A Neighbourhood of the Shwedagon Pagoda
Dagon, Burma
1755
Born Aung Zaya, ‘victorious’ in Burmese, King Alaungpaya reined his mount and imperiously signalled his war-weary troops to an abrupt halt. Frightened of him more than the enemy, the 10,000 men that made his army came to an alert standstill. Wondering whether the king suspected an ambush, the troops, in keen anticipation, waited in silence for the next sudden command the king would issue. The king was known for his acute tactical sense in battle, and despite his unbiased ruthlessness in dealing with slovenly soldiers who failed to rally to his order, the body of men loved and worshipped their monarch who stood tall at five foot eleven inches. Since the beginning of their history, no Burman had ever been able to boast about the incredible successes in battles against their enemies and the extent to which their empire had swollen.
But the king did not issue the anticipated command.
Alaungpaya, meaning ‘the future Buddha’, was meditating on the past and the rise and fall of dynasties in his country.
The early Pyu, a priestly caste from Northern India, were the earliest who migrated to Burma. Their tradition was deeply rooted in the yoga system from Patanjali and his Yoga Sutras. They established a highly peaceful Hindu kingdom in the Irrawaddy valley around 500 BC. They were also known to practice different forms of yoga such as Raja yoga, Karma yoga, Tantric yoga, Hatha yoga, Dhanda yoga, Letha yoga, Longi yoga and others. They refined the Hatha yoga system, along with the other systems, and created the Hanthawaddy yoga system.
Later, in 250 BC, city states emerged, consolidating the Pyu kingdom. The Pyu had three prominent city states among the score in the country. The oldest of the three cities was Beikthano (the Burmese word for the Hindu god Vishnu), and the other was Sri Ksetra. It was among the Pyu that Buddhism took a deep hold.
The Pyu, predominantly vegetarian, discouraged killing and revered the lives of all creatures, great or small. They created an agrarian society complete with sophisticated systems of canals, elaborate irrigation devices and advanced methods of animal husbandry. The Pyu kingdom became one of the major trade routes between India and China.
Around AD 6th century, the Mons—a fierce warrior people originating from Eastern India—gradually moved down and subdued the Pyu kingdom, and settled in the region. Pyu culture was assimilated by the Mons, who named their domain Hanthawaddy.
What was Pyu metamorphosed into Mon.
Then the Bamars, his people—the earlier Burmans of the Tibeto-Burman strain—migrated to Burma from the Nanzou kingdom, known later as Yunnan in AD 9th century. Living near the Pyu and the Mon at Pagan, the Burmans of Pagan enriched themselves with Pyu–Mon culture. King Anawratha of the Bamars then fought the Mons, defeated them and founded the Pagan Empire.
In 1279, the Tai people were driven out of the highlands of Yunnan by an empire building Mongols. The Tais, who later became known as the Shans, invaded Burma, scattering the Burmese. Pagan declined and the kingdom split into small kingdoms. Thadominbya founded a new kingdom as the rightful successor to Pagan in 1364, in an attempt to reunify the Burmese, and made Ava, officially known as Ratanapura, the City of Gems, its capital. After his death at 21, the court of Ava constantly waged wars with the Shans in the north and the east, the Rakhines of Arakan in the west and with the Mons who broke away from Pagan and founded their Hanthawaddy kingdom in the south. An exhausted Ava fell to the Shans in 1527.
In January 1555, King Bayinnaung of the Taungoo dynasty conquered Ava. But with the death of the king in 1581, the dynasty declined.
In 1740, the Mon people began a rebellion. The Mons had restored their Hanthawaddy kingdom at Pegu, their armies aided by the French East India Company, which gave firearms. With the help of Dutch and Portuguese mercenaries, they captured Ava in 1752, ending the 266-year-old Taungoo dynasty.
