AMONG the hundreds of thousands who witnessed Aung San Suu Kyi’s first major speech at the Shwedagon pagoda was a petite forty-one-year-old woman with bright-red lipstick and a piercing gaze called Ma Thanegi. Recalling the day, she wrote:
August 26, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi makes her first mass public appearance outside the Shwedagon Pagoda, West entrance. Her name is magic: Because she is General Aung San’s daughter, there was no one out in the streets who was not curious to see her. The morning was wet and windy, with the field in front of the Western entrance rapidly turning to a mud bath, as I sat with my friends on plastic sheets. The grass had just been cut and we saw small frogs hopping around in panic under our feet. She was three hours late. People who came with her crowded onto the stage behind and around her “to protect her”; but mostly because they wanted to be seen by her side . . .
For Ma Thanegi, who is descended from courtiers in the Mandalay palace and has become one of Burma’s best writers in English, it was the start of an intense involvement in the democracy movement.
“Due to a bad sound system we could hear nothing,” she wrote of that day. “But even if they could not hear, people instantly took her into their hearts without question, for she was fair-skinned, she was beautiful, she was articulate, and her eyes flashed as she spoke. Above all, she was our General’s daughter . . . We were glad to have a symbol, a leading light, a presence bringing hopes and dreams that her father did not have the chance to fulfill . . .”
Before becoming a writer, Ma Thanegi devoted most of her energy to painting. Enthused by Suu’s speech, she and her fellow painters began turning out wall posters supporting the democracy movement. When she took samples to show Suu she was quickly recruited to her staff of volunteers.
“About two days after her Shwedagon speech I went to see Daw Suu with my colleagues in the painters’ organization, to give her some posters we had produced,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir of those days. “She discovered that I could speak English, so soon after this first meeting she asked me to join her personal office staff, as I would be useful in dealing with the foreign media people.”
Ma Thanegi began spending long hours at Suu’s house, as the new opposition party slowly and chaotically took shape in rooms adjoining the improvised sickbay where Suu’s mother, Daw Khin Kyi, still gravely ill, spent her days in bed. She recalled precisely the layout of the house and the people who were then occupying it:
As one entered there was a staircase going upstairs on the left side of the lobby. A round marble-topped table stood in the middle of this entrance. On the left there was a narrow, closed-in veranda, off which was Suu’s office, which had once been the dining room. In fact she used the circular dining table with the Lazy Susan as her desk and as a conference table. Beyond were the bathroom, the kitchen and a store room.
To the right of this office was a small room, and beyond it the larger one where Daw Khin Kyi lay in bed. A back corridor connected this room to the kitchen as well. There was a back door and back stairs, rarely used and fallen into decay.
On the other side of the lobby was the parlor that Daw Khin Kyi kept for her visitors, with sofas, tea tables and a piano. This room, which opened onto the side veranda through French windows and which also opened onto the sick room, was kept locked.
I would arrive at the office around 8 AM and I stayed until 5:30 PM.
But the general strike and the uprising meant that commuting was often a challenge. “By now, some of the roads were blocked with fallen trees so no buses were running and few cars were on the road. Some cars thought to belong to the Military Intelligence had been burned. My house was a few miles away. Sometimes I came on foot.
“At the start two younger women artists in our group helped with the files but both left, one for the US and the other to marry, and I was left very short-handed.”
By this time Suu had a small but committed and semipermanent staff. There was an assistant called Ko Myint Swe who paid the bills, ran errands and tracked down books for Suu. Formerly a librarian at Rangoon University, he was “passionate about books,” Ma Thanegi recalled.1 His wife Daw Nwe, a poet, would sometimes stay with him; later the two of them would run the party’s public relations section from a shed at the end of the garden. When Suu began making frequent public appearances, her personal assistant Ko Myint Swe would be close at hand with emergency provisions.
The two volunteers with whom Ma Thanegi worked most closely were two brothers, “almost like family to Suu,” who had moved into the house and now slept in the main downstairs room. “They were the sons of an ex-army officer called U Min Lwin,” she wrote.
We got along extremely well.
Ko Maw, the elder, was short and wore thick glasses, and talked far too much in a fierce and angry voice. Under his very grouchy exterior he had the kindest of hearts. The younger, Ko Aung, was tall and never spoke unless he was in a good mood. His hooded eyes roved constantly and missed nothing. As time went on, Ko Aung and I learned to work well as a team in any situation—a glance was all we needed to inform each other about something. We relied on each other to get things done—we soon found out that a number of the volunteers preferred the reflected glory of being near Suu to doing any real work. Being extremely bright and street smart, and totally unemotional, Ko Aung was indispensable.
