Living Silence in Burma (13 page)

Before the SLORC’s coup, both Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo had called for the formation of an interim government. After the coup, they had asked civil servants to continue to stay home, but people were hungry and in desperate need of money. The junta ordered civil servants to go back to work by 3 October or lose their jobs. The offer was sweetened by the promise that they would receive back pay for September, when no one had gone to work. On 3 October almost everyone showed up at their
offices.
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As a result, Aung San Suu Kyi and other NLD leaders decided the best course was to go ahead with election campaigning, hoping to bring about change through the ballot box.

Student activists initially continued to press for an interim government that would write a new constitution and take responsibility for holding elections. To carry out their work, ABFSU members in Rangoon organized the Democratic Party for a New Society (DPNS), which held political education sessions at its offices and investigated and publicized the problems of farmers and relocated urban residents. Similarly, in Mandalay, many high-school and university students continued their activities under the auspices of a political party called the Organization of Students and Youth for National Politics.

During this period, as many as sixteen student fronts appeared, including groups led by ethnic minority students. While they tried to unite, differences in ideology, mistrust between rural people and city people, and tensions between ethnic minorities and Burmans made it difficult for them to work together. Also, some of the larger student groups could not easily accept that they did not have the right to speak for everyone.

Senior politicians also often broke with each other over personal differences and contentious power dynamics. The difficulties that many of the political organizations faced with factionalism related to the fact that most were organized in the pattern of patron–client relations. When conflicts emerged, leaders were reluctant to compromise, and many thought the better option was to leave and form a new group.

Ethnic minorities that supported participation in the elections faced difficult decisions of their own. Some thought it was best to join the NLD, because the NLD had a chance of winning the election and effecting change through legislation. Others chose to support ethnic-based parties that might succeed only in minority regions, but offered more space for voicing demands for ethnic cultural and political rights.

The NLD was the most successful in bringing diverse people together under a common platform, but it too had to struggle to maintain internal unity. It was composed of two different groups: ex-military men on the one hand, and intellectuals and students on the other. Nevertheless, the NLD quickly attracted widespread support, primarily because the public was so taken with Aung San Suu Kyi. Almost three million people joined the party and large crowds attended her rallies. She and Tin Oo campaigned extensively, including in the ethnic minority states. Wherever she arrived, excited crowds waited to greet her. The ethnic nationalities were particularly touched by Aung San Suu Kyi’s visits to their areas,
which echoed her father’s visits four decades earlier. Many hoped that she too would be sympathetic to their concerns.

Aung San Suu Kyi and her party members stood out because whenever they appeared in public they wore traditional clothes and often
kamauk
, the wide-brimmed farmers’ hats which became the symbol of the party. Many men in the NLD wore dark-coloured Kachin
longyis
, which had been favoured by student demonstrators in 1988. Aung San Suu Kyi donned the clothes of the various ethnic groups in each region and, like Burmese women in the past, always pinned a sprig of flowers in her hair.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s words also resonated with the feelings of the people. Drawing on both Western democratic practice and Buddhist ideology, she articulated what was wrong with authoritarian rule. She often talked about the ten ethical rules for kings, which are based on Buddhist concepts of loving kindness, tolerance and self-control.
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Derived from Buddhist scriptures, the rules were widely applied to pre-colonial kings in Burma. It was believed that kings who strayed would see their kingdoms disintegrate, and they themselves would lose the right to hold power.

The SLORC realized that, despite the proliferation of parties, Aung San Suu Kyi had the power to unite people and posed a serious challenge to their own party. Something had to be done. First the authorities threatened supporters with serious consequences if they attended her rallies, but people still came. The regime’s propaganda wing circulated vulgar cartoon images of her and repeatedly argued that her long years abroad and marriage to a Westerner made her unfit to be a leader.
¹⁴
Because of lingering memories of foreigners taking Burmese wives in the colonial period, this did bother some citizens, but her status as the daughter of a great national hero carried more weight.

In April 1989, when she arrived in the town of Danubyu in the Irrawaddy Delta and was about to address the crowd, an army captain gave six soldiers the order to shoot her. Just before they did, a major stepped forward and stopped the soldiers.
¹⁵
Aung San Suu Kyi continued walking towards the stage, but the pressure had clearly escalated.

Although Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD focused on the election campaign rather than resuscitating a mass movement, they joined with student groups in commemorating the anniversaries of significant days from the 1988 demonstrations. The regime saw such events as provocative and sent troops. At a commemoration Aung San Suu Kyi attended for students killed at Myenigone the year before, soldiers shot and killed one of the student participants. Aung San Suu Kyi herself was briefly arrested.
¹⁶

What really upset the military top brass, however, was that Aung San Suu Kyi dared to criticize General Ne Win by name. Furthermore, she urged the army to be loyal to the country and the people rather than to General Ne Win. The government-controlled press attacked her for sowing discord between the
tatmadaw
and the people, and within the
tatmadaw
itself.
¹⁷

On 19 July, Aung San Suu Kyi had planned to march with thousands of students to the tomb of her father to honour Martyr’s Day, the day that General Aung San and his cabinet were assassinated in 1947. The SLORC responded by filling the streets with troops. Fearing that the military would storm the marchers, she called off the march at the last minute.
¹⁸
Rumours were already spreading that she would be arrested. It happened the next day. The military surrounded her compound on 20 July 1989 and put her under house arrest while sending thirty supporters who were there off to prison. On the same day, Tin Oo was arrested at his house, although neither he nor Aung San Suu Kyi was formally charged.
¹⁹

