The Lady and the Peacock (48 page)

And in a related development occurring at the same time, the monks themselves—the incarnation, one might say, of Burma's collective conscience—began for the first time since independence to demonstrate their anger at the impiety of the rulers.

Burma loves anniversaries, especially ones of great political moment, so when August 8th—the second anniversary of the brutal army crackdown against the 8/8/88 uprising—rolled around with the generals no closer than ever to convening parliament, some kind of protest was inevitable. What was interesting and new—and, for the generals, extremely unsettling—was that among the brushfires of anger that broke out on that day, the most significant was a protest not by students but monks.

On the day of the anniversary, several hundred monks left their monastery in Mandalay before dawn with their begging bowls. There was nothing unusual about that: It was the unchanging ritual of the monks to give laypeople living and working near the monasteries an opportunity to gain merit by offering them food every morning of the year. What was different this time was that the monks carried their bowls upside down, symbolizing a boycott, a temporary excommunication, of the military regime:
the exclusion of the army from the spiritual benefits it was in the exclusive power of the
sangha
to confer. Their march was joined by thousands of laypeople.

The military had already been deployed around the city in anticipation of trouble. The soldiers ordered the demonstrators to halt, and when they refused the soldiers opened fire, killing at least four people, two of them monks.

In response to the bloodshed, the
sangha
announced that their boycott of the regime would go on indefinitely. It spread rapidly from Mandalay to the rest of the country. By October, when the regime ordered the monks to end the boycott or face the forcible disbanding of their orders, around fifteen thousand monks in 160 monasteries in Rangoon—one-quarter of the capital's total—were on strike. In Mandalay, the religious capital of the country, the number was about twenty thousand.

When students and workers had protested en masse in 1988, the army's response was straightforward brutality, with thousands mowed down in cold blood. But this time around, because the protests were led by and overwhelmingly composed of monks—acting, as they were to do again seventeen years later in the Saffron Revolution, when it became obvious that for non-monks to protest would invite bloody mayhem—the junta's response was deeply conflicted.

On the one hand they threatened to dissolve hostile monasteries and force protesting monks back into ordinary life; and these threats were eventually acted upon when three monastic sects were dissolved. And the army garrisoned Mandalay to stop the protests recurring.

“The military has raided more than a dozen monasteries,” the
Washington Post
reported,

. . . and seized a variety of prohibited items ranging from political tracts to slingshots . . . This former Burmese capital has the look of an occupied city. But instead of foreign invaders, like the British who captured Mandalay in 1885, today's occupiers are members of Myanmar's own Tatmadaw, as the army is called. Helmeted troops armed with automatic weapons and grenade launchers patrol neighborhoods on foot and in trucks, man barbed-wire roadblocks on downtown streets and guard key intersections and installations. As the 11
PM
curfew approached one night this week, soldiers cradling German-designed G3 assault rifles set out in single file through a residential neighborhood like a combat patrol through enemy territory . . .
¹¹

But at the same time as purging the
sangha
, a quite different approach was tried: Some generals responded to the monks' demand for an apology for the killings in August by getting down on their knees and begging forgiveness. “The military stepped up efforts to appease senior Buddhist abbots,” the
Washington Post
's report continued, “by staging televised appearances in which the generals knelt before them . . . The generals . . . were filmed giving the monks such nontraditional offerings as color television sets and bottles of imported soft drinks.”

*

SLORC's split response betrayed the fact that the monks' challenge, coming on top of the drubbing the regime-sponsored NUP had suffered at the ballot box, was a powerful assault on their claims to legitimacy.

Legitimacy in postcolonial states is a fragile and fissiparous commodity. In the first forty years of Burma's history, legitimacy boiled down to a single name: Aung San, the saintly father of the Burmese Army, the new nation's founding hero. Prime minister U Nu had been the Bogyoke's close comrade-in-arms, and ruled in the martyr's place, following the plans for government which Aung San was developing when he died, with a broadly socialist program and with the ethnic minorities linked to the center in a loose federal structure.

When Ne Win's military junta seized power in 1962, Aung San's name was again invoked at every opportunity. And this time authority was found in Aung San's writings for the dramatically anti-democratic change of direction dictated by Ne Win.
¹²
In 1957, in the run-up to the coup, Ne Win's pet scholar, Dr. Maung Maung (who became a short-lived President of the Union in 1988), published in the
Guardian
, the Rangoon-based newspaper he edited, an essay entitled “Blue Print,” which was purportedly Aung San's vision of Burma's future. In the essay, written in early 1941 when he was in Japan, the future Burmese leader denigrated parliamentary government which “fosters the spirit of individualism,” advocated a “strong state administration as exemplified [in the 1930s] in Germany and Italy,” and declared that “there shall be only one nation, one party, one leader” and “no parliamentary opposition, no nonsense about individualism. Everyone must submit to the State which is supreme over the individual.”

This was nothing like the sort of democratic model of governance advocated by Aung San after the defeat of the Japanese and his alliance with the returning British, the sort of policy adopted by Burma when it became independent. And although the “Blue Print” has for many years been routinely listed among Aung San's other literary works, Gustaaf Houtman, the Burma scholar, has uncovered persuasive evidence to indicate that it was probably not written by Aung San at all, but dictated to him by his Japanese military patrons, reflecting their own fascist priorities. But because Maung Maung depicted this prescription for authoritarian rule as the work of the sainted national founder, Ne Win was able to maintain the national Aung San cult without a hiccup.

