Aung San Suu Kyi (14 page)

The generals in the junta quite simply did not know how to handle a person with such disarming charm.

During those first months of the election campaign there were few direct threats aimed at her person. The junta did not dare. They realized that such a measure might lead to a full-scale revolution. During one trip, however,
Aung San Suu Kyi was only seconds from being shot to death. The occurrence has now become part of the mythmaking around her, not least because it says something important about her personality.

It all happened in Danubyu, a dusty little dump in the Irrawaddy Delta about sixty miles northwest of Rangoon. It was April 5, 1989. During the day Suu Kyi and her people had been out with a boat in the Irrawaddy Delta, carrying out their election campaign. Everywhere they had been met by rejoicing crowds, and neither the police nor the military had intervened to stop their meetings. When evening was approaching, they were on their way back to the town of Danubyu. As they got closer to the harbor area, they saw that it was full of soldiers who were standing with rifles raised and aimed at their boats.

They were not surprised. When they had arrived at Danubyu the same morning, the streets had been full of soldiers. The inhabitants in the town had been ordered to stay at home, otherwise they would risk getting arrested or even shot. Once at the NLD office, they were met by a certain Capt. Myint Oo, who forbade them to hold any political meeting. “For security reasons,” he explained. Aung San Suu Kyi had agreed to their demand and met her party comrades inside the office instead.

When they were about to leave Danubyu later on, Capt. Myint Oo tried to stop them again but allowed them to pass after Aung San Suu Kyi had promised that they would be back before six o'clock.

Despite the fact that they were back well before the time agreed on, the atmosphere was now very threatening in the harbor area. Nyo Ohn Myint, who was the chairman of the NLD youth section and also included in Suu Kyi's force of bodyguards, suggested that they should get out of the boats on the beach beside the jetty. Suu Kyi climbed out first onto the clay bank. When the rest of her party had come ashore, they were surrounded by a group of soldiers who pressed them toward the water, pulled at their clothes, and yelled at them to turn around. One of Suu Kyi's bodyguards lost his temper and nearly started a fight with one of the soldiers, but after a couple of minutes the pressure eased and Aung San Suu Kyi suggested that she should walk ahead toward the NLD office.

They walked for three hundred or so feet along the main street, and when they arrived in the vicinity of the town marketplace, they met six soldiers
blocking their path. Capt. Myint Oo stood beside them with a pistol in one hand and a megaphone in the other. One of the bodyguards, Win Thein, walked diagonally in front of the rest of the group with an NLD flag.

Maw Min Lwin, who was the chief of the bodyguard force, realized that Suu Kyi was exposing herself to unnecessary danger. Along with Nyo Ohn Myint, he tried to walk in front of Suu Kyi, but she stopped them. “No, you don't need to,” she said. “That will only make them nervous. Let me go first.”

They continued on their way.

At that time of day, Danubyu was usually teeming with market noise, traffic, and the babble of thousands of human voices. Now not a sound was to be heard.

Ma Thanegi, one of the women in the NLD leadership, was walking a few steps behind the bodyguards. She tried to speak to the captain. “Stop this. You must let us pass,” she said. “You must let us walk to our office.”

But the captain yelled that they would be shot on the spot if they continued walking in the middle of the road. “Okay,” said Suu Kyi, “then we will walk along the side of the road instead.” The captain yelled back that they would be shot even if they walked along the side of the road. He started counting from one and ordered his soldiers to open fire when he got to ten. Then Suu Kyi turned around to the rest of her party and asked them to stop. If the captain meant what he said, she did not want to risk a bloodbath. Aung San Suu Kyi herself continued slowly onward.

The soldiers cocked their weapons.

“I was scared to death,” says Nyo Ohn Myint, telling me the story of this incident twenty years later. “But just as the captain was about to give the order to fire one of his superiors came running, a major, and stopped the counting.”

A violent exchange of words broke out on the pavement. It ended with Capt. Myint Oo tearing off the officer's tabs from his uniform and yelling, “What have I got these for if I can't give an order to fire?” By that time Aung San Suu Kyi had already walked straight through the line of soldiers. As she passed, Suu Kyi saw how they were trembling with nervousness. One of the soldiers was crying. Later on, Aung San Suu Kyi told Alan Clements about this incident: “My thought was, one doesn't turn back in a situation like this. I don't think I'm unique in that. I've often heard people who have
taken part in demonstrations say that when you are charged by the police you can't make up your mind in advance about what you'll do; it's a decision which you have to make there and then.”

Nyo Ohn Myint remembers how the NLD had an informal meeting later on in the evening in the Danubyu office. Everyone was shocked by what had happened. He had been unable to speak for an hour after they had arrived in safety. One of the local NLD activists also recounted that Capt. Myint Oo had sat in the local police station after his humiliation earlier on in the day and swore to kill Aung San Suu Kyi. He had been terribly drunk, waved his pistol about, and screamed that he had “saved a bullet for the wife of that Indian!” Among racist Bamar, all foreigners are often called Indians.

Well inside the NLD office, most people thought it was time to go home, but Suu Kyi refused to cancel the arrangements for the following day. They were going to visit a monument dedicated to General Bandula, who was killed at Danubyu in 1825 during a crucial battle against the British in the first Anglo-Bamar war.

“If I die in Danubyu,” she said, “you have to seize the opportunity to democratize the country.” When they arrived at the monument, they were met by the major who had stopped the shooting the previous day. He told them that Capt. Myint Oo had been transported away from Danubyu and assured them that Suu Kyi no longer needed to feel threatened.