It was then that he, Alaungpaya, a man possessed with great diligence and vigour, decided to carve for himself an illustrious place in the annals of the Yazawins, the chronicle of Burmese kings. Ignoring pleas from his family to submit to the Hanthawaddy kingdom, he rallied villages, declaring, ‘When fighting for your country, it hardly matters whether there are only a few or many with you. What does matter is that your comrades have true hearts and strong arms.’ He routed the Hanthawaddy army of Mons, also known as the Talaings, and reunified the fragmented kingdom of Pagan. In his crusade to re-establish Burmese supremacy, Alaungpaya had settled the score with the Shans in the north, stemmed the century-old Siamese incursions, and had savagely routed the Mon powerbase in the south—killing tens of thousands of Mons, including learned three thousand priests, pregnant women and children. A thousand more priests were killed in the countryside. Alaungpaya’s army was hugely supported by the British Army, typical of their colonial interest against the French and the Portuguese.
Alaungpaya then founded the Kounbaung dynasty in 1752, last of the Burmese, and created the second largest empire in history— a breakaway from the earlier kings of the Pyu, the Mons and the Pagan kingdoms. But on that day, Alaungpaya—villager, hunter, patriot, warrior, leader, general, conqueror, and dynasty-builder—was suddenly overpowered by a native stirring of the villagers again.
As a villager, he had always loved pristine nature. Bewitched by the tranquil call of the idyllic countryside, unblemished by the sight of hovering vultures, Alaungpaya then decided that the time for hostilities was over and that he would build a city where he had commanded his troops to halt that day in May of 1755. In the peace that befell him, he decided to name the place ‘Yangon’, meaning the ‘end of conflict’.
But the Yangon of Alaungpaya was not to see the end of conflict as was proclaimed by the king.
Yangon was destined to be bathed in blood.
*
The First Anglo-Burmese War
The British Garrison
Rangoon
1824–1825
The British called Alaungpaya’s Yangon, Rangoon. War had been declared on Burma by the British, and Rangoon was now in the hands of the British. The few guns the Burmese possessed had been surprised and tamed. The city had fallen quickly and the British garrison was waiting for the Burmese counter-attack.
The Burmese troops, arrayed for the counter-attack on the city to evict the invading colonial British, were an excitable medieval army. They had every reason to be spirited, for they were led by the bravest of their generals—Maha Bundula, who had already had a string of successes against the British in the northern campaign since the declaration of war in early 1824. Bundula’s astonishing military prowess during the campaign forced the British to make a strategic change necessary in the conduct of the war: the British decided on a thrust at Rangoon with a flotilla of warships up the Irrawaddy. And here on the banks of the river, General Bundula had decided to stem the tide of the invasion and dispatch the British to their borders in shameful defeat. A fine horseman, the general galloped along the ranks of his infantry, flashing his gleaming daah and exhorting his troops to roar—raising their pennants high in the air, challenging the British and eager to engage the enemy in combat.
Major General Sir Archibald Campbell, the commander of the British forces, saw the glint of the general’s daah and heard the roar of the Burmese troops, recognizing that the Burmese were now prepared to charge. They had the numbers with them and realized that if the force before him were ever allowed near to engage in close combat, his forces would be annihilated.
But the British commander was not unduly worried. He would keep the distance between the two opposing forces until it was the right moment to engage the Burmese. He hoped, however, that the Burmese would charge and give him an excellent opportunity to devastate them with his tactical advantage. He had the Congreves with him. The Congreves were solid fuel rockets which had a range of a thousand yards. Finally, he had the cannons of the flotilla, in addition to the ones at the garrison, and a well-trained and disciplined force.
‘Commence firing,’ he ordered in a detached tone when, as he had expected, the Burmese horde charged. The naval guns of the British flotilla joined in—their muzzles flashing in a thunderous crash to flash again in another lethal volley, while his musketeers, in the classic triple line formation, stood ready for their orders to rake the approaching defenders with their shots. The determination, the zeal and the courage of the Burmese were torn apart in disarray as limbs flew and bones disintegrated amidst the savage explosions. And soon, they were vanquished.