The military intelligence had no legal justification for arresting Aung San Suu Kyi, but they searched her compound thoroughly for anything that could be used against her. They had found out that General Kyaw Zaw, a leading member of the CPB and one of General Aung San’s close associates in the Thirty Comrades, had sent a letter for Aung San Suu Kyi through his daughter. Although the CPB had collapsed in April 1989 and the letter was apparently of a personal nature, the military intelligence hoped to use it to show a connection between the NLD and the outlawed CPB.
²⁰

San Kyaw Zaw, General Kyaw Zaw’s daughter, was arrested. She had been a lecturer at Rangoon Institute of Economics but was never promoted to full professor because her father and other family members had joined the CPB. She insisted that she had not been able to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi and had destroyed the letter, but she was still ordered to sign a confession saying that she had delivered it. She refused. She was held at an interrogation centre for forty-five days, during which she was at first denied the right to sleep or bathe. Suffering from gynaecological problems, she was taken to a military hospital at one point, but not allowed to stay for treatment. Instead she was taken back to the interrogation centre where she says a drunk captain tried to rape her.

When they were not intimidating her, San Kyaw Zaw’s interrogators sought to break her resolve through flattery. They told her that she was much better than Aung San Suu Kyi, because she had never left the country or married a foreigner. Still she held firm. When she started a hunger
strike, they finally released her without having obtained the false confession. Nevertheless, the regime justified its arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi with the charge that she was being manipulated by the CPB while also involved in a rightist conspiracy involving Burmese exiles and foreign embassies. The faulty logic implicit in the contradictory accusations did not seem to bother the SLORC, and they never produced any hard evidence.
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Numerous NLD members throughout the country were also arrested in July, and Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo were both later disqualified from running in the election. U Nu was arrested in December 1989 for refusing to withdraw his claim that his party represented a parallel government. Some other active parties were banned for their supposed CPB connections. Arrests of leading student activists had begun even earlier. The students’ commemorations of the bloody days of one year before were drawing large crowds. To prevent them from spreading any further, the SLORC decided to quash the organizers.

Min Ko Naing was taken in March 1989, and when the Democratic Party for a New Society held its first conference in Rangoon, several central executive committee members were arrested and imprisoned. Moe Thee Zun managed to escape to the Thai–Burma border, where he joined the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF), which had formed in late 1988.

In addition, the SLORC imposed numerous restrictions that limited the parties’ ability to campaign. First, martial law was still in effect and anyone who said anything considered to be an attempt to split or defame the
tatmadaw
could be arrested. Moreover, meetings of more than five people were prohibited. Parties could not distribute party literature unless it had been cleared by the Home Ministry. The regime controlled all forms of media, and often used the media to attack the NLD and student organizations. Parties were promised the right to hold rallies and to have access to media airtime only during the last three months of the election campaign, but the election was not until May 1990, giving the regime over a year to try to manipulate the situation in its favour. Perhaps most worrying, when the election rules came out, there was no mention of how or when a new constitution would be written or when power would actually be transferred.

Despite the political arrests, which totalled an estimated six thousand by November 1989, members of the NLD continued to campaign throughout the country.
²²
University students who had joined the NLD’s youth wing were particularly active campaigners, finding the work both challenging and exhilarating. Even those who were not NLD members
began to campaign for the NLD, realizing that only by uniting behind one party could they achieve a decisive election victory.

In the villages, those campaigning for the NLD often came into conflict with NUP organizers. Village heads who supported or were afraid of local military authorities sometimes let the NUP give public speeches, but not the NLD. To get around this obstacle, student activists sometimes pretended they were visiting friends and went quietly from house to house promoting the NLD. In some cases, the monks stood up for the NLD campaigners, giving them a chance to campaign more freely. But villagers were often afraid to be seen talking to NLD party members and publicly feigned indifference. They worried that if the NLD lost, they would be punished by the authorities and their livelihoods would be affected.

Another problem for the campaigners was that they often could not obtain the support of an entire village because of pre-existing social divisions. For instance, if there were two monasteries in the village, each abbot would have his own supporters. If one abbot came out in favour of the NLD, his supporters would follow suit. But the other abbot might refuse to support the NLD as a result. The same could happen if there were influential families in the village with long-standing rivalries.

Much of the campaigners’ time was spent instructing illiterate villagers about how to mark the ballot properly and how to recognize the parties’ symbols. The campaigners also explained what they thought democracy would mean for the villagers. Economic issues were a key concern, and Dr Tint Swe, an NLD candidate, often emphasized in his speeches how Burma had once been the richest country in South-East Asia, but was now one of the poorest. Putting it in terms the villagers could understand, he said that 5-ton trucks full of gold had disappeared because of General Ne Win’s rule. Some campaigners told farmers that if the NLD won, they would be able to grow whatever they wanted without government interference, and they would no longer be locked in stocks in front of the police station if they could not meet their rice quotas.

Despite the authorities’ harassment of political parties during the campaigning, the voting on election day itself was relatively free. Out of the 20.8 million people who had the right to vote, 72.5 per cent cast ballots.
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Party representatives were allowed to be present at the polling stations, and the vote counting appears to have been fair. In the rural areas there were reports of intimidation, and some villagers could not reach polling stations because they were over a day’s walk from their villages. Rangoon residents who had been moved to satellite towns because of their vigorous support for the pro-democracy demonstrations in 1988 also
could not vote.
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These problems, though, were relatively minor. It seems that the regime believed that with the top NLD leaders under arrest and many of the leading student activists in prison or exile, the NUP could pull off an election victory.