As time went on, more and more shops and offices were shut down by strike action. In the absence of public transport the city became harder to negotiate, with the result that 54 University Avenue at times became a sort of island. “Sometimes tensions would run high in the city and none of us would be able to leave the house for days on end,” Ma Thanegi recalled.
We heard stories about the beheadings, and people brought us newspapers with gory photos of heads displayed on spikes.
One time, when every shop in the city was closed, Suu remarked that she was getting tired of seeing the long hair on everyone. I knew how to cut hair, so I was delegated to be in-house barber. Ko Aung refused to let me touch his shoulder length hair, but the others, including Dr. Aris and Ko Myint Swe, had to suffer the indignity of hair shorn so short that, as Suu remarked afterwards, they looked like convicts.
Ma Thanegi was in the house on the Sunday when military rule announced its return with a bloodbath.
Late in the morning of September 18th, Ko Maw came into the house looking worried. It was a Sunday, so there were no meetings or visitors. “Something’s going on,” he said. “They are broadcasting military songs nonstop on the radio.”
Ko Aung went to fetch a radio which he placed on Ma Suu’s round table—the one with the Lazy Susan in the middle—and left it turned on. I made several calls but could not confirm anything, but we all suspected the army was moving in. Sure enough, at 4 PM we heard the announcement that the army was taking over to control the anarchy and that no one was to march in the streets. A curfew was imposed from 8 PM to 4 am. Government employees were told to report back to work or face dismissal.
Despite the ban on marching, some groups marched out the next day; many were shot and killed. The corpses were quickly taken away and the streets washed of blood.
Ma Thanegi stayed home during the days of shooting and bloodshed when University Avenue was under siege. When calm returned to the streets and she went back to work she found the house in an uproar over how to react to General Saw Maung’s promise of multiparty elections.
“There was great excitement in the office over whether we should form a political party. One evening, when there were no other visitors in the house and we were alone, Suu came to me as I was bent over my work to ask if I would want to be involved in party politics. She said she was thinking of getting young people like Ko Myint Swe more involved, by bringing them onto the Central Committee.”
Ma Thanegi treated Suu’s approach warily: She had played no part in the democracy movement before, and was temperamentally averse to joining organizations. In the end she chose to remain at arm’s length from the party, but she was to become intimately involved with Suu as her personal assistant over the coming months as the party came from nowhere to become the most significant political force in the country.
Suu on August 17, 1995, with her friend and assistant, Ma Thanegi. Despite the broad smiles, the friendship would soon end in bitterness.
After many meetings and much discussion, the founding triumvirate, Aung Gyi, Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo—Aung-Suu-Tin as they were known for short—announced the creation of the National United Front for Democracy, changed soon afterwards to the National League for Democracy (NLD), the name it retains today. The name change became necessary in late September when the former ruling party, the Burma Socialist Program Party, re-branded itself the National Unity Party—a name too similar for comfort. “All effort is now being put to establish the National League for Democracy, of which Suu is Secretary General,” Michael wrote home on September 30th. “There are still troops and checkpoints in all the streets, but they have stopped indiscriminate shooting it seems. Not a word about negotiations with the opposition . . . After the Malaysian [ambassador] had left, Suu went out to register her party with the Election Commission.”2
The party’s flag was red, with a white star and a stylized golden peacock, head lowered and fan spread—the “fighting peacock.” Burmese armies had fought under a flag showing a peacock with a fully opened fan throughout the Konbaung Dynasty, which began in 1700. In the days of the monarchy, “the throne was painted over with representations of the peacock and the hare,” according to George Scott, writing under the nom de plume Shway Yoe in his book The Burman, His Life and Notions, first published in 1882, “typifying the descent of the king from the solar and lunar races.”3 In the 1930s the peacock also became the emblem of Burma’s militant students, who included Suu’s father Aung San: He was editor of the student magazine Oway, which is the Burmese word for the peacock’s harsh cry. Rejecting the bellicose suggestion of the name, Suu preferred the party’s emblematic bird to be known as “the dancing peacock.”
Suu became general secretary of the new party, Aung Gyi, the retired general, was chairman and Tin Oo vice-chairman. Members of the Central Executive Committee included Win Tin, the turbulent journalist, Kyi Maung, the chubby ex-army officer, and Daw Myint Myint Khin, a woman barrister who was head of the Rangoon Bar Association.
