IN November 2010, Burma was preparing for its first elections in decades. Aung San Suu Kyi was in detention in her home, as she had been for the previous seven years.
Traveling across Rangoon six days before the poll, I had the luck to hail a taxi driver who spoke some English. I asked him, “Are you going to vote?’
“No!” he said, “I don’t like it! It is a lie! They are lying to all the people, and all the world. They are very greedy! They don’t know what democracy is . . .” Later he said that his wife was going to vote and he was under pressure to do the same: She was afraid that if they didn’t they might be killed.
He told me that he had a degree in Engineering from Insein Institute of Technology. So why, I asked him, was he driving a taxi?
“I am driving because I don’t want to work for the government, because that means stealing. I want to work for my country and I want to do good. I don’t want to steal! Money is not the important thing for our people. The important thing is to get democracy . . .”
It was the strangest election I have ever come across. The party that had won the previous election by a country mile, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), would have been allowed to participate if it had recognized the new constitution and if it had been prepared to expel Aung San Suu Kyi and all other members in detention or prison. As the party declined to do this, it was de-registered, becoming a non-party. The biggest party, which in the end won handily, had only been in existence for a few months: It was created by the simple trick of turning the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a regime-sponsored mass organization to which all government employees are compelled to belong, into a party, the USDP. The other parties running included small split-offs from the NLD opposed to that party’s decision not to run.
During the weeks of the election campaign, the mood in Rangoon was completely flat. There were no election meetings, no posters stuck up, no loudspeaker vans patrolling the streets blaring their parties’ messages. The only indications that something out of the ordinary was under way were a few billboards for the USDP, and daily homilies in the regime’s newspaper, the New Light of Myanmar, urging people to vote.
“A voter can choose not to vote,” one such homily noted, “but a person who is found guilty of inciting the people to boycott the election is liable for not more than one year’s prison term or a fine of 100,000 kyats or both.”1
A cartoon in the paper showed a group of smiling citizens striding towards an arch inscribed “Multiparty democracy general election.” Beyond was a modern city of glass and steel skyscrapers, captioned “Peaceful, modern and developed democratic nation.” “Join hands,” said one of the citizens, “the goal is in sight.”
Another article in the same paper recalled that there had been an election twenty years before, whose result had not been honored. “The election was meaningless because it looks like runners starting for the race without having any goal, aim and rule. In other words, it looks like a walk taken by a blind person.[sic]”
Despite the references to the 1990 poll, all mention of Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues was rigorously excluded from all printed and broadcast material.
What actually distinguished the 1990 poll was the fact that the polling and the counting of votes were conducted reasonably fairly: That’s why the NLD and its ethnic allies won 94 percent of the seats.2 Subsequently, the regime agonized for nearly twenty years over how to shake off the memory of that humiliation and somehow acquire legitimacy as rulers. This election was the way they finally chose to play it.
It was inconceivable that their proxies would win if the election was free and fair, so they did not want foreigners poking their noses in. Offers from abroad to monitor the polls were firmly rejected, as were visa applications by foreign journalists. I was admitted as a tourist, as on previous occasions.
The most flagrant way the poll was rigged was by regimented voting in advance: State employees and others were dragooned into voting en masse for the regime’s proxy party.3 “We discussed how to take advance votes from members of thirty civil societies in Rangoon,” a USDP official told Irrawaddy, a news website run by Burmese journalists in exile.4 Civil servants and members of regime-sponsored organizations including the Red Cross and the fire brigade were among those required to vote in advance. In this way getting out the vote—in many cases days in advance—became a quasi-military operation. In Rangoon constituencies where opposition candidates stood a chance of winning, pre-cooked ballots were poured in to ensure a favorable result. Two days after the poll, without giving any details, a senior USDP official was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying, “We have won about 80 percent of the seats. We are glad.”5
By then I and several other undercover reporters had been expelled. I watched the next act of the drama in the office of the NLD-Liberated Areas (NLD-LA) in Mae Sot, on the Thailand–Burma border.6
Although Aung San Suu Kyi’s eighteen-month detention sentence expired on Saturday, November 13th, it was not clear until the last minute whether she would be released or not. But her party was optimistic: “There is no legal basis for detaining her any longer,” said her lawyer.7 Two days before, women members of the NLD had started cleaning the party’s headquarters, which had been closed and shuttered for much of the time she was in detention, and repairing the air conditioners.
Nearly 2,200 political prisoners remained locked up in Burma’s jails, but shortly after 5 PM on November 13th, Suu’s seven and a half years of detention finally came to an end. At 5:15 PM on that day, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Soldiers armed with rifles and tear-gas launchers pushed aside the barbed-wire barriers blocking University Avenue, and a swarm of supporters dashed the final hundred yards to the villa’s gate. Twenty minutes later, a slight 65-year-old woman popped her head over her red spiked fence.”8
The crowd chanted “Long live Aung San Suu Kyi!” “I’m very happy to see you!” she yelled, barely audible over the chanting. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen you.” Rangoon was a prison camp no more. “Some people sobbed out loud, many shed tears and everybody shouted words of salutation and love,” the Times of London reported on November 14th. “For ten minutes Aung San Suu Kyi could do nothing but bathe in the acclaim of the crowd.”
The previous week an NLD veteran, one of the party’s founders, released from prison after nineteen years, had told me, “When I and others were released it was like watering a flower in a pot—the plant is getting fresh, that’s all. But when Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is released it will be like the beginning of the monsoon, the whole countryside green and blooming.”9 And indeed for some days the mood was very much like that.
Burma’s military regime had played its best card with great astuteness. In the cacophonous celebrations of the next days, which echoed around the world, the outrageous theft of the election a week before was completely forgotten.