Shaken with disbelief at the fierce bombardment, General Bundula ordered the retreat and began building stockades on the river, from where he would watch the white barbarians and their awesome warships that had made him eat humble pie. He had announced that he would feast on rice in Rangoon by the end of the week. Bundula, dismayed at his first-ever defeat in battle, soon died on the banks of the Irrawaddy while on a lookout position on a pipal tree. A British cannonball had exploded near his lookout, killing the general instantly and ending the efforts of the Burmese to deny the British the conquest of Burma. Rangoon eventually became the new capital of colonial Burma.
Rangoon continued to see conflict and bloodshed into the second and third colonial British wars, the Second World War and the post-independence era when ethnic peoples of the country revolted with the Karens.
*
Rangoon
1974–1988
Two centuries later, the British or the Japanese were no longer causes of conflict in Rangoon, and the eradication of ethnic insurgency was almost a conceivable certainty. But now the city and the country were in the throes of a much more frightening conflict, jolting the generals of the revolutionary council of 1962. Gross and ill-educated management of the country’s economy and the lack of constructive critical review in the face of Ne Win’s authoritarianism had finally plunged the country into a miasma of simmering discontent, which flared in a violent outburst, for the people were now fighting for the most essential of substance that allowed dignity and a sense of well-being in a human society—food.
Beginning in May 1974, a wave of strikes hit Rangoon and elsewhere in the country against a backdrop of corruption, inflation and food shortages, especially rice. In Rangoon, workers were arrested and troops opened fire. But the hunger of the people disregarded all forms of fear and imploded within their society, discarding all norms of civility and respect. Burmese began killing Burmese, the strong looting the poor, and together, the ravisher and the ravished uniting to attack government enterprises in their craze to feed the hunger. Fires raged across the country, massacres spread, inmates of prisons revolted and were butchered and the country tilted on the hinge of anarchy.
In 1974, the Revolutionary Council held the first general election after 12 years and, dissolving the council, brought direct military rule to an end. Ne Win was no longer the chairman of the Revolutionary Council but the self-elected president of the single party to contest the election—‘The Burmese Socialist Program Party’. Still the omnipotent chairman, he began shuffling his deck of cards, contemplating upon a solution that would appease the people and quell the inferno of agitations across the land. He found the solution—a solution that would also perpetuate his power for life while he remained inaccessible and protected in the background.
He handed out to the people his resignation in 1981 as president of the ruling party, but remained in control of the party and the junta. Despite installing a civilian in the interim period in early 1988, his attempt to appease the people failed to quell unrest. The damage and the hurt that had been caused had sunk deep into the national consciousness, birthing voices of dissent that sprang resoundingly from former members of the Revolutionary Council—like Brigadier Aung Gyi and General Tin Oo. The voice of former Prime Minister U Nu surfaced again, joining those of the deposed army officers, in their attempt to wrestle from the civilian the key to form an interim government and set a precedent for free and fair elections that could herald the dawn of civilian governments in the future.
There was another voice, feminine but resolute; a voice that was determined to seek to the end the cleansing of a nation from its evils that had set in since the past two and a half decades. It was the voice of the little girl who had lost a father forty-one years ago tragically.
The Lotus in Rangoon. Aung San Suu Kyi.
*
A Residence on the Inya Lake
Rangoon
July 1988
‘What!’ exclaimed the septuagenarian chairman, and demanded, ‘…when did this happen?’
‘Just this morning, sir,’ replied his aide, unnerved by the chairman’s explosion.
‘She’s supposed to be here to take care of her ailing mother!’ he shouted in consternation. ‘We should have watched her from the very beginning. I knew there had to be more than just the visit to her mother.’
‘Her mother is really ill, sir,’ vouched the aide.
‘That I know,’ said the retired chairman and continued, ‘what I’m surprised about is how she managed to get functional so soon. I’m sure there is some kind of organization without which she couldn’t have held a meeting on her own. The bitch!’ The jolt that provoked former chairman’s harangue had come from a source he had least suspected. He had tolerated the criticism and the squawk for political and economic reforms from her, and had dismissed it as girlish impetuosity in Western intellectual parlance. A spoilt brat was what he had thought of her. He had been watching Aung Gyi, Tin Oo and that infernal U Nu who had the audacity to state that he hadn’t dissolved his legitimately elected government and, therefore, had sovereign claim to the prime ministership of the new government.