“In addition to Suu, three of them were civilians,” Ma Thanegi recalled. “The others were ex-military men, derisively known to the intelligentsia in the party as baung-bi chut or ‘men-out-of-trousers,’ referring to the fact that they had switched back from army uniform trousers to longyis.
“There was mistrust between the two sides from the beginning,” she went on. Yet in those grim days of late September there was also great determination and great hope: hope founded on the promise of democratic elections held out by the new generalissimo, and on the “magic name” of Aung San Suu Kyi. Within less than a year almost all those men and women would be silenced, either under house arrest or in jail.
*
What did the very different people now banded together under Suu’s name hope to achieve?
Announcing the formation of the party, Aung-Suu-Tin stated that “the basic objective of this organization is to achieve a genuinely democratic government” for which purpose the party was prepared to take part in the elections announced by Saw Maung. A few days earlier, in an article published in the Independent, Suu had written, “I am working . . . to achieve the kind of democratic system under which the people of Burma can enjoy human rights to the full. . . . Every country and people must search for a political and economic solution tailored to their unique situation.”4
So what was Burma’s “unique situation,” and how might democracy, a concept invented and refined in the West, be tailored to fit it?
The modernization of Burma was a question over which Suu had been wrestling for years, long before she was drawn into the maelstrom in the summer of 1988.
As she told the crowd at the Shwedagon, towards the end of his short life her father made clear that he believed Burma should become a democracy. With the downfall of the Axis powers, fascist dictatorships went out of fashion. The other ideological model, communism, had won a convert in Aung San’s uncle Than Tun, who became head of the Burmese Communist Party. But the pitilessly materialistic perspective of Marxism held few charms for the deeply religious Burmese, even after the Chinese over the border turned Maoist. And on attaining independence in 1948, a democracy was what Burma became, and remained until the army takeover.
But what did the word “democracy” mean in the Burmese context?
Inherent in the term as used in the West is the concept of the “loyal opposition.” Political parties compete for the votes of the people, which translates into power. The losers in the election remain loyal to the state while putting up steadfast but peaceable opposition to the actions of the elected government in parliament.
Readers will excuse this re-statement of the basic principles of parliamentary democracy because in Burma, as in many other countries outside Western Europe, they originally appeared highly exotic.
Until 1948 Burma had had no experience of democracy or anything like it. The highly autocratic and capricious rule of the Burmese monarchy had been replaced by the diktats of the British in Calcutta, enforced by the gun. The British were eventually supplanted by the Japanese who, despite their sweet words about a “co-prosperity sphere,” proved to be every bit as dictatorial as all the others who had ruled the country.
And there was a specific problem with the concept of “opposition.” In 1874, King Thibaw’s predecessor, King Mindon, on being informed that William Gladstone’s Whigs had lost the general election in Britain, remarked, “Then poor Ga-la-sa-tong [Gladstone] is in prison I suppose. I am sorry for him. I don’t think he was a bad fellow.”5 “It never occurred to [Mindon],” wrote Burma scholar Gustaaf Houtman, “that, when a political opposition party loses the elections, it might not end up in prison. Indeed, political opposition, unless it is sufficiently strong to extort respect, would appear to necessarily imply exile, imprisonment or death.”
As Suu herself observed, the fine social achievements of Burmese Buddhism had tended to close the minds of her co-nationals to the possibility that, in the political sphere, the rest of the world might have anything useful to teach them. “A sound social system,” she had written, “can go hand in hand with political immaturity.” Burma owes most features of its social system to its experience, stretching back over a millennium, of Theravada Buddhism. There is no room for a caste system in Buddhism: In striking contrast to Hindu practice, the notion that all men are born equal is not only preached but to a large degree practiced. The Burmese had a monarch who ruled over them more or less capriciously, guided and advised by Brahmin astrologers and Buddhist monks, and a chasm of wealth and privilege separated the palace from the people. But the people were not in a state of misery: All Burman children who were Buddhists—which until the British intrusion meant effectively everybody—went to monastery schools where they learned to read and write, and for many centuries Burma had been one of the most literate countries in the world.
It was also infused with religious teaching to an unusual degree: All Burmese boys were inducted into the sangha in early childhood, and for several weeks or months or longer if they chose they lived as monks alongside the adult ones, setting out each morning to collect food donated by local villagers, learning to meditate and read and recite the sutras and perform the many different complicated ceremonies of the temple.
