The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (61 page)

She hoped, perhaps, that something like this would happen all around the country and that the “second struggle for independence,” as she called it, would play out along similar lines. Peaceful but determined,
the National League for Democracy would stand firm, and the army would somehow magically give way. Sadly, though, nothing of the sort has happened. Instead over the seventeen years since this incident the NLD has been largely decimated, its leadership almost entirely in prison or under house arrest. Democracy is no nearer today than it was in Danubyu that hot spring day. What went wrong? And what else could have been done?

*

Aung San Suu Kyi was born on 19 June 1945, the third child of General Aung San and his wife, Daw Khin Kyi. These were the chaotic weeks after the British Sixteenth Army had retaken Rangoon and Lord Mountbatten was about to begin talks with the brash young leadership of the self-styled Burmese Anti-Fascist League. Her eldest brother would soon die in a tragic drowning accident, and her other brother would become an engineer and settle in San Diego, California. She was just two when her father was assassinated.

At age fourteen, when her mother, once a nurse, was appointed by U Nu as Burma’s ambassador to India, Aung San Suu Kyi left the country, not to return to live for nearly thirty years. She went to school in New Delhi and then went on to read philosophy, politics, and economics at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. Through mutual friends, she soon met her future husband, Michael Aris, an expert on Tibetan language and literature and a gentle and selfless man, who quickly fell in love with the beautiful and exotic student from Burma.

Before settling down to married life, she first had a spell in New York. This was in 1969, but Aung San Suu Kyi seems to have had no attraction at all to the great goings-on of the Swinging Sixties. No Woodstock or Vietnam protests, no experimentation of any kind. Instead she found a very proper job on the staff of the UN’s Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (in real life no less dreadful than it sounds) and, choosing not to live alone, shared an apartment with Daw Than E, a much older Burmese woman (her “emergency aunt,” she would call her), who had been a famous singer in Rangoon in the 1930s and 1940s. No parties or concerts but instead evenings and weekends volunteering at a local hospital or an occasional visit to our house in Riverdale.

All the while she kept up an active correspondence with Michael
Aris. When she finally agreed to marry him, they moved together to the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, where he worked on his Ph.D. and served as a tutor to the royal family, including the future king, Jigme Wangchuk. Aung San Suu Kyi worked in the little Foreign Ministry, which was being established.

She had a feeling that some national calling would one day compel her to sacrifice her family life. In one of her nearly two hundred letters to her future husband around this time, she made it clear that she might one day have to return to Burma. “Should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.” But for now the young couple were busy with two children, both sons, and after several blissful years in Asia returned together to Oxford, where Michael Aris pursued his scholarship and she began her own research, on her father and on Burmese history. I visited them in the summer of 1984 at their town house off Banbury Road. It was sunny and warm, and their brick-walled garden was full of flowers. Daw Than E (her emergency aunt) was there too, and the conversation soon turned to films about the British Empire, Merchant Ivory’s
Heat and Dust
and David Lean’s A
Passage to India
having shown recently in Oxford’s cinemas. Michael sat contentedly and quietly smoking his pipe, their kids playing in the room nearby. In her always polite and somewhat schoolmarmish way, she encouraged me to come to England for a Ph.D. and to work on Burmese history as well. In later years I felt I had a sense of the happy life both she and Michael had given up.

It was only by chance that Aung San Suu Kyi was in Burma when the 1988 protests nearly toppled the regime. Her mother had been hospitalized with a severe stroke, and she had gone back to Rangoon to live at her family’s sprawling lakeside house and look after her. “I had a premonition,” Aris wrote in the introduction to a collection of essays about his wife, “that our lives would change forever.”
¹²

During the uprising itself she had been besieged by university students and others, asking her to join in. And she had been deeply moved by the sight of thousands carrying her father’s portrait, some as they were gunned down. After a few weeks she gave in and her maiden speech in late August excited the country. She turned to her father’s rhetoric and called repeatedly for “unity” and “discipline.”

