The Lady and the Peacock (54 page)

In Burma's best-known beauty spots, new hotels were already being thrown up in readiness for the hoped-for tourist influx, O'Brien reported—but here was the world's most famous Burmese telling everyone not to bother.

“Burma will always be here,” Ms. Suu Kyi said, announcing the boycott. “Visitors should come later.” She went on, “Most materials for hotels are imported. The result is that each hotel signifies a lot of money, but really only for overseas suppliers. Some construction companies have even been bringing in workers from abroad. Within the country there's really only one privileged group making money.”

The previous month, in one of her “Letters from Burma” in Tokyo's
Mainichi Daily News
, Suu had argued that it was “not yet time to invest” in Burma.
⁶
And in the
Independent
interview she made a more wide-ranging attack on foreign investment, condemning a recent visit by a British trade delegation. “It's not right for the British government to do all it can to support human rights here and then to promote trade with Burma against democracy,” she said. “The sort of involvement being suggested won't help to bring about sustained economic and social development.”

The issue of investment and sanctions has continued to provoke fierce debate ever since. In the spring of 2011, Suu's declaration that she was still opposed to the lifting of sanctions provoked the
New Light of Myanmar
to warn that she and her party “will meet their tragic ends” if they continued in this vein. It was the first threat to her since her release in 2010: proof that, even though sanctions have not achieved their goal of inducing the regime to negotiate, they remain a very touchy subject.

Ma Thanegi, Suu's friend and companion who kept the intimate diary of their campaign travels in 1989, claims that the permanent rift that opened up between the two women was caused by their conflicting views on sanctions. Freed from Insein Jail in 1992, Ma Thanegi had gone round to greet Suu when she emerged from detention, and resumed helping out in the party's office a couple of days a week. But soon, she said, she found herself in disagreement with Suu's policy pronouncements.

“When she began telling foreign investors to stay away, I told her that it would hurt the people, who need jobs. She replied, ‘People will just have to tighten their belts.' I said, ‘There are no more notches.' I insisted on this issue but she said, ‘It's not true.'” And there the discussion ended.
⁷

Ma Thanegi claimed that this was another case in which Suu's instincts for moderation were trumped by the more hard-line demands of others in the party—the same process, she says, that happened before Suu's house arrest, when young party members opposed U Kyi Maung's suggestion
that they try to negotiate with SLORC and Suu agreed to adopt their tougher approach. She also maintains that Suu naively read too much into Madeleine Albright's vigorous statements of support after her visit in September 1995. Ma Thanegi noted in her diary:

The first two or three days when she spoke from her gate she talked of reconciliation, and I heard through a US Embassy official who was the CIA Chief that his Burmese MI contacts said SLORC was pleased, but still had a “let's wait and see” attitude. Some NLD members were angry with her for being “soft” and asked her if she were “surrendering.” Her speeches turned hard-line. I told her she should not openly criticize [SLORC] but should wait to discuss these things when she meets them. She said she must be honest. I told her some people do not deserve honesty.

Madeleine Albright . . . came and said we are behind you all the way, and not being a political person, Ma Suu doesn't see that “behind you all the way” is just politics, just happy talk—they are not going to send in the Marines to shoot the military down and impose democracy.

Since 1995 Ma Thanegi has repeated her attack on Suu's line on sanctions and the tourism boycott many times and very publicly, perhaps most damagingly for the NLD's cause in the pages of
Lonely Planet's
controversial Burma guide book. “Ma Thanegi . . . told us many NLD members have always been against the [tourism] boycott,” the guide's editors wrote in the 2009 edition. “Many people around Aung San Suu Kyi tried to dissuade her on the boycott,” they quoted her as saying. “In '96, '97, '98, '99. I gave up trying around then.”

Suu may at first have regarded Ma Thanegi's opinions as worthy of her attention but not necessarily more than that: After all, the two of them had become friendly during the campaign tours, but Ma Thanegi was not even a member of the party, let alone of its Central Executive Committee. But when Ma Thanegi began repeating them to any foreign journalist willing to listen—the “no more notches” line has been recycled many times over the years—she must have considered the possibility that her closest companion, the one to whom she had given soap, toothpaste and a good pair of sandals before she was taken to jail, had to all intents and purposes gone over to the other side.

