The Lady and the Peacock (13 page)

Aung San Suu Kyi's emotional appeal for disillusioned members of the armed forces was already apparent. Maung Thaw Ka, the ex-naval officer who had stood alongside her during her speech at Rangoon General Hospital, was one of them. And now other senior figures closely associated with the armed forces were coming over to her side.

Suu with NLD cofounder U Kyi Maung.

U Kyi Maung was to become one of the central figures in Suu's early political life in Burma, the chairman of her party who led it to triumph in the election when Suu and all the other top leaders were in jail or detention. A plump, quizzical figure approaching retirement age with a biting wit and a phlegmatic approach to the terrors visited on him and his colleagues by the regime, he was as devout as he was irreverent: His pithy
formulations of how to apply the simple truths of Buddhism to solitary confinement had a powerful influence on Suu herself.
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A career soldier, Kyi Maung had reached the rank of colonel before being sacked from the army for opposing Ne Win's coup. He had spent a total of eleven years in jail for his hostility to the dictatorship and had just emerged from a brief third term when he got the message that Suu wanted to see him.

“I thought to myself, let's see what this lady is up to,” he said later.
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“Now is the time, a revolution is stirring . . . I was a veteran jailbird and well over twenty years her senior. Later on I learned that she was watching people, looking in all directions for people who could be trusted—candidates, you know, for the struggle. She was born with revolution in her blood but she needed all the help possible to see it through. So from then on we began to meet frequently.” At their first meeting he remembered telling her, “Suu, if you're prepared to enter Burmese politics and to go the distance, you must be tolerant and be prepared for the worst.” She listened, he said, “attentively.”

Even more ominous to the regime was the arrival at Suu's side of a man who had been one of Burma's most senior and distinguished soldiers before falling out with Ne Win.

Bony and bespectacled, U Tin Oo stood out among the professors and journalists swirling around Suu like a commando at a cocktail party. A decade after being sacked and jailed by Ne Win, there was still a parade-ground gleam in his eye and the abrasiveness of the battle-hardened soldier in his manner.

Suu, U Tin Oo (third right) and other members of the NLD's Central Executive Committee outside Suu's house in early 1989.

“From the age of seventeen until nearly fifty, my life was a struggle,” he later explained.
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“I had a very rough life. I had to stay many years in dense jungles during the war. I've been wounded in battle numerous times . . . I lost my father, and my son died at a young age. After being promoted to chief of staff I was betrayed, sacked and imprisoned. I lacked politeness, and felt aggressive.”

One of the first recruits to Aung San's Patriot Burmese Forces in 1943 when he was only sixteen, Tin Oo rose rapidly through the ranks. He was twice decorated for valor in battle and was a popular hero of the regime when he was made Minister of Defense in 1974. But during the abortive uprising of that year, his was the name shouted by the crowds calling
for Ne Win to step down and be replaced. Two years later, accused of involvement in an abortive coup, he was sacked and jailed.
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On coming out of prison, he spent two years as a monk, then took a degree in law. As the democracy revolt erupted around him, he was reluctant to get involved: “My [old army] colleagues urged me to address the public. At first I declined. I wanted to continue living quietly practicing
vipassana
[insight] meditation. I think I was a bit attached to the tranquility and peace of the practice. But my colleagues would not give up, and after many discussions we agreed to form the All-Burma Patriotic Old Comrades' League. Nearly all the retired officers from all over the country came to our headquarters, which was my house, to offer their services.”
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Tin Oo himself, after much arm-twisting, followed in Suu's footsteps and made a public speech to a “huge, energetic crowd” outside Rangoon General Hospital on August 27th. But although he represented a formidably prestigious sector of this highly militarized society, Tin Oo recognized that the old soldiers could not stand alone. “Although our group was large, consisting of military personnel and some portion of the population, I knew that I could not lead the entire country along with the ethnic races,” he said. “We needed a leader, a strong leader, who could lead the whole show . . . We needed somebody who understood democracy, who had really lived it.”

A colleague played him a tape of Suu's speech at Shwedagon. “Her words were strong and clear,” he recalled, “and there was no hitch at all. Some people who live abroad a long time can hardly speak Burmese when they come back to Burma, but she spoke fluently and with daily Burmese usage. She was clearly a very rare person. I realized that the people were eager for democracy, and that they were thinking that she was the unifying force that could lead the movement. We didn't say ‘leader'—she was the lady who could try . . . to guide our people to what they desired so much.”

The old soldiers in Tin Oo's League decided that the only hope for the revolution was for the different opposition groups that had sprung up to band together under a single figure. Increasingly Suu was seen as the only plausible candidate. “We agreed that I would meet her,” he remembered, “and that I would go alone. . . . When I came to her house she was sitting on the corner of the sofa in the main room. She was alone. I paid my respects . . .”
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The old soldier and the daughter of his first commander talked over the desperate straits their country was in. “The way she talked, her complexion, her features and gestures were strikingly similar to those of her father,” he said. “She resembled him in almost every way. I thought that she was a female replica . . . I said, ‘I listened to your first public speech. We cannot make it alone. We need unity within the struggle for human rights and democracy.' She agreed. ‘All right,' she said, ‘fine, let's go forward together and work together.' That's all.”