In the days after the uprising was crushed, she banded together with several former army officers to form the National League for Democracy.
Brigadier General Aung Gyi, the man who had led the 1962 takeover with Ne Win, would be its first chairman. The vice-chairman was General Tin Oo, army chief of staff in the 1970s who was jailed for his alleged role in the abortive 1975 coup. Others included Colonel Kyi Maung, a member of Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council in 1962, and Brigadier Aung Shwe, a man who had almost led his own coup against U Nu in 1958. All had been in the Japanese-trained Burma Independence Army under Aung San, and all had served in the Fourth Burma Rifles under Ne Win, rising to senior positions in the 1950s. Then they had fallen out with the top man, and now, in the central irony of recent Burmese history, they were heading the opposition, together with Aung San’s daughter.

*

Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest on 20 July 1989 while many other party members were imprisoned. The army had allowed the NLD to form and organize but decided to crack down when Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularity and determination quickly showed itself. She kept up a strict regime, meditating, listening to the news on the radio, exercising, and reading. Her husband was allowed to visit from time to time. The State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) accused the NLD both of being in cahoots with the Communist Party of Burma and of being part of a conspiracy with foreign “right-wing” forces, producing their arguments in the wonderfully titled
The Conspiracy of Treasonous Minions within the Myanmar naing-ngan and Their Traitorous Cohorts Abroad.

Despite the crackdown and the arrest, the government went ahead and in May 1990 did what no one expected and what no once since has really been able to explain: it held reasonably free and fair multiparty elections. There were problems, of course: The campaigning itself had been very restricted, and many parts of the country, the hill areas in particular, were in no position to take part because of the ongoing insurgency. But the balloting itself was fine, with less irregularity than any of the elections in the late 1940s or 1950s. The outcome, though, was a shock for the men in uniform, returning a clear victory for the NLD. With around two-thirds of eligible voters casting their ballots, the NLD won just under 60 percent of the vote and 392 out of 492 seats in the new Assembly. The military’s proxy was the National Unity
Party, the rebranded Burma Socialist Program Party of the ostensibly retired strongman General Ne Win. But the National Unity Party trailed far behind with only 21 percent of the vote and 10 seats, the rest going to a medley of mainly ethnic-based parties. The military had seriously miscalculated the mood of the people.

What next? The army was schizophrenic. On the one hand, it appeared to have in mind its glory year of 1959–60, when it ran a highly competent, if ruthless, government and then handed power back to an elected government, pleased with itself for having done so and congratulated by admirers both at home and abroad. It had tried to do the same now, with 1959 as the template, right down to the slum clearings and the newly paved roads. On the other hand, it knew that 1960 brought problems and then a new army coup in 1962; it thought this time needed to be different, not just a handover to elected officials but something that would more clearly preserve its legacy and its authority. And in Aung San Suu Kyi, the passion and anger of the uprising behind her, it sensed a danger, to its institution and to itself personally that had had no equivalent in 1960. On 28 July the NLD met at Gandhi Hall in Rangoon and adopted a resolution calling on the SLORC to stand down and hand over power to a government based on the results of the elections—in other words, to the NLD. There was talk of trials for “crimes against humanity.” The whole world called on the Burmese officers to give up. They dithered and then rolled back on their promises, making things up as they went along.

Aung San Suu Kyi was freed six years later in July 1995, though she was able to travel outside Rangoon only with permission. Every Saturday afternoon at four she stood up on a little box and spoke from behind the gates of her house, and hundreds of people came to listen and ask questions. But few democratic reforms were in sight. There were some talks with the government, but the two sides were far apart, and no agreement was reached. Resorting to nonviolence tactics, she tried to provoke the government and test its limits through her speeches and through her attempts to ignore its restrictions on her movement. But she wasn’t facing the Raj of the 1930s or the Johnson administration of the 1960s. These were tough men who played a very different game. In 2000, Aung San Suu Kyi was again placed under house arrest, this time for a little more than two years.