Traditional Burmese society had plenty of faults and problems: People of non-Burman nationality were discriminated against and even enslaved, banditry was common even in the heartland, and it was rigidly hierarchical. But within those parameters there was, for the Burman majority, a broad measure of equality, and the Five Precepts of Buddhism—not to take life of any sort, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to lie, and not to take intoxicants—were generally observed. And in a country blessed like Burma with fertile soil and plenty of sun and rain, the result for the Burman peasant was simplicity, stability and a general absence of want. George Scott wrote in The Burman:
The Burman is the most calm and contented of mortals. He does not want to grow rich. When he does make a large sum of money, he spends it all on some pious work, and rejoices in the fact that this will meet with its reward in his next existence . . . If any one has escaped the curse of Adam it is the Burman . . . When his patch of paddy land has been reaped, his only concern is how to pass the time, and that is no very difficult matter, where he has plenty of cheroots and betel-nut . . . And so an uneventful life passes away: the greatest ambition to see the village boat successful at the Thadingyut races, and the village champion cock or buffalo triumphant over all others . . .6
The downside of the Burman’s easygoing contentment, as Suu had pointed out, was a pervasive lack of intellectual ambition. “Traditional Burmese education did not encourage speculation,” she wrote, because Burmese were convinced that “Buddhism represents the perfected philosophy. It therefore follows that there was no need either to try to develop it further or to consider other philosophies.”7
Far away from the peasant in the fields, in the almost unimaginable court, beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, ruled the king, the “Lord of the Celestial Elephant,” who if not the son of the previous king—if that king had died without issue—was identified by soothsayers much in the way that child reincarnations of the great lamas of Tibet are identified. “The king,” Scott tells us, “emphatically rules by what is called in the Western kingdoms the right divine.”8 But to ensure that right was not infringed upon often required drastic measures: Any potential rivals to power—any latent opposition, to use the language of democracy—had to be got rid of in the most decisive manner.
When Burma’s last king, Thibaw, came to the throne, he was persuaded by his mother and consort that “he would never be safe till the princes were put out of the way,” Scott writes. “Seventy of the royal blood, men, women, and children, were murdered in the next three days, and buried within the palace, in a long trench dug for the purpose. The eldest prince . . . died shrieking for mercy at the hands of his own slaves, whom he had often tortured . . . The poor old regent of Pegu . . . had his nostrils and gullet crammed with gunpowder, and was thus blown up.”
The massacre of Thibaw’s rivals was widely reported in foreign newspapers and its bestiality helped the British build the case for ending the Burmese monarchy and imposing their rule on the whole country. But from the Burmese point of view, the clearing away by a new monarch of rivals to the crown was a familiar and prudent custom. “Many Burmans defend it warmly,” Scott pointed out, “on the plea that it secured the peace of the country.” Otherwise there would always be the risk of those snubbed by the soothsayers staging a rebellion when they felt strong enough to do so.
Burma’s royal massacres were startling on account of their scale, but nowhere in the world does a king cut a deal with pretenders to his crown; in traditional monarchical systems, the only place for a royal rival is in exile or under the ground. Burma’s tragedy, one which Suu was acutely aware of before she went home, was that history had given the country no opportunity to discover that there were ways in which power could be both asserted and shared.
On the far side of Burma’s northwestern border lies the world’s largest democracy. India was no less feudal and monarchical than Burma when the British marched in to usurp its history, but it emerged from centuries of colonial subjection with a democratic system that has survived for more than sixty years. Why was India able to sustain such a system while Burma, despite being encumbered with far fewer social problems than India and with a higher standard of living and rate of literacy, relapsed into tyranny after a mere decade of democratic experiment?
It was a question which Suu had long pondered, and the result was the most mature piece of writing of hers yet to see the light of day: an essay entitled “Intellectual Life in India and Burma under Colonialism,” written while she and Michael were in Shimla in 1986.
Democracy was able to sink roots in India, she argued, because the British had deliberately set out to create an intellectual elite educated in English to run their Indian administration. This elite was able to throw off the restrictions of traditional vernacular education and open themselves to international influences, while remaining in touch with their own traditions. The result was people like Gandhi. “Gandhi was of a practical turn of mind that looked for ideas to suit the needs of situations,” she wrote. “In spite of his deeply ingrained Hinduism, Gandhi’s intellectual flexibility made him accept those elements of western thought which fitted into the ethical and social scheme he considered desirable.”9
Burma was colonized more than two centuries after Bengal, and when the British cast around for a native elite to help them administer the colony, the Burmans were both outnumbered and outclassed linguistically by the Indians and Chinese to whom the British had opened Burma’s door—“peoples,” as Suu pointed out, “so much more experienced in dealing with westerners and their institutions.”
