Aung San Suu Kyi (15 page)

The conflict within the NLD never became acute during the election campaign. When the SLORC heard about the plans for an alternative July 19 demonstration, they called in several battalions from the regiments stationed around the capital and let them patrol the streets at the same time the state-controlled mass media trumpeted out that the junta was going to keep law and order at any price.

With this threat of a new bloodbath hanging over it, the demonstration was canceled, but the junta had now been given an excuse to tighten the thumbscrews. Early in the morning of July 20, 1989, eleven covered trucks drove up along University Avenue. The vehicles were parked so that they blocked all transport past Aung San Suu Kyi's house. Soldiers poured out of the backs of the trucks and stopped the forty NLD activists and family members who were inside the house from leaving.

Several hours passed without anything happening. The soldiers wanted either to spread anxiety and uncertainty among those inside the house, or else they were waiting for orders from above. Aung San Suu Kyi realized that the time had come and spent the day packing. “I thought if they were going to take me to prison then at least I should have a bag packed with essentials,” said Suu Kyi a few years later, in an interview with Barbara Victor, “such as toothbrush and a change of clothes. After I did that, we all had a nice time just waiting.”

Suu Kyi was able to spend the day conversing with her party comrades and being together with her sons, Alexander and Kim. They had come to Rangoon some weeks earlier with their father, but Michael had returned to attend his own father's funeral in Scotland. Sixteen-year-old Alexander was old enough to understand that the soldiers constituted a threat, but Kim mostly thought that it was exciting. “I remember the soldiers coming to the house,” he said in an interview in 2004 in the magazine
The Weekly
. “There was a huge amount of activity and lots of guns and shouting. Of course, I wasn't really aware of what it was all about, but, for a young boy, it was incredibly exciting. Mother tried to be reassuring, at least when I was around, and I can't remember ever being frightened.”

One of Suu Kyi's assistants played Monopoly with the children to pass the time. At about four o'clock in the afternoon the wait seemed to be over. Half a dozen soldiers entered the house and searched through the office
spaces on the ground floor. They turned desk drawers upside down and poured out the contents on the floor. They tore items out of the wardrobes and the kitchen cupboards. After them, an older officer made his entrance. He exhorted U Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung to leave the house. The others there were arrested and thrown into prison. Some of them were released after two or three days, and others received long prison sentences.

The officer who had forced his way into the house read a document with allegations against Aung San Suu Kyi. She was a “dangerous” and “subversive” person, he said, since she was planning to carry out an alternative ceremony to commemorate her father's death, and therefore she would now be committed to house arrest. The house was emptied. Only her sons and two maids were permitted to remain.

Aung San Suu Kyi was now a prisoner in the shabby white stone house on the shores of Lake Inya, the very house in which she had spent so many years of her childhood.

Burma in the 1950s was a country full of sharp contrasts. On the one hand, there was a civil war and unrest. Aung San was dead and society was going through an ever more blatant militarization. On the other hand, there was a strong belief in the future, with an economy that was on its way to being built up after the war and a freedom in society that Burma had never before experienced.

The Danish doctor and author Aage Krarup Nielsen writes about the bright side of Burmese life in his book
De gyllene pagodernas land
(“The Land of the Golden Pagodas”), published in 1959. His narrative is about Burma's immense natural resources, wide-stretched teak forests, and fertile paddy fields. He also describes how the system of education was well developed and the literacy rate was the highest in Southeast Asia. Krarup Nielsen met businessmen and politicians who all described Burma as a successful example for other Asian countries. The concept had not yet been invented at that time, but everybody took for granted that Burma would become one of the “Asian tigers.”

Burma was, however, confronted with enormous problems. To start with, large areas of the country were bombed to bits after the Second World War. The Japanese attack and the Allies' counterattack had razed whole towns and villages to the ground, leaving them in ruins. The harbor in Rangoon
had been wrecked, and more than five hundred trains and railway carriages had been blown up by the Japanese before they retreated. And just as reconstruction was about to begin, the communists went underground and started an armed struggle against the central government. At that point three months had passed since independence, and shortly after that the Karenni people's guerrilla army and the Karens with their armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), declared war on the central government. The first phase of the civil war was extremely bloody, hindering all further development in the countryside. During this period, U Nu's government was only in control of the region around the capital. After a few years the Karen guerrillas had been driven back, but even so they were in control of the greater part of the Karen state and in practice they established an independent nation in the mountains between Burma and Thailand.

Most of the other ethnic groups were at first loyal to the government in Rangoon, but they took care to arm themselves. No group fully trusted the Bamars' assurances of independence within the framework of a federal union, and it was easy to obtain weapons. Both the Japanese and the Allies had left behind large arsenals, and most groups had of course been drawn into the world war in one way or another.

Amid this chaos, Burma also became a pawn in the Cold War. When Mao Zedong's communists took power in Beijing in 1949, the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan. His Guomindang established a military dictatorship on the island and swore to retake mainland China one day. The Western world supported GMD for a long time, and right up until the 1970s Taiwan was allowed to represent China at the United Nations.

