The Lady and the Peacock (15 page)

Now the army began putting all the intelligence it had gathered to good use—and thousands of activists, fearing what was to come, fled to the border areas to avoid being picked up or killed. Aung Myint was one who sought refuge in the Karen-held areas on the Thai border. “We fled,” he said, “because we realized that this time it was different; not a random massacre as in August. It was meticulously planned and the targets well selected. Because everything had been out in the open during the August–September demonstrations, all the leading activists were known—and the army were looking for us specifically.”
³⁴
Now many of those who had stood on improvised stages and urged their fellow students to struggle for democracy turned their backs on all that. Despairing of the nonviolent path, they threw themselves on the mercy of the ethnic armies that had been fighting the Burmese state for years, some of them since before independence. They asked for food, training and guns, and pledged to fight alongside them.

*

By Tuesday night the fight was over; the streets were clear of protesters, the corpses had been carted off, the blood hosed away, might had prevailed again. Ordinary Burmese who wanted to know what had happened were once again thrown back on foreign radio reports: One of the first consequences of the crackdown was the forcible closure of all Burma's newspapers, including the increasingly insubordinate regime mouthpiece the
Working People's Daily
, which only returned to the news-stands, duly castrated, weeks later. But anyone listening to the BBC would have discovered that, since the army takeover, perhaps one thousand people had been killed in Rangoon alone. It was probably an underestimate. Michael Charney wrote, “Suppression associated with the coup led to between 8,000 and 10,000 deaths.”
³⁵
It was the worst massacre of civilians in Burma's blood-soaked modern history, and one of the worst anywhere in the world in the postwar era.

This was how the Ne Win regime chose to greet the emergence of Aung San Suu Kyi as a rival for power; it was her baptism of fire. How did the “Oxford housewife” react?

Terry McCarthy spent many hours with Suu in the immediate aftermath of the crackdown and in the days that followed. “I went up there with a couple of other journalists and we had a long chat in her living room looking over the lake,” he remembered. “Michael [Aris] was there as well—the two boys had been sent back to school in England some weeks before. I found her so compelling that I went back to her house almost every day after that.

“While we were there the first time the shooting started up—the Burmese army use very large caliber guns, they made a lot of noise and it was clear they weren't shooting at birds. But Suu didn't flinch at all. She was incredibly composed.”
³⁶

At that first meeting she told the Irish journalist that she had been expecting to return to Britain in the autumn, but that the events of the past few months had changed her mind: Now she expected to stay in Burma, “but I would prefer not to remain in politics if I can avoid it.”
³⁷
Yet the next moment she acknowledged the impossibility of that. “You can't pick up something and then drop it,” she said. “You have to see it through. I realized that after the August shootings.

“. . . It's very different from living in academia in Oxford,” she conceded, a touch ruefully. “We called someone vicious in a review for the
Times Literary Supplement
. We didn't know what vicious was.”

*

The events of September 18th were preceded by the most savage purge of the Burmese government since 1962. On the morning of that day President Maung Maung had been summoned to Ne Win's home and sacked. At the same time, all administrative organs of the state, from the State Council and Council of Ministers at the top down to local authorities throughout the country, were abolished or suspended. They were replaced, not by the neutral, interim administration the people wanted but by the army officers who had been in charge until replaced by a simulacrum of civilian rule in the mid-seventies. The masks of socialism
and parliament discarded, the army now confronted the population with its naked power.

Maung Maung's replacement was General Saw Maung, the army's chief of staff, quite as much a creature of Ne Win as the two presidents he had succeeded. When the bodies of the dead had all been burned and the blood hosed from the streets, he took to the airwaves and told the nation that the army had merely been doing its duty—and when that duty was complete, the political evolution of the nation would resume.

The army's immediate job, he said, was to restore law and order and rebuild the state's administrative machinery. Then it would be the responsibility of corporations, cooperatives and “private concerns” to “alleviate the food, clothing and shelter needs of the people.” Once these jobs were done, multiparty elections would be held as promised and the Military Council would not interfere with the Election Commission in any way. “We do not wish to cling to state power long,” he insisted. On the contrary, he spoke of “handing over power to the government which emerges after the free and fair general elections.” “I am laying the path for the next government,” he said, and “I will lay flowers in the path of the next government.”
³⁸

But the Burmese were not fooled: Ne Win, they decided, was merely repeating himself through Saw Maung. “It's going back to the 1962 formula,” a man near the Sule pagoda in central Rangoon told McCarthy. “Nothing different.”
³⁹
After the intense excitement of the past six weeks, a couple of days of hyper-violence had restored the status quo ante. Number One was back on top.

“During the day he carries a revolver,” Terry McCarthy wrote of Ne Win, “and sleeps with a submachine gun on the pillow beside him . . . He is moody and erratic, given to fits of anger followed by periods of weeping. He rarely leaves his compound in Rangoon, issuing orders to the military by radio-telephone. His staff are terrified of him. Just as Burma has been cut off from the outside world, so he is cut off from his own people.”
⁴⁰
A former aide told McCarthy: “He thinks killing is routine, in order for reason to prevail—but not our reason, his reason.” Another former adviser compared him to a viper. “He is not even like a cobra or a rattlesnake,” he said. “They give a warning before they strike.”

But despite the similarity of the general repression, several things were starkly different from the Ne Win coup of 1962. For one thing,
that first coup was practically bloodless. For another, Ne Win was now seventy-seven, and on record as saying that he wanted to retire. His proxy, General Saw Maung, had endorsed the commitment of the Maung Maung government to multiparty elections, to be held within three months, even while his troops were murdering civilians in the streets.