Then much later, when the British tried to create the University of Rangoon by amalgamating two existing colleges, raising the academic standard and making them residential, they were met by violent protests: “There was . . . in the Burmese mentality,” writes Suu, “an ingrained resistance to elitism: . . . education of a national character should be made available to as broad a section of the population as possible.” But this salutary motive meant that it was very difficult for Burmese equivalents of the giants of colonial India—people like Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Gandhi and Nehru, all members of the English-speaking elite—to emerge.
The intense frustration of this failure radiates from an article written by Aung San in the 1930s while still a student. “We are fully prepared to follow men who are able and willing to be leaders like Mahatma Gandhi,” he wrote. “. . . Let anybody appear who can be like such a leader, who dares to be like such a leader. We are waiting.”10
It was of course Aung San himself who emerged to lead. But while he was able to lead his country to the threshold of independence, he could not transform its political culture: That was a task beyond the capacity of a single individual, however charismatic, or of a single generation. It was a transformation that, at independence, remained unfulfilled.
The party Aung San headed at his death, and which constituted Burma’s first independent government in 1948, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), was not recognizably a party in the Western sense. Rather it was “a loose confederation of political parties and local influential leaders and strong men,” according to the American Burma expert David Steinberg. “Its membership ran the gamut of left to left-center positions that were socialist to some degree. More important, the AFPFL included a broad array of individuals reflecting the essential personalization of power; each leader had a power base and his own entourage, and sometimes armed supporters.”11 This “personalization of power,” the absence of an ideological coherence that could hold the party together, led to the League eventually splitting into two opposed camps based not on policies but on personalities—which in turn allowed the army to take its first bite of power, four years before the final takeover.
Burma had not digested the concept of a loyal opposition, or of power that could be shared or delegated through society’s different strata. As in many other traditional societies, writes Steinberg, “power was conceived as finite.” To share power, “from center to periphery, between leaders, etc,” was to lose power: It was a zero-sum game. “Loyalty becomes the prime necessity, resulting in entourages and a series of patron–client relationships. Those outside of this core group may therefore be considered potential adversaries—a ‘loyal opposition’ thus becomes an oxymoron.”
Gustaaf Houtman cites three reasons why the concept of “opposition” has failed to gain any traction in Burma. First, “the centralization of power lying with a king or general” means that “the regime views opposition with suspicion and is unwilling, perhaps even unable, to allocate it a place in its political scheme.” Secondly, “expressions of opposition are . . . equated with confrontation, and therefore armed force.” And thirdly, “opposition is seen as threatening to ‘harmony’ and ‘national unity.’ Indeed, the overarching emphasis on national unity means that the idea of opposition is literally equated with the ‘destruction of unity.’”12
In her speech at the Shwedagon, Suu had repeatedly invoked the need for “unity,” as her father had done. Yet from the perspective of Ne Win and his cronies, Suu and her new party embodied a fearful assault on the mystical concept of national unity, and a mortal challenge to their rule—all the more menacing because it was launched in the name of the very man, Aung San, whose achievements were the basis of their own claims to legitimacy.
“In Burma,” writes Houtman, “those who declare themselves opponents to the regime are either extremely courageous or extremely foolish—there is little in between.”13 As Aung San Suu Kyi set out to carry word of her new party and its democratic promise to the corners of the country, she would soon discover exactly how courageous she and her colleagues would need to be.
*
If Saw Maung’s promise of elections within three months—before the end of 1988—was to be fulfilled, the NLD had no time to waste. Yet almost at once it was embroiled in the factionalism that has been the besetting sin of Burmese politics since the time of Aung San. In this case it was an outbreak of hostilities between the baung-bi chut, the former military men, and the intelligentsia. Almost inevitably it developed into a fight between right and left.
Brigadier General Aung Gyi was the odd man out in the party’s leadership. Formerly a close ally of Ne Win and his subordinate in the 4th Burmese Rifles—the regiment that provided all the military elite throughout the Ne Win years—in 1988 he had been the first figure from the military establishment to attack Ne Win’s policies openly. He had been purged from the junta twenty-five years before, in 1963—yet he was unblushingly open about his continued affection for the army, and careful to avoid attacking his old boss in person. In the speech he made at the Shwedagon the day before Suu made hers, he urged his audience to heed the words of the new, “moderate” president, Maung Maung. Shortly before the crackdown of September 18th he had “guaranteed” that there would be no army coup, and vowed to commit suicide if he was wrong. It was rumored that he remained on close terms with senior figures in SLORC.