The self--sacrificing behavior she had demonstrated at Danubyu was an important explanation as to why the young activists in the democratic movement joined her after the bloody autumn of 1988. She showed that her own safety was not more valuable than anyone else's, and she did whatever she could to protect the activists who gathered around her.

Immediately after their homecoming from Danubyu, Moe Myat Thu, one of her bodyguards, and five other young people were arrested outside the gates of 54 University Avenue. The soldiers dragged them out of their car and took them to an army camp in the vicinity. When Aung San Suu Kyi heard about this incident, she immediately went out onto University Avenue and sat down on the pavement. She told the surprised soldiers that she was thinking of sitting there until her colleagues were released. The soldiers grew nervous. It was the first day of the annual Burmese water festival, and
they knew that the whole street would soon be flooded with people wanting to celebrate at the NLD headquarters, situated five hundred feet from there. If Aung San Suu Kyi was still sitting out on the street, the whole situation might develop into a demonstration against the junta. After about thirty minutes, the NLD activists were released.

“It isn't a hard choice to make, to follow a leader who acts like that to protect her colleagues,” says Moe Myat Thu when I interviewed him in Thailand in the winter of 2010.

Most of all, of course, it shows a strange, sometimes almost death-defying obstinacy. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi will not agree that she is brave. When asked a question about Danubyu, she has replied, “There must be thousands of soldiers who do that kind of thing every day. Because, unfortunately, there are battles going on all the time in this world.”

Aung San Suu Kyi often emphasizes that she refuses to allow fear to rule her life, even if there is often good reason to be afraid. “You must not let your fear stop you from doing what is right,” she has explained. “You must not deny fear. Fear is normal. But it's dangerous if you let it stop you from doing what you know is right.”

In her next breath she usually mentions how as a child she used to handle her fear in the same way she did during the election campaign when perpetually harassed by the junta—by challenging it. During her earliest years, she, like most other children, was afraid of the dark when she was about to go to sleep in the evenings. But instead of pulling the covers up over her head and shutting her eyes, she chose to get up and go down into the pitch-dark cellar. There she sat on the floor and waited until she was used to the darkness, until she controlled it. One of the most famous things she is quoted as saying is “Fear is a habit.”

After Danubyu, the junta realized that Aung San Suu Kyi was not going to give an inch even when faced with the threat of death, and the election campaign had shown that both the democratic movement and the ethnic minorities stood behind her. Even a large part of the army looked up to her. Aung San Suu Kyi thus constituted a direct threat against the continuation of the junta's long hold on power. She still believed that they might draw up some kind of formal death sentence against her. If it became public, then it would trigger a revolution. At the same time Capt. Myint Oo's unstable
behavior demonstrated that there were elements within the army who wanted to see her dead.

The temperature rose even higher during the spring and summer of 1989. The junta intensified their harassment, and more and more democratic activists were arrested and sentenced to long terms in prison after summary trials.

That did not stop Aung San Suu Kyi from intensifying her criticism of the military rule. Lian Sakhong, who lives in Uppsala nowadays, remembers a meeting immediately before the annual water festival in Rangoon. Lian comes from the Chin people, and at that time he was one of the leaders of the ethnic minorities' alliance, the United Nationalities League for Democracy (UNLD). He was going to give a speech after Aung San Suu Kyi:

Before the meeting she seemed quite calm. Her face was expressionless, but the look in her eyes was concentrated, filled with energy and focused straight ahead all the time. She was wearing a white blouse with full sleeves, and just as the meeting was about to start, she rolled them up above her elbows. I've never seen anything like it. She looked like a gunman preparing for a shoot-out.

In her speech a few minutes later she went on the attack for the first time against the former dictator Ne Win. In prior speeches, she had avoided pointing him out in any specific way. In Burma one has a duty to respect and revere those who are older, even if they are guilty of a brutal genocide, and nobody else in the democratic movement had dared to criticize the former dictator. It is true that he had given up his power in the summer of 1988, but both the people of Burma and the international community assumed that he still ruled from the wings. Aung San Suu Kyi accused him now of having corrupted her father's legacy, having dragged the country down into poverty, and not having had the ability to make peace with the ethnic minorities.

This last issue—relations with the ethnic minorities—was controversial even for the democratic movement and the NLD. With July 19, 1989, in view, Aung San Suu Kyi sent out information that she was thinking of arranging an alternative demonstration in memory of her father on the forty-second anniversary of his murder. Ever since 1962, they have transformed this memorial day into a celebration of the country's military power. However, instead of taking part in the celebrations of the regime, Aung San Suu Kyi was now planning a peaceful march of her own along the streets of Rangoon. On July 19 a meeting was held between the NLD and the ethnic groups' UNLD. Lian Sakhong, one of the participants at the meeting, relates that Aung San Suu Kyi and the representatives from the UNLD planned to make it into a shared demonstration. However, U Tin Oo and the other generals in the executive for the NLD reacted very strongly and threatened to join the regime's demonstration if the suggestion was accepted. The pensioned generals in the executive of the NLD distrusted the ethnic groups, and several of them wanted to keep the national control of the federal states in one way or another. Aung San Suu Kyi, on the contrary, was of the opinion that a federal constitution was necessary in order to create peace in the country, and she strove for even closer cooperation with the UNLD. She also suggested that the NLD refrain from running for office in the federal states so that the ethnic parties would not suffer competition from her own party.

Meeting at NLD's head office (spring 1989). From the left: Salai Ngai Sak, Lian Sakhong, Ram Ling Hmung (standing), Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and U Tin Oo.
Courtesy of Lian Sakhong.