All that changed dramatically with the ascent of Aung San Suu Kyi. As we have seen in previous chapters, the embrace by Suu of forces hostile to military rule led to the junta quietly and progressively dismantling the Aung San cult—casting themselves off from the one figure who for decades had given them his blessing from beyond the grave.

Where to turn instead for authorization? On coming to power, General Saw Maung had insisted that SLORC had no intention of hanging on to power for long, but planned to hand over to a multiparty democracy—civilian rule—as quickly as possible. But now that “that woman” had won the election hands down, a quick handover was out of the question. SLORC would have to remain in power indefinitely—but on what basis?

With Aung San no longer available, the regime cast further back, to the line of kings abruptly amputated by the British in 1885. Renaming the country Myanmar, discarding “Burma” as a colonial invention (although the word “Bama” has been in use for centuries by the Burmese themselves) was a first step. But that was for foreign consumption. If the generals were to be accepted on the same terms as the people had accepted their kings, they would have to start behaving more like kings. And fundamental to Burmese kingship for a thousand years had been the king's relationship to the
sangha
.

When the Buddha and his successors endorsed the right of a particular monarch to rule, that legitimized the king in the eyes of the people; and the monks performed the ceremonies of purification and so on which kept the palace on the right track, karmically speaking. It was a symbiotic relationship, because the king in turn was the patron of the
sangha
, giving
robes and food to the monks in person and spending a large part of his fortune building them monasteries and pagodas for the greater glory of the Buddhist faith. The king was also the ultimate authority, with the right to de-recognize parts of the
sangha
if particular groups of monks went off in strange directions.

It was this relationship which SLORC, and General Saw Maung in particular, now needed to buy into to obtain legitimacy in the eyes of the people—the more urgently because Aung San's daughter had gained an overwhelming popular mandate to replace them. But now, at the military's moment of greatest need, the monks were voting with their feet and their bowls—for the other side. No wonder the generals were deeply divided over how to respond, with the followers of the tough Ne Win line urging a fierce crackdown, while the more pragmatic and/or superstitious were desperate to find a compromise, even if it involved going down on their knees and giving the monks Coca-Cola.

It is perhaps not surprising that General Saw Maung, the titular head of the junta, a mediocre, ill-educated career soldier like most of the officers with whom Ne Win surrounded himself, should have proved unequal to the strain caused by these rebuffs by both the people and monks. The first public sign that he was facing an insurrection within his brain as well as on the streets came in a long and rambling speech he gave in November 1990, a month after crushing the monks' uprising.

“If we look at the efforts for independence,” he told an audience of local administrators in the town of Prome, in a speech monitored by the BBC,

. . . if we choose a certain outstanding period to speak about that, we will have to say it is the time of the Thirty Comrades . . . If we are to assume that Burma gained independence because of the Thirty Comrades, then the Thirty Comrades is the core force of Burma. The Defense Services were born from that core force and continue to exist until today. In other words, the Defense Services have always been there. They were there throughout efforts for independence and also after independence, protecting the nation from the perils that emerged from time to time . . .

Through the rambling emerges his compulsion to plot himself in the line of heroes who created the independent nation—in other words, in the line of Aung San, whose name he cannot bring himself to utter.

Next he turned to the 1988 uprising—and he is unable to dissemble his sense of guilt for what happened.

A similar situation arose again in 1988 and everybody knows that the Defense Services had to control the situation. The year 1988 was not so long ago and whatever happened then cannot be forgotten. Whatever I have done was done so that there is no blemish either in the nation's history or in my own personal history.

The Defense Services are the core force of the nation, and they in turn are born from the people. It is essential to understand this . . . I understand that we cannot be divorced from the people. We are also constantly teaching the Defense Services personnel so that they understand this also . . .

And what of himself? This general with the people's and monks' blood on his hands? How was he to convince himself that he possessed any worth at all? “I am a person who never lies,” he slurred. “I have never once lied throughout my career. I work with discipline and abide by rules. I never lie to the others and I hate anyone lying to me . . . How long am I going to be lied to?”

Within a year, Saw Maung had gone off the rails completely. During a golf tournament for top army officers in Rangoon on December 21, 1991, he brandished his revolver and threatened to shoot onlookers, declaring himself to be the reincarnation of King Kyansittha, one of Burma's greatest, and most peaceable, early monarchs. Four months after that, in April 1992, it was baldly announced that Saw Maung had resigned due to ill health.

General Saw Maung, the ruling general purged in 1992 after he became mentally unstable.

*

What is legitimacy and how is it obtained? According to the German sociologist Max Weber, it means that if you issue a command, it is probable that it will be obeyed, perhaps out of fear but for other reasons, too: “affective” reasons, that is emotional reasons, and “ideal” reasons, having to do with beliefs and thoughts. Weber thus picks up the themes of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who argued that the authority of government rests on opinion—opinions of interest, corresponding to
fear and the hope of advantage—but also opinions of right: At least some subjects must be convinced that it is right to obey before the ruler can muster enough force to persuade those who are not.

But in the aftermath of Burma's election, and SLORC's decision to ignore the result, the junta's stock of legitimacy was desperately low. An army of occupation can keep a territory subdued, as the British did in Burma following their three nineteenth-century wars there—but that is not legitimacy. And SLORC was now in a very similar position: ruling by fear alone.