He was in other words a very ambiguous figure to lead the nation’s most promising opposition party, and when the rift at the top became open, Suu acknowledged that she had made a mistake in bringing him on board. “I went wrong,” she told U Win Khet, one of her close assistants, privately, “but not without a reason. I held a personal grudge against Aung Gyi, but when I started to work for my country I decided to set personal grudges aside.”14
The general and Suu eventually parted company, but not before Aung Gyi had caused serious trouble to the fledgling party. He had left Rangoon in late September or early October, ostensibly for a “holiday in Maymyo,” the British-built hill station northeast of Mandalay. “But on his way there he stopped at every town in between,” Ma Thanegi wrote, “held meetings and announced that anyone contributing 30,000 kyats to the National League for Democracy would become a candidate in the election.”15
This idea, which would have brought in useful funds at the cost of branding the party as an association of the (relatively) rich, would have been anathema to Suu and the rest of the party’s leadership. But they only found out about it weeks later, when Suu had to clear up the mess in his wake.
Life in Burma was returning to a sort of blighted normality by the end of October as Suu and her closest colleagues, including Ma Thanegi, set off up-country, defying martial law to hold the first mass political meetings of Suu’s career. The general strike which had begun on August 8th collapsed on October 3rd, workers returning to their posts under threat of mass dismissal. Two weeks later Rangoon’s banks reopened for the first time since the start of the uprising. SLORC appealed to the 10,000-odd students who had fled to border areas to return, opening reception camps in border areas under government control and promising to treat them not as insurgents but only as “misguided youth”—sending them home to their parents—if they surrendered by November 18th. In an indication of the regime’s credibility problem, very few took up the offer, and there were reports that some of those who did were imprisoned, tortured and even executed.
Suu set off from University Avenue with her team on October 30th in a convoy of cars. She traveled in a cream-colored Japanese Saloon owned and driven by Myo Thein, her preferred driver, nicknamed “Tiger.” On either side of her in the back were two of the young men with whom Ma Thanegi shared her office duties, Ko Aung and Ko Myint Swe. In the shoulder bag carried by Ko Myint Swe—which to a Burmese identified him as the literary man he was when off duty—were Suu’s water bottle, headache pills, smelling salts and tissues, plus a few sweets in case her voice threatened to give out.
It was the first time an opposition political party had set off on the campaign trail in more than a generation, and in this first foray they visited the four states of Magwé, Bago, Sagaing, and Mandalay in the flat and hot Burmese heartland north of Rangoon, meeting the staff of the NLD branch offices which had already begun springing up across the country. But everywhere they went Suu was obliged to correct the picture Aung Gyi had left behind when he had visited a few weeks before.
“At every single rally and meeting Suu had to explain and refute U Aung Gyi’s announcement,” Ma Thanegi recalled. “By the time we got to the town of Shwebo she was exhausted about it, saying that she had been able to do no campaigning work for the party because her whole time was occupied explaining that Aung Gyi’s announcement, inviting contributions in return for becoming the party’s candidate, was without foundation. Many people were angry about it.”
There were other problems, too. Political campaigning was a phenomenon with which people had no familiarity, but the personality cult of Suu had already spread across the country. “At some places, meetings took too long and we got behind schedule because people at NLD offices insisted on reading out long poems or speeches,” she wrote. “This was the same all over the country. Then there were the people who wanted to have their photos taken with Suu, or while they handed bouquets to her, and at the same time not caring if the stalks of the flowers were poking in her face. Others insisted on spraying her with cheap perfume, sometimes spraying it right in her face. Aung Aung”—one of Suu’s young student bodyguards—“and I [Ma Thanegi] had to be very rough with these people.” Some of the many people who wanted to be seen with Suu would crowd onto the stage with her, alongside her aides and bodyguards.
For a generation the only form of political activity in the country had been that provided by the BSPP; lacking any other role models, the self-appointed leaders of the freshly sprung League branches emulated the former ruling party, Ma Thanegi remembered. “If a township or village had set up a branch of the NLD, its leaders, chairman, secretary and so on, chosen among themselves, welcomed us in expensive style, dressed in silk gaung baungs (a sort of turban) and silk longyis, their wives wearing silks and long scarves, all of them looking exactly like apparatchiks of the BSPP, and with the same haughty look on their faces.”
