Aung San Suu Kyi (32 page)

The lines of conflict after 2001 have also created a new kind of affinity between those countries that were lumped together by the United States during the Bush regime as “the axis of evil.” Burma, Iran, North Korea, Eritrea, and other similar countries have realized that they can become stronger through cooperation. In their resistance to democratic reforms, they have found a solidarity that should really be impossible for regimes whose identity is based on nationalism and on fear of the rest of the world.

In this way one can say that the junta had succeeded with their strategy. They were no longer the focal point for the international floodlights, and by isolating Aung San Suu Kyi they had strangled the domestic opposition. Foreign diplomats in Rangoon and groups that wanted to see increased trade with Burma even started to say that the world must accept the military rule, cooperate with the junta, and stop relying on Aung San Suu Kyi. Almost twenty years had passed since the elections in 1990, despite everything. How long should the results actually be valid? Had the junta not actually consolidated their popular support?

It was this that made the monks' saffron revolution so hopeful. It reminded the whole world of what was at stake in Burma.

Although it did not really start with the monks at all.

In the autumn of 2004, several of the student leaders who had been in the vanguard of the demonstrations in 1988 were released, among others
Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi. Most of them had been in prison for almost sixteen years. When I visited Burma in the spring of 2005 I met some of them. The meeting took place under extremely hush-hush circumstances. It was the middle of the night and we sat on the floor of a candlelit apartment in central Rangoon. The security police were spying on the student leaders who had been released, round the clock, so I had arrived there two hours before the others so that nobody would take note of my arrival. They told me about life in prison, how one copes with years of isolation, and how it feels to lose a major part of one's life.

“We were prepared for things to take that turn,” they said. “We had seen how earlier generations of activists had sacrificed their lives or been thrown into prison.”

One of them said that every day during his imprisonment, he thought about his day as though he had still been at liberty. When breakfast was pushed in to him through a hatch in the door, he thought about the kitchen back at his parents' home. How they used to sit drinking tea and eating rice together. In the evenings he fantasized about getto-gethers with relatives and student friends, their conversations, laughter and arguments. Every day.

And in the same way as Aung San Suu Kyi during her periods of house arrest, they had meditated every day for at least an hour. It was a way of clearing their thoughts and focusing on the aspects of their existence that they were able to influence.

They told me how the strip lighting in the cells was on all day and night in order to break them down mentally, and how they were mishandled during the long interrogations with the security service. I asked whether they were intending to get involved once more? Did they dare to risk their liberty yet again? They contemplated the answer.

“We must first find out which possibilities we have. Just at present we are under such tight control and we don't know what the opposition movement looks like.”

In February 2007, information leaked out that small groups of activists had carried out public protests in Rangoon. They gathered in groups of five to ten persons, handed out leaflets, and protested against the unemployment and poverty in the country. The United Nations had classified Burma as one of the twenty poorest countries in the world, and late in the year 2006 inflation
increased exponentially. The price of rice, eggs, and cooking oil rose to such high levels that many people could no longer afford to buy even these most basic of daily groceries.

Events began to resemble those in 1988, and this impression was reinforced by the name 88 Generation Students, chosen by the group leading the gradually expanding protest movement. Those whom I had met in Rangoon two years previously were part of this movement. Their movement grew during the spring and summer, and when the junta decided on August 15 to abolish state subventions of oil and gas, they saw their chance. The decision to abolish subventions was taken after the World Bank and the IMF had recommended precisely such measures. However, nobody had counted on the junta's abolishing them altogether, and the decision was as usual made completely without warning. The prices doubled several times over, and people were suddenly forced to spend their total incomes on fuel and transport. 88 Generation Students decided to carry out a larger demonstration on August 19. About four hundred people assembled in central Rangoon, but at that point the junta struck immediately. The leaders of 88 Generation Students were thrown into prison, and the activists who had already been in prison for over fifteen years were given prison sentences of up to sixty-five years.

It was in this situation, when 88 Generation Students had been silenced, that the orange-robed monks took over, and a whole world dressed in orange to support their struggle.

On September 5 the soldiers crushed a peaceful demonstration in the little town of Pakokku. Three monks were injured, and the day after, a group of young monks took a number of civil servants hostage in a building near the monastery. They demanded an apology for the unnecessary violence of the previous day, but the military refused and the protest escalated step by step to become the most extensive popular protest since 1988. When the demonstrations were at their peak, over a hundred thousand people had dared to go out onto the streets. The monks marked their attitude toward the military in the same way they had after the elections in 1990: if they passed officers or members of their families they turned their begging bowls upside down and refused to accept alms—a tremendous insult to every faithful Buddhist.

The most emotional moment of the protests was when a group of monks wandered along University Avenue in order to honor Aung San Suu Kyi. When they arrived at the barricades outside her house, one saw how the soldiers hesitated. Would they let the monks through? Would it give them bad karma if they stopped them? An officer pulled out a communications radio, and on a few shaky sequences taken by an onlooker one can see how he nods, puts down the receiver, and gives the order to let the monks pass. Suu Kyi met them at the gates to her home. They prayed together and people standing beyond the barricades claim that she was weeping. She had been able to show herself in public for the first time in several years. And for the first time in several years the monks revealed who they understood to be the rightful leader of the country. It was as though the whole of Burma had been given an electric shock. The Burmese journalist Myint Swe described how the simple fact that she once again appeared in public brought new energy to the democracy movement.