This sudden shift to centre stage under the opposition’s limelight meant, to the shrewd septuagenarian, a shift in the opposition’s strategy which had to be immediately countered. The legitimacy of U Nu was now a vague contention, and of no great consequence to the people; nor did he believe that the people would die for Aung Gyi and Tin Oo. But the woman was a different matter. She was the offspring of the founding father of the nation…a hero and a martyr fawned upon with exalting poetry and song.
‘Setko July, Mamyitnaing…’ meaning that 19 July of the calendar could never be forgotten, for the assassination of Aung San had occurred on that date. It was literally an emotional patriotic poem, immortalizing her father. The emotional hold she could have on the people was a power that she could wield, challenging the duplicity of the regime’s own extolling oration of her father and the exhortations in their address to the nation for their own selfish political ends.
‘Get me the intelligence chief immediately. Now!’ he rasped and sent the aide scurrying from his lounge. The chairmen then reached for his telephone and dialled the number of the next most powerful man in the country after him. He dialled for the senior-most general of the army, a trusted ally who had seen through the revolution along with him.
*
The Intelligence Chief ’s Residence
Rangoon
Major General Myo Mint was strolling in his garden, inhaling the fragrance of the jasmine that hung in the fresh morning air, when the aide of the chairman stumbled upon him, gasping for breath and speechless for a moment from his speedy errand.
‘General, the chairman wants to see you immediately,’ he announced as soon as he recovered his breath.
‘Oh! I thought something drastic had happened,’ said the intelligence chief in relief. The past few months had weighed heavily on him for, amidst the chaos of changing governments and rumours of the chairman’s flight from the country, he had been on constant watch for himself. He knew that the power one enjoyed under a dictatorship was like a finely honed razor that could cut both ways. The frenzy of the aide had worried him and made him think that death had befallen the chairman.
Like many of the men of power in the country, he took refuge in the former chairman’s continued span of life, for it ensured them theirs.
‘It’s Aung San Suu Kyi, sir,’ blurted the aide. ‘She has given a speech outside her residence.’
‘What speech?’ asked the general, instantly alert.
‘She has declared the formation of some kind of league to restore democracy in the country, sir,’ replied the aide.
‘What! What league? What democracy? Speak up, man!’ demanded a stunned intelligence chief. This was worse than drastic, the shaken general now feared. A major development in the opposition camp that he hadn’t anticipated. Was this failure to be fatal? With those worrisome thoughts, he hastily left for the chairman’s residence with the aide.
Meanwhile, in the residence on the Inya Lake, the ageing chairman paced the lounge irritably, clasping his hands and trying to gain an insight into the sudden development in his capital. Was this a precursor to something more portentous, like a sudden Western interest in the country, he wondered. Why did she want to get involved in the country’s politics when she was married to an Englishman and had a comfortable life in London? Or did she? What about her sons? Or was this an orchestration of some frustration, expressing a need to call attention upon her… or was there some ulterior motive in her attempt at defiance of the regime’s rule? Surely, she was educated enough to know the consequences of meddling with him! Was her husband somehow involved in this? Preparing an international stage? The rush of thoughts in the chairman’s mind came to a halt when his aide and Major General Myo Mint burst into the lounge.
‘I say, Myo Mint, what is this that I hear?’ shot the chairman. ‘How could you let such a thing happen? It’s a good thing that she didn’t get to the radio! You’re the intelligence chief, for God’s sake….And all those people, I believe a crowd…more than a thousand listening to her! Where did they come from?’
‘I’m surprised myself, sir, but I’ll get to the bottom of it, I assure you,’ responded the intelligence chief. It was his misfortune to have being caught napping on this one, but as the person in charge of intelligence, he knew he would have to ride out the chairman’s indignation and lambast.
‘You must!’ enforced the chairman.