The point of no return came when the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh quoted the “no more notches” line in a piece about Burma published by
the
New Yorker
in August 1996.
⁸
After that, communication between the two women ceased.

“I didn't want to really quarrel with [Suu],” Ma Thanegi told me, “so I stopped going to see her. Then after the
New Yorker
article came out Michael [Aris] wrote me a letter accusing me of disloyalty.” Ma Thanegi became
persona non grata
for the party: She must have done a deal with the devil.

As her diaries on Suu's campaign trail make clear, Ma Thanegi is a very robust, self-confident, plain-spoken woman, never one to hide her views for fear of causing offence: One of the reasons she made such a good companion for Suu was that she was incapable of flattering her. On the other hand she admitted to me that she had been subjected to several periods of interrogation during her time in jail, including at least one that went on all night. Given the importance to the regime of weakening Suu's prestige abroad, transforming her most sophisticated Burmese friend into a highly articulate enemy would be a goal worth pursuing.

Ma Thanegi denies that she was acting on the orders of SLORC in attacking Suu. “They did not try to put any words into my mouth,” she told me. “They knew they couldn't influence me at all. I knew that if I stopped being involved in politics my life would be okay.”

But her frequent and uniformly anti-NLD comments to foreign media show that she has by no means “stopped being involved in politics.” A former friend said he knew that Ma Thanegi had been “turned” by MI in prison, and even knew the person responsible. “Khin Nyunt's man worked on Ma Thanegi successfully,” he said. “Colonel Hla Min was her main contact as he was one of the most polished, by the military's standards, and US-high schooled.”
⁹
This information was confirmed by Aung Lynn Htut, a former senior officer in Military Intelligence and number two in the Burmese Embassy in Washington, who sought political asylum in the United States in 2005, after the fall of Khin Nyunt, his boss. “All political matters were under the control of Counter-Intelligence Department,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Khin Nyunt allowed Colonel Hla Min to keep in touch with Ma Thanegi.”
¹⁰

Why would she succumb? In return MI would have promised to leave her in peace, the former friend suggested. “Being left alone is no small reward if you are an artist, a writer, who has many foreign visitors. You'd
be surprised how weak-kneed professionals and intellectuals get in these situations, especially if there is both pressure and the seduction of access to power. Picking up the phone and talking to an MI agent and getting one's Internet line fixed is a huge privilege, and a concrete allure of being in the good books of the regime.” He said the 2006 film about informers in communist East Germany,
The Lives of Others
, gives a good idea of the Burmese situation.

Ma Thanegi denied having been given any material inducements to attack her old friend. “I have a comfortable living because of my inheritance,” she said, “I'm fine, I don't need to live in a huge house.” But Ma Thanegi has never had any political aspirations of her own, so what possible reason could there be to attack Suu and her ideas so publicly if not to weaken her standing and improve that of the regime? If she remained as fond of Suu as she evidently was throughout the trips they took together but felt that she had recently taken some wrong turnings, surely she would have taken care to make her views known only to the close circle of people in the party who were in a position to influence her? Going public with her denunciations appears to be the clearest possible declaration of enmity.

The larger question is: Was Ma Thanegi right? Was Suu justified in supporting sanctions which could further damage the already miserable living standards of ordinary Burmese? By yielding (as Ma Thanegi claims Suu did) to the demands of her more hot-headed colleagues, was she not backing a policy that would only antagonize the regime while condemning her people to unrelenting poverty? Should she not have been prepared to sacrifice her revolution for the sake of her people's prosperity?

But Suu's insight was that, under this regime, economic liberalization could not be expected to produce any significant degree of freedom or democracy—or even more generalized affluence. SLORC's most significant reform was to allow foreign companies to invest in Burma, but from the outset they ensured that all the investment was done through them personally or through cronies in their control: No foreigner was allowed to get an independent toehold in the country. Profits went straight into the generals' pockets and any sign of independence was promptly punished.