She was disliked by many in the military, partly because of her perceived
foreignness. For all her time abroad, however, she was first and foremost her father’s daughter. For Aung San, a no-nonsense, straight-talking approach coupled with courage and an iron will seemed a winning combination. And it was these same qualities that did much to win her popular adoration. But to believe that it was this single-mindedness that won independence is to misread the lessons of the 1940s. Britain’s withdrawal from Burma was part of its withdrawal from India; the question was one of the nature and timing of the postcolonial transition. Unlike the British, Burma’s generals were never ready to quit Burma. It wasn’t a matter of forcing the pace. They were considering going in a different direction altogether.

*

By the late 1990s, beneath the talk of democracy and dictatorship, Burmese society was changing fast. The population was surging ahead and by 2006 had reached roughly fifty-three million people, a very young population, the majority having been born
after
the 1988 uprising. Towns and cities became more crowded, with fewer and fewer qualified teachers and doctors or any sort of infrastructure (including electricity) to meet expanding needs; and in the countryside, where most of the people still lived, an ever-increasing number of farmers squeezed out a livelihood on the same little plots of land. Many moved north in search of new opportunities, or simply to survive, to the jade mines and the bustling Chinese border towns, or across the Tenasserim Range into Thailand, where hundreds of thousands of Burmese today toil away, illegally and for little money, in construction jobs, performing menial labor, and in the sex industry. HIV/AIDS spread rapidly, in a society with increased narcotics use and where family planning had been virtually nonexistent during the Ne Win years. Some began to warn of an impending (or present) humanitarian crisis, in which millions of the country’s poorest, their savings finally gone, were finding it impossible to meet their most basic needs, to feed themselves and their children or obtain even the most essential health care.

There was political change as well. The military government convened a National Convention to discuss and draw up a new constitution, one of its committees chaired for a while by the mischievously named U James Bond. The convention was the government’s response to the elections in 1991 and its refusal to hand over power to the National
League for Democracy. It initially included the NLD and other parties that had won seats in the polls, but it also included representatives of the ethnic insurgent armies and handpicked hundreds of others. It was clear from the start that this wouldn’t be a freewheeling debate on the future of the country, and the aim was fairly plain: find some constitutional formula that would include a paramount role for the army. The military may have been thinking about constitutions in nearby Thailand or Indonesia, both of which, in the recent past, ensured army autonomy as well as a certain number of seats in Parliament for the armed forces. Or it may have looked to its own colonial past (without admitting it), to the constitutions of the 1920s and 1930s that allowed British mandarins only very slowly to hand over government responsibility to elected politicians, while retaining for themselves a range of emergency powers, undiminished authority over the highlands, and an unambiguous sense of who was ultimately in charge.

For most in the National League for Democracy this was an unacceptable process. They pleaded for an amendment in the convention’s working procedures and in particular asked for a repeal of the rule that made a felony any criticism of the military during the convention debates. This was refused. For two rainy days in November 1995 the NLD’s eighty-six delegates boycotted the convention, and on the third day they were formally expelled. The convention soon went into a long recess.

For a while things simply plodded on. But then, in 2000, there was again a new energy, a new momentum. The National Convention was reconvened, and the adoption of a new constitution was to be followed by fresh elections and a civilian government. A somewhat more hurried round of talks began between the Burmese military and the insurgents, maps were examined, and options for local self-government were weighed. In 2003 a new government was formed and placed under the prime ministership of intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt. A seven-step Road Map to Democracy was unveiled. There were also signs of greater openness. The International Committee of the Red Cross was allowed for the very first time to visit prisons on a regular basis. The government admitted to a serious HIV/AIDS problem after years of denials and asked for international assistance. More than a hundred political prisoners were released. And talks were held between Aung San Suu Kyi and government representatives, at first secretly and then
openly. International negotiators scurried between the two sides, hopeful for a long-awaited breakthrough.