But despite all the problems and misunderstandings, it was a brilliant start for the new party. Everywhere they went, Suu and her colleagues drew large, enthusiastic crowds. Party branch offices had sprung up in all the major towns, many of them spontaneously, with no input from Rangoon. There was no doubting the popular desire for change, and Suu had rapidly established herself as the preeminent focus and symbol of it. And although they were trailed everywhere by plainclothes police and agents of Military Intelligence, no one tried to stop their meetings from taking place. On October 26th a small student protest at the Shwedagon was quickly broken up by troops; ten days later an attempted demonstration by monks in the city was also dispersed. But the magic of Suu’s name, combined with the fact that she was always careful to emphasize that her opposition to the regime was strictly nonviolent, appeared to have a mesmerizing effect on her adversaries. So far, at least, they let her get on with it.
Perhaps they were banking on her giving up and going home to Oxford and her family before too long; perhaps they were hoping that the growing throng of parties which had signed up for the election, who would eventually number 235, would drown out her voice and stifle her influence. And then there was the Aung Gyi factor apparently working in their favor.
Ever since independence, communism had been the great bogey of Burmese politics. In 1948 the Communist Party of Burma, headed by Suu’s uncle Thakin Than Tun, her mother’s brother-in-law, had refused to cooperate with prime minister Nu’s democratically elected government and had resorted to armed struggle, seizing a large area in the Pegu Mountains northeast of Rangoon and forming an alliance with Chinese communists on the northeast frontier. When Norman Lewis traveled through the country in 1950, large areas were out of bounds because of insurrectionary activity by communists.
Neither in her writings before returning to Burma nor in her political speeches inside the country had Suu given any indication of communist sympathies. But Ne Win loyalists had already condemned the 1988 uprising as a communist plot, and Suu’s family connection to the Communist Party, and the presence in the NLD’s Central Executive Committee of known left-wing figures such as the lawyer Daw Myint Myint Khin, who had belonged to a Marxist study group in the 1950s, made the insinuation an easy one to make. And the state media, and Khin Nyunt, the bespectacled chief of Military Intelligence, an increasingly influential figure in the junta, made it frequently and boldly. Aung San Suu Kyi was “surrounded by communists” it was claimed; she was “going the same way as her uncle’s Burma Communist Party.”16
Attacks like that could be shrugged off; they were routine, and often laughable—as when Khin Nyunt claimed that the communists had first tried to promote Suu’s mother Daw Khin Kyi as the leader of the 1988 uprising, overlooking the fact that the lady in question had been in a hospital bed and close to death since March.
What was far more worrying was when, in early December, Aung Gyi himself started to repeat the allegations: In perfect harmony, both Military Intelligence and the retired, supposedly anti-junta general claimed that eight members of the party’s thirty-three-strong Central Committee were communists. Was it possible that Aung Gyi was still in cahoots with Ne Win? Could he be scheming with Number One to weaken or split the new party, or even destroy it?
If he had restricted himself to raising the alarm about reds under the bed, Aung Gyi might have damaged the party severely. But when he began publicly downplaying the importance of Suu in the party, he went too far, fatally underestimating his colleague and the support she enjoyed. At a dramatic meeting of the committee on December 3, 1988, his leadership was put to the vote. He lost, and had no alternative but to step down, taking some of the other baung-bi chut with him out of the party. Fortunately, however, several of the most capable ex-army men on the committee, including Tin Oo and Kyi Maung, stuck with Suu and the civilian intelligentsia, and were to be crucial to the party’s later success. Tin Oo, the former Minister of Defense, replaced Aung Gyi as chairman.
*
Her stroke had precipitated her daughter’s return home and thereby changed the country’s destiny; for months now she had lain semi-paralyzed in her room on the ground floor of 54 University Avenue as a great popular movement came into being around her. Then on December 27th, at the age of seventy-six, Suu’s mother, Daw Khin Kyi, finally died, and her strongest remaining link to her father was broken.
If she had died six or seven months earlier, before Suu’s Shwedagon speech and all that stemmed from that, her death would have had a very different resonance. It would have been a final, punctuating event in Suu’s life: The painful duty that had torn Suu so brusquely away from her family would have been concluded and, however conflicted her feelings about the turmoil in Burma, there would have been no understandable reason for her to prolong her absence from the family home in Oxford.