Suu only began speaking out in favor of sanctions once the faint hopes of dialogue after her release had come to nothing and her party had pulled out of the National Convention. By speaking out now she was putting in
play the one tool that guaranteed her a hearing and a standing both in Rangoon and the world outside. Had she opposed sanctions she would have gained nothing, and there would have been little besides moral squeamishness to prevent the rest of the world forming an orderly queue at the border to do business with SLORC: After all, Western businessmen do business with plenty of other vile regimes around the world. But if Burma had gone the way of Indonesia under Suharto, the Philippines under Marcos, Zaire under Mobutu or Libya under Gaddafi
with her blessing
—what would have been the point of her entering politics in the first place?

In the
New Yorker
piece where Ma Thanegi ventilated her opposition to sanctions, Amitav Ghosh noted how Suu's manner had changed since her release. In their first interview, soon after she emerged from house arrest, they had laughed and joked together; in the second, nearly a year later, she rebuffed his arguments bluntly. For example, she refused to accept that the governments of ASEAN should be condemned for launching a policy of “constructive engagement” with Burma. “Just because [these governments] have decided on a policy of constructive engagement, there is no need for us to think of them as our enemies,” she told him.

“I was witnessing, I realized, Suu the tactician,” he wrote. “She was choosing her words with such care because she wanted to ensure that she did not alienate the leaders of nations who might otherwise think of her as a threat.

“. . . She now seemed much more the politician. Suu now had a party line.”
¹¹

Ghosh gives the impression of being rather upset by the change—as a fellow Oxford graduate and an old acquaintance he seems to think he deserved something rather more intimate and, dare we say, feminine in the way of conversation than what he got the second time around.

But within the very narrow scope the regime had left her, Suu was learning the ropes.

*

The other issue Suu raised in her interview with Harriet O'Brien has been just as hotly debated as trade sanctions: the question of whether or
not tourists should visit Burma. Since Ne Win's coup in 1962, the vast majority of Burmese have been isolated from the rest of the world, which has left them ill-informed, culturally impoverished, and at the mercy of the state's propaganda. By opposing tourism, it was argued, Suu exacerbated that isolating effect, helping to keep her people mentally shackled in a country that has become a prison for them, closing off valuable sources of free information. At the same time she put a moral obstacle in the way of non-Burmese learning more about her country at first hand.

Suu's supporters countered that most tourists who visit tropical destinations have no real interest in what is going on in the places they visit and have no significantly beneficial effect on the lives of the people they come in contact with. In Burma they travel on roads built by forced labor and stay in hotels built on land obtained by bulldozing the villages of the poor. And because of the generals' stranglehold on the economy, most of the money they spend ends up in the regime's pockets.

Suu and her party's opposition to tourism, amplified in the West by the Burma Campaign UK and the US Campaign for Burma, has certainly helped to keep the growth of Burma's tourism sector in check: It remains minuscule compared with that of neighboring Thailand—Burma gets only 1.4 percent of the number of tourists who visit Thailand, 200,000 compared with its neighbor's fourteen million
¹²
—but the regime's failure to create a modern tourist infrastructure and an environment in which foreign businesses can work without fear of having their assets stolen are probably more significant factors than the boycott.

In November 2010, in the run-up to Suu's release, the NLD announced a U-turn on tourism. Win Tin, the veteran journalist and member of the party's Central Executive Committee who had served nineteen years in prison, said in an interview that the NLD had changed its policy. “We want people to come to Burma,” he said, “not to help the junta but to help the people by understanding the situation . . . For the outside world to see, to know our situation, that can help our cause a lot.”
¹³
Later Suu herself endorsed the change. While not encouraging package tours and cruises, she said, she believes that “individuals coming in to see the country, to study the situation in the country, might be a good idea.”
¹⁴
And in June 2011 the NLD formally reversed its policy on the issue.