlesnake,” he said. “They give a warning before they strike.”
But despite the similarity of the general repression, several things were starkly different from the Ne Win coup of 1962. For one thing, that first coup was practically bloodless. For another, Ne Win was now seventy-seven, and on record as saying that he wanted to retire. His proxy, General Saw Maung, had endorsed the commitment of the Maung Maung government to multiparty elections, to be held within three months, even while his troops were murdering civilians in the streets.
If paying lip service to that commitment was seen as a way to buy off the outside world, it failed utterly: On September 23rd the United States announced it was cutting off all aid in protest at the massacres. Europe and even Japan, long the junta’s most reliable supporter, were soon to follow America’s cue. But the commitment to elections was also a perverse way to justify the coup: For elections to be held, first order must be restored, which was why the army was obliged to intervene—as the midwives of democracy! Hence the name that the soldiers gave themselves within less than a week of the massacre: the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC—forever after to be compared to SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency in the James Bond films.
The regime’s pledge to hold elections was bizarre. But amid the terror, the bloodshed, the exodus of students, the general despair, it provided a rare chink of light: There could be a way forward, despite it all. Perhaps that chink could best be appreciated by someone who had spent nearly half her life in England, a country where the words “Glorious Revolution” refer to an event, exactly three hundred years before, in which no lives were lost and which set British democracy on such a big, fat keel that it has been gliding forward ever since.41
So it was on Saturday, September 24, 1988, as SLORC was rising from the ashes of the BSPP, and before Ne Win could change his mind, that Aung San Suu Kyi and her allies announced that they were forming a political party.