The junta realized that the situation was beginning to get out of hand. To avoid risking anything, the junta leader Than Shwe sent his entire family abroad. They chartered a plane from the air company Air Bagan and flew to Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

However, they really did not need to worry. The military had learned its lesson since the demonstrations twenty years ago, and the whole security apparatus had been trimmed to handle exactly the same type of situation as the monks' protests in 2007. On September 25, the junta threatened the demonstrators with violent reprisals. Soldiers and military vehicles were stationed at the Shwedagon Pagoda, and the next day they attacked a demonstration procession with about seven hundred participants. They fired tear gas grenades and advanced into the crowd of people while striking wildly about with batons and rifle butts. The same afternoon, photos were cabled out from Burma showing monks continuing to demonstrate. Some of them, still dressed in their orange robes, had put on gas masks as protection against the soldiers' attack.

On September 27, reports came in that many members of the army refused to participate in the assaults on the demonstrators. The British newspaper
The Guardian
published information that a group of officers had openly given their support to the protest movement, and a rumor said that
four hundred soldiers at a regiment outside Mandalay had been arrested because they refused to obey orders. It is unclear if the information was really true, but in order to avoid disruption within the army, the junta leader Than Shwe personally took command of the troops.

That was the last day of extensive protests. In the morning, the junta struck out against the monks. Those who were not arrested were compelled to remain inside the monasteries that were surrounded by heavily armed soldiers. By the Sule Pagoda in central Rangoon, a large demonstration was repulsed and several people were killed when the army opened fire. One of them was Japanese photographer Kenji Nagai, who was shot to death when he was about to take photographs of the soldiers' excessive violence. A hidden camera from the radio station Democratic Voice of Burma caught the whole incident on film. It is a macabre and tragic sight when Kenji Nagai raises his camera, adjusts the focus, and then falls headlong backward, hit by a bullet from a machine gun. He dies a few seconds later on the warm, damp asphalt by the Sule Pagoda. Later, when the crowds of people had been dispelled, a soldier went up to him and took the camera from his dead body so as to get rid of all the evidence.

After September 27, things became routine again. The protests faded when people no longer dared to go out onto the streets, and the military was slowly able to regain control.

The teahouse where Zaw Zaw and I are sitting is by coincidence situated just a stone's throw from the Secretariat, the redbrick building where Aung San was murdered in 1947. Aung San's spirit hovers over the democratic movement, in the same way that Aung San Suu Kyi is present in our conversations the whole time, directly or indirectly. In a whisper, Zaw Zaw describes how the Lady followed the protests in 2007, full of hope and expectation. “She realized that it would perhaps not lead to any dramatic changes, but that it was important that people dared to demonstrate openly. It created a completely new generation of democratic activists.”

Zaw Zaw was himself out in the streets every day during those autumn days in 2007. He organized the students and activists who walked side by side with the monks to protect them against police and military harassment. During our conversation, he tells me about the violence that confronted the demonstrators when the junta decided to suppress the revolt. Zaw Zaw was
walking in a demonstration in one of Rangoon's northern suburbs, near the Insein prison, where the military did not have to worry about foreign journalists. On the morning of September 27, the soldiers started firing tear gas at the procession of demonstrators. After that they opened fire with live ammunition.

“One of my best friends got a bullet in his head,” said Zaw Zaw, and for the first time during our conversation at the teashop he looked uncertain. His gaze started to wander, and he smoothed back his dark, long hair and took a deep breath before continuing: “It was as though the whole of the back of his head had exploded. I couldn't sleep that night. Hid in a cellar. Then the adrenaline took over and the day after I was back in the demonstrations again.”

Zaw Zaw marched along the streets together with the orangerobed monks. They clapped their hands twice, then took a step forward.
Clap, clap.
One more step.
Clap, clap.
One more step.

A quiet, slowly advancing procession against violence.

There are plenty of tragic anniversaries in Burma. They have greatly increased in number during the decades marking the struggle for democracy. Aung San's death on July 19, 1947. The massacres at Rangoon University on July 7, 1962. The popular uprising on August 8, 1988. Aung San Suu Kyi's speech on August 26 of the same year. The SLORC's seizure of power on September 18. Suu Kyi's house arrest on May 30, 2003. The crushing of the monks' protests on September 25, 2007. Hurricane Nargis in May 2008. To name but a few.

Sometimes it's good to think about all the years Aung San Suu Kyi has been either isolated or under strict surveillance by the junta and compare what's happened in your own life during the same period. When she was arrested the first time in July 1989 I was a twenty-one-year-old student in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. I still had a year of classes and examinations before I would graduate. After that I have worked as radio journalist, press secretary for a union in Sweden, editor of three magazines, book publisher, and writer of a column in a newspaper. I have had three kids, married, and divorced. I have become middle aged and published five books.

Society has changed dramatically. The Berlin Wall has fallen, computers and information technology have become permanently enmeshed in our lives. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had two terms as U.S. president;
the attacks of 9/11 led to the war on terrorism; China, India, and Brazil have risen to possibly become new superpowers one day; and the people of Tunisia and Egypt have forced their dictators to leave the country.

In Burma, very little has changed during the same period, and Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the time.

The decisive question is when all these tragic anniversaries and all these developments, for better or worse, in the surrounding world will become too much for the military to cope with. When will the protests and the activists' enormous personal sacrifices finally have an effect? All dictatorships fall, of course, but Burma's generals have developed a huge capacity for riding out all the storms and hanging on to their power. They know exactly how to pit countries and interests against each other, with the only end being to preserve military rule. And while this oppression continues, the anniversaries will just become more and more numerous.