It was an encounter of military terseness and efficiency, worthy of Aung San himself, famous for his economy with words. Both were holding in their emotions, but as the general headed for the door, Suu blurted out, “Did you meet my father? Did you know him?”

Tin Oo replied, “Yes of course, I knew him well.” Suu asked him how that came about. “I told her that I had known him from my days as a cadet and an officer in his Patriot Force. I said, ‘The last time I met your father was at Maymyo, he was the Deputy Chairman of the Governor's Executive Council, and I, a lieutenant. At that time your father was visiting with the Chief of Yawngshwe state . . . And I saw your mother too. That was the last time I saw your father alive.' So she asked, ‘Did you notice at that time a small girl being carried by somebody?'” Tin Oo confessed that he had not, but the coincidence further strengthened the bond between them. The general told her how sad it was that Aung San had not lived to bring his work of nation-building to a conclusion. “Now I have to serve and cooperate with you,” he told her, “so that you, his only daughter, may enjoy the great fruits of Burma's independence.” More than two decades and many years of detention later, Tin Oo remains the most stalwartly loyal of all Suu's colleagues.

The third veteran to stand alongside Suu in the tense days of mid-September 1988 was U Aung Gyi, the gadfly general who, by publishing his anti-regime tirades in the spring, had broken the taboo against open criticism. Aung Gyi himself had spoken at Shwedagon one day before Suu, though his efforts to persuade the crowd to go easy on President Maung Maung were met with stony silence.

Now, for the first time, Aung San Suu Kyi, Aung Gyi and Tin Oo, the emerging leaders of the uprising, banded together. They went to meet the election commission that had been set up following the BSPP's decision to
hold multiparty elections, to learn what arrangements were being made to ensure that they were indeed free and fair. But they came away unsatisfied, and in a public letter to President Maung Maung signed by all three they explained why.

They pointed out that new political parties formed to fight the election would find themselves up against the BSPP, which had had a lock on power for twenty-six years and was still in charge. That could never be a fair fight. Furthermore the BSPP had a massive captive vote bank, consisting of the entire armed forces, all of them members of the party by compulsion, as well as millions of civilian employees of the state. Lacking funding and independent supervision, what kind of a chance would the opposition parties have?

The only solution, as the Rangoon strike committee and others had been arguing, was for the replacement of the present administration with an interim government “acceptable to all the people” to be sworn in to see the elections through.

The date was September 13th, a Tuesday.

What is tantalizing, seen from a perspective of more than twenty years on, is to observe how President Maung Maung, in these tumultuous days, seems to be edging towards the same conclusions as his adversaries in the opposition. In a speech after the BSPP's extraordinary congress, the president conceded that his party was not up to the present challenges. “The weakness of the party is that it was born as a ruling party and grew up as one,” he told the assembled delegates. “In practice, it lacked the experience of making sacrifices, taking risks and working hard to overcome difficulties.” He appeared to be dictating his own party's obituary.

Then, on Friday, September 16th, three days after the publication of the openly hostile letter by Suu and her two colleagues, the regime conceded one of the letter's principal demands. It was the third victory Suu had wrung from them in less than a month. “On September 16th,” as Burma historian Michael Charney records, “the State Council announced that since government servants should ‘be loyal to the state and only serve the people' and in keeping with the multiparty system that the government now promised to create, all state employees, including the military, could no longer be members of a political party.”
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That meant they could not belong to the BSPP. Another huge clump of the ruined state's masonry
came crashing down. Optimists, including Michael Aris, were gladly anticipating the revolution's triumph. “Dear Everyone,” he faxed home on September 15th, “an enormous thank you to you all for helping so much with Alexander and Kim . . . We still have high hopes of bringing them here for Christmas . . . Both of us are convinced that by then peace will have firmly arrived. Even now the final cracks in the edifice of this monstrous regime are appearing. Wish us luck!”

Meanwhile the 600 million kyats the regime had forcibly withdrawn from the bank to pay the army's wages appeared to be losing its adhesive power. The regime might discount the arrival at Suu's side of a figure like Tin Oo, long gone from the army and identified with Ne Win's enemies for more than a decade. But what about the sixteen privates from the 16th Light Infantry who marched through Rangoon in their uniforms though without weapons on September 7th, chanting, “Our military skills are not for killing the people”? What of the officers of the immigration and customs police, marching through the capital in their uniforms bearing banners to demand democracy? Or the Railway Police likewise in uniform and marching in formation behind a woman officer carrying the obligatory photo of Aung San?

Small fry, the senior generals might scoff, lower rankers, easily excited but just as easily scared back into line. But what about the air force flyers who started moving in the same direction? On September 9th, 150 airmen of the Mingaladon Maintenance Air Base went on strike followed by airmen from two other units. In the speech in which he pointed out the failings of the BSPP, Dr. Maung Maung had gone on to conjure a hellish image of the barbarous forces of revolt, those determined to “sweep everything aside, bring everything down, rush in on human waves shouting their war cries to the cheers of outsiders, and establish their occupation.”
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But what of these new recruits to the revolt, marching through the capital behind their drummers and buglers in crisp military order, demanding change?