That part of the story is relatively well known. Less well known is that two of Chiang Kai-shek's army units planned to do what Mao had once done, that is to say remain in a distant part of the country, keep a hold on that region, and then start the counteroffensive from there. They decided that Jonghong in the southern Yunnan province would be their “base,” but before they had realized their plans, Mao's People's Army had already gained control of the town. Instead, about 1,700 soldiers from Chiang Kai-shek's Eighth and Ninth Armies marched over the border into Burma. So as not to be discovered and pressed back by Burmese government troops they traveled right through the inaccessible jungle of the Shan state. One of the officers, Zhang
Weicheng, had fought together with the Allied forces during the war and knew the area. In the end they settled in the town Mong Hsat in a green, fertile valley in the eastern Shan state. There were plenty of supplies and the local people seemed to be friendly. During the coming years, GMD established its own state in northeastern Burma.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) immediately made contact with them and initiated an operation to retake China from the communists. The White House supported the basic elements of the strategy that the CIA developed. President Harry S. Truman saw how the communist guerrillas were winning terrain in the whole of Southeast Asia and drew the wrong conclusion that all these movements were linked together via Moscow and Beijing. But even if the leading politicians in the United States supported the basic elements in this analysis, it was still extremely controversial to support the guerrillas directly in an independent country like Burma. The extent and character of the operation were therefore kept secret by the civil servants responsible within the CIA, even from the White House and Congress. During a number of years, enormous number of weapons and supplies were shipped out to the mountains in the Shan state. An aviation company called Civil Air Transports (CAT) was established to take care of the deliveries. Several other companies based in Thailand looked after contacts with the rest of the world.

Burma's army was sent to the Shan state but did not succeed in driving out GMD. U Nu chose to take up this issue in the recently established United Nations General Assembly, which agreed on a resolution in April 1953 demanding that GMD lay down its arms and hand over the region to the government of Burma. However, GMD and the CIA flouted this resolution. New soldiers were recruited from the ethnic groups in the border region, and by the end of 1953, GMD was able to muster as many as twelve thousand soldiers.

The Chinese troops in the Shan mountains neither could nor would rely completely on support from the United States. They needed their own re sources and turned therefore to the only asset that was able to bring in any income to speak of in the mountains: opium. Under the alleged supervision of the CIA, opium production in the Shan mountains exploded. CAT aircraft started in Thailand, and on its way north it carried arms and ammunition.
On the return journey the aircraft conveyed ton after ton of opium, which was later refined into heroin and shipped out to the world markets via Bangkok.

In the beginning of the 1950s, GMD twice attempted to retake China. Its troops marched over the border with a couple of thousand well-armed soldiers and military instructors from the United States, but the popular support that GMD had counted on never turned up and the attacks were easily repulsed. After a brief period in the 1950s it was clear that GMD was going to “get dug in” in Burma.

The central government in Rangoon increased its military ventures in the region. The commander in chief of the army, Ne Win, sent thousands of soldiers to the mountain areas, and the historically independent Shan people felt pressured from two directions, since both armies were perceived to be “foreign.”

At the same time, China increased its support to Burma's communist party, partly to combat GMD, and Beijing provided new fuel for the civil war. U Nu was fully aware of the threats from both the United States and China. The vast neighboring country in the north has always had an ambition to expand southward, to open up trade routes, and to gain direct access to the Indian Ocean. On that point Mao was no different from Beijing's previous rulers.

Aung San Suu Kyi did not see much of this with her own eyes. She grew up in the early 1950s in Rangoon, a city that was characterized more by optimism and belief in the future than were the problem-filled border regions. Burma was on its way to establishing itself as an independent nation. It joined the newly created United Nations and a series of international delegations whose members visited the country to study the political development and investigate investment opportunities. Several of these foreign guests also found their way to Aung San's house on Tower Lane. During the war, Aung San had built an impressive network of contacts in India, Japan, Great Britain, and the neighboring countries. Khin Kyi's home remained an important meeting place for the political and military elite in Burma. When Khin Kyi became a widow, she first had plans to take up her old career as a nurse. However, U Nu and the others who ran the country were of the opinion that this assignment was all too limited for the widow of the country's national hero. Instead she was appointed as the head of a
committee working to develop the welfare of women and children. She took over Aung San's seat in parliament and even led a Burmese delegation to the World Health Organization (WHO), which had started a large project in Burma to reduce malarial diseases. Khin Kyi thus played an important role in the political postwar landscape.

On the morning of January 16, 1953, the family was once again struck by tragedy. Aung San Suu Kyi was playing with her brother Aung San Lin outside the house. The two children, seven and eight years old, were very close to each other. They slept in the same room, went to the same school, and often romped around in the garden together. On that morning they were running around for a while outdoors; Aung San Suu Kyi got tired and went indoors to rest while her brother ran down to a pond that lay near the driveway up to the house. There he dropped a toy weapon in the water, and when Aung San Lin went to pick it up, one of his sandals got stuck in the clay. He rushed into the house, gave the toy to Aung San Suu Kyi, and called over his shoulder that he was going to fetch his sandal. A little while later he was found dead, floating facedown in the pond.

People in Burma have learned to live with death as part of everyday life. Poverty has always harvested many victims, and the country has been at war almost continually, with violent death and sudden disappearances of political dissidents. As one effect of this, Burma has had one of the highest levels of child mortality in Asia during the entire postwar period, right up until the present day. The problems have gotten worse in recent years, when the junta have escalated the war against the guerrilla armies and invested all their resources in military armament with only a marginal portion on medical care.

Many are of the opinion that Buddhism equips people with better readiness than other religions when it comes to handling grief and tragedies. One basic idea in the Buddhist faith is that of life's transience. Happiness always changes into grief, and no grief lasts forever. As a human being, one must learn to live with these changes but also with the insight that life does not end with death. It takes on new forms. The soul lives on.

However, all this is theoretical reasoning. In practice it is hard to imagine anything other than the deepest grief when a child dies.

“I was very close to him . . . ,” Aung San Suu Kyi recalled, talking to
Clements, “probably closer to him than to anybody else. We shared the same room and played together all the time. His death was a tremendous loss for me. At that time I felt an enormous grief. I suppose you could call it a ‘trauma,' but it was not something I couldn't cope with. Of course, I was very upset by the fact that I would never see him again.”