‘It was very difficult to foresee this, sir. She’s the daughter of Aung San! She’s like family,’ the intelligence chief said, taking the opportunity to minimize the damage caused to his credibility.
‘Not anymore,’ declared the chairman.
‘Who would have thought it appropriate to place a watch on her?’ the major general reinforced his defence.
‘We have been lax with her and I can’t blame you entirely, Myo Mint. We had thought better of her, I agree,’ the chairman offered. The wily chairman was notorious for extending an olive branch after remonstrating his officials, and this was the very same olive branch extended to him now, the intelligence chief reckoned. He was still the donkey while the chairman held the whip.
‘I want a watch placed on her immediately; what she does, where she goes, who visits her—everything, including all members of her household,’ the chairman ordered.
‘Very well, sir. I’ll get to it right now,’ said the intelligence chief in a firm voice.
‘Good, Myo Mint. I want a constant update,’ the chairman said. ‘Get going, then.’ Dismissing the major general, the chairman then waited for the arrival of the army commander-in-chief, General Khin Maung Nyunt.
*
Aung San’s daughter had come to Burma earlier to look after her ailing mother and, in the time that she had spent in the country, had come to witness the extent of the nation’s deterioration. It was no longer debatable print in the newspaper that she read but an empirical knowledge that she gained. She was repelled by the oppression of the regime. Aung San Suu Kyi was angered by the debasement of a people for whom her father had sought liberation. This was not the Burma Aung San had died for, and she was determined to see that her father’s death would not be in vain.
Aung San Suu Kyi decided that it was time to flush the generals down their cesspool of corruption, deceit and usurpation of a people’s trust. The cry from a daughter of the nation for the liberation of her people from tyranny now rang louder in the chairman’s ears than all the gunfire his Tatmadaw had discharged upon the dogs, the students and the insurgents of the country. What galled him most was that it was a woman who, under his unsuspecting nose, had become an anathema to his personal empire. She was demanding for free and fair elections!
‘Let us have a dialogue with her, Mr Chairman,’ General Khin Maung Nyunt proposed within the first few minutes of his arrival. ‘We have a delicate situation here and the sentiments of the people have to be considered before we act. We have to think of the army, too.’
The general’s counsel was well-appreciated by the chairman, who himself did not want to precipitate another spate of nationwide censure of him. He was also sensitive to international reaction at this juncture, which could jeopardize his plans for the future that were yet to be announced.
‘Yes, I can understand that. Lead a delegation and have this dialogue with her,’ the chairman consented. ‘Find out what she has in mind. Entreat her, persuade her; appeal to her that it is not in the country’s interest to bow to her wishes or to her movement.’
‘I will, Chairman,’ assured General Khin Maung Nyunt.
‘Prevail upon her that it is us who have held the nation together all these years. Our people do not know how to conduct themselves in a free society. They need a firm hand to rule them and if we remove ourselves from authority, she will have to account for the lawlessness that will reduce whatever is left of this country to unimaginable chaos. Look at what’s happened recently. Insurgencies rearing their heads again! Threaten her if you have to,’ the chairman advised.
‘That, I will,’ assured the commander-in-chief of the army.
‘Promise her, if you must, that elections can be considered when the stability is restored in the country,’ the chairman directed. ‘A military retaliation will not be in her interest now because we can outlaw any kind of opposition. Tell her to keep quiet in her own interest. Remind her that the army shoots to kill.’
But Aung San Suu Kyi was not to be entreated, nor dissuaded or threatened from her stance despite the fervent overtures of the government to pacify her. Her fortitude lay in rekindling a long-lost courage among the people. In the days that followed, the National League for Democracy (NLD) gained a following, burgeoning by the hour, and the civilian heading the current government was showing signs of cracking. The generals now feared the popular sentiment of the people infecting the younger cadre of their Tatmadaw. It was time to rectify the situation before it went out of hand, and the last thing the generals desired was a mutiny of the younger officers and soldiers. They warned their mentor about the impending debacle, and soon, a meeting was convened.
‘Bring in the butcher,’ he ordered.