If paying lip service to that commitment was seen as a way to buy off the outside world, it failed utterly: On September 23rd the United States announced it was cutting off all aid in protest at the massacres. Europe and even Japan, long the junta's most reliable supporter, were soon to follow America's cue. But the commitment to elections was also a perverse way to justify the coup: For elections to be held, first order must be restored, which was why the army was obliged to intervene—as the midwives of democracy! Hence the name that the soldiers gave themselves within less than a week of the massacre: the State Law and Order Restoration Council or SLORC—forever after to be compared to SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency in the James Bond films.

The regime's pledge to hold elections was bizarre. But amid the terror, the bloodshed, the exodus of students, the general despair, it provided a rare chink of light: There could be a way forward, despite it all. Perhaps that chink could best be appreciated by someone who had spent nearly half her life in England, a country where the words “Glorious Revolution” refer to an event, exactly three hundred years before, in which no lives were lost and which set British democracy on such a big, fat keel that it has been gliding forward ever since.
⁴¹

So it was on Saturday, September 24, 1988, as SLORC was rising from the ashes of the BSPP, and before Ne Win could change his mind, that Aung San Suu Kyi and her allies announced that they were forming a political party.

A
MONG
the hundreds of thousands who witnessed Aung San Suu Kyi's first major speech at the Shwedagon pagoda was a petite forty-one-year-old woman with bright-red lipstick and a piercing gaze called Ma Thanegi. Recalling the day, she wrote:

August 26, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi makes her first mass public appearance outside the Shwedagon Pagoda, West entrance. Her name is magic: Because she is General Aung San's daughter, there was no one out in the streets who was not curious to see her. The morning was wet and windy, with the field in front of the Western entrance rapidly turning to a mud bath, as I sat with my friends on plastic sheets. The grass had just been cut and we saw small frogs hopping around in panic under our feet. She was three hours late. People who came with her crowded onto the stage behind and around her “to protect her”; but mostly because they wanted to be seen by her side . . .

For Ma Thanegi, who is descended from courtiers in the Mandalay palace and has become one of Burma's best writers in English, it was the start of an intense involvement in the democracy movement.

“Due to a bad sound system we could hear nothing,” she wrote of that day. “But even if they could not hear, people instantly took her into their hearts without question, for she was fair-skinned, she was beautiful, she was articulate, and her eyes flashed as she spoke. Above all, she was our General's daughter . . . We were glad to have a symbol, a leading light, a presence bringing hopes and dreams that her father did not have the chance to fulfill . . .”

Before becoming a writer, Ma Thanegi devoted most of her energy to painting. Enthused by Suu's speech, she and her fellow painters began turning out wall posters supporting the democracy movement. When she took samples to show Suu she was quickly recruited to her staff of volunteers.

“About two days after her Shwedagon speech I went to see Daw Suu with my colleagues in the painters' organization, to give her some posters we had produced,” she wrote in an unpublished memoir of those days. “She discovered that I could speak English, so soon after this first meeting she asked me to join her personal office staff, as I would be useful in dealing with the foreign media people.”

Ma Thanegi began spending long hours at Suu's house, as the new opposition party slowly and chaotically took shape in rooms adjoining the improvised sickbay where Suu's mother, Daw Khin Kyi, still gravely ill, spent her days in bed. She recalled precisely the layout of the house and the people who were then occupying it:

As one entered there was a staircase going upstairs on the left side of the lobby. A round marble-topped table stood in the middle of this entrance. On the left there was a narrow, closed-in veranda, off which was Suu's office, which had once been the dining room. In fact she used the circular dining table with the Lazy Susan as her desk and as a conference table. Beyond were the bathroom, the kitchen and a store room.

To the right of this office was a small room, and beyond it the larger one where Daw Khin Kyi lay in bed. A back corridor connected this room to the kitchen as well. There was a back door and back stairs, rarely used and fallen into decay.

On the other side of the lobby was the parlor that Daw Khin Kyi kept for her visitors, with sofas, tea tables and a piano. This room, which opened onto the side veranda through French windows and which also opened onto the sick room, was kept locked.

I would arrive at the office around 8
AM
and I stayed until 5:30
PM
.

But the general strike and the uprising meant that commuting was often a challenge. “By now, some of the roads were blocked with fallen trees so no buses were running and few cars were on the road. Some cars thought to belong to the Military Intelligence had been burned. My house was a few miles away. Sometimes I came on foot.

“At the start two younger women artists in our group helped with the files but both left, one for the US and the other to marry, and I was left very short-handed.”

By this time Suu had a small but committed and semipermanent staff. There was an assistant called Ko Myint Swe who paid the bills,
ran errands and tracked down books for Suu. Formerly a librarian at Rangoon University, he was “passionate about books,” Ma Thanegi recalled.
¹
His wife Daw Nwe, a poet, would sometimes stay with him; later the two of them would run the party's public relations section from a shed at the end of the garden. When Suu began making frequent public appearances, her personal assistant Ko Myint Swe would be close at hand with emergency provisions.

The two volunteers with whom Ma Thanegi worked most closely were two brothers, “almost like family to Suu,” who had moved into the house and now slept in the main downstairs room. “They were the sons of an ex-army officer called U Min Lwin,” she wrote.

We got along extremely well.

Ko Maw, the elder, was short and wore thick glasses, and talked far too much in a fierce and angry voice. Under his very grouchy exterior he had the kindest of hearts. The younger, Ko Aung, was tall and never spoke unless he was in a good mood. His hooded eyes roved constantly and missed nothing. As time went on, Ko Aung and I learned to work well as a team in any situation—a glance was all we needed to inform each other about something. We relied on each other to get things done—we soon found out that a number of the volunteers preferred the reflected glory of being near Suu to doing any real work. Being extremely bright and street smart, and totally unemotional, Ko Aung was indispensable.