But now not only Suu but also Michael and the boys understood that the situation had changed definitively. In her final illness, Daw Khin Kyi had been a bridge for Suu: She had passed over that bridge, and on the far shore had found another duty, just as pressing as the need to care for a sick mother, and far more unpredictable in its consequences. Now her fears of separation had been realized, and there was no going back.
For all sides in Burma’s churning national crisis, the death of Daw Khin Kyi marked a caesura, a break point, though one with different meanings and possessing the seeds of different hopes.
The regime could yet dream that Suu’s entry into politics was a mere fling, a caprice, an aberration, and that now her mother was gone she would pack her bags and depart. They granted Michael, Alexander and Kim, who had returned to England in September, visas to come back, banking perhaps on the emotional tug of home to drag Suu away when they departed.
For the masses of people who had struck for weeks and weeks in the summer and who had been traumatized and silenced by the massacre of thousands of their fellow citizens, the death was by contrast their first opportunity since the events of September 18th to take to the streets en masse and show their solidarity with Suu—and, by implication, their hostility to the regime. Twenty thousand of them flocked to University Avenue after her mother’s death to express condolences. Far more were ready to follow the hearse to the mausoleum.
The scene was set, in other words, for another bloody clash. Yet mercifully, this time around it didn’t happen like that. For their part, SLORC made no attempt to relegate the funeral of the widow of the nation’s founding father to the capital’s shabby margins: In accordance with Suu’s request, they sanctioned the lady’s burial in a ceremony tantamount to a state funeral, at the mausoleum close to the Shwedagon where the remains of Supayalat, King Thibaw’s consort, of U Thant and of Aung San himself were interred. They even paid some money, more than 1,000 dollars, towards the funeral expenses, and approved the building of a new monument to house the remains.
These gracious concessions were further enhanced when the regime’s new strong man, General Saw Maung, visited University Avenue the evening before the funeral to sign the condolence book, accompanied by Khin Nyunt, the intelligence chief who was also the Minister of Internal and Religious Affairs. They stayed for tea; referring to the massacres perpetrated by the army between September 18th and 20th, the president told Suu that he was distressed that his karma had resulted in him presiding over “this blot” on the army’s honor, adding that he had no wish to cling to power.17 What Suu said in reply is not recorded, but it was the closest to a meeting of minds that would ever occur between the two of them.
The public also behaved well. The regime had warned chillingly that the funeral could lead to “another round of disturbances”—words that could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then Suu stepped up to put the matter in more dignified terms. Two days after her mother’s death, she issued an appeal for calm, published in the Working People’s Daily (the regime’s English-language newspaper) on December 29, 1988. “As there will be a very large crowd of people at my mother’s funeral procession,” she wrote, “I humbly request the people to be calm and disciplined in sending my mother on her last journey . . . so that the funeral ceremony may be successful.” She added, “I would also like to request the people to abide by the funeral committee’s arrangements and security arrangements.”
The people, 100,000 of them according to Reuters, did as they were told. The junta helped out by not attending, and by keeping the army in barracks: As so often in the long and strange interaction of the Burmese people and its armed forces, the masses swarmed through the capital in a temporary vacuum of visible force, kept in order by student marshals wearing the same red armbands as during the strikes of August and September. Students sang anti-government songs and waved the NLD’s peacock flag. The coffin was carried from Inya Lake in a flower-strewn hearse, led by monks and followed by Suu and the family and a substantial group of foreign diplomats, a walk of two hours under the hot sun. At the end of it the people dispersed peacefully. Suu’s relief was immense. “I hope this occasion has been an eye-opener,” she told the Independent by phone. “If we have cooperation and understanding we can do things peacefully. The people are not out for violence for violence’s sake.”18
Already her thoughts were turning to the future: not Oxford, in the depths of another English winter, but her next campaign tour. Michael, of course, would not be able to accompany her: Even if his visa had permitted such a long stay, his presence was required to look after his sons as they returned to school. So as a second best he suggested to Ma Thanegi, Suu’s personal assistant, who spoke such excellent English, that she might like to write a diary of the campaign, to keep him in the picture. Ma Thanegi was happy to agree.
A page from the campaign diary kept by Ma Thanegi, Suu’s friend and companion. On the campaign trail Suu’s fans developed a penchant for spraying her with cheap perfume. Here, Ma Thanegi quotes Suu telling her, “You know, Ma Thanegi, I’ve gone up in the world—they sprayed me with Charlie instead of Concord!”
