The Lady and the Peacock (23 page)

A furious captain swung around to shout and the music stopped in one bar. I felt a bit giggly at this but only for a moment. Captain Myint U came towards us, one arm outstretched and finger wagging, shouting at us to stop walking in procession.

People react to terrifying situations in unpredictable ways. Ma Thanegi's reaction was to get angry herself. “How the hell did this
fool expect our group of forty to walk?” she wrote. “Indian file and ten paces apart? We were just hungry, hot and longing to rest. I thought I had better tell this fool the true meaning of 2/88, and called out to him that I would like to talk with him. I shouted this several times but he didn't hear, he was too intent on shouting to Ma Suu that he would shoot if people blocked road.”

Suu now offered a compromise. “Ma Ma called out to us to walk at the sides of the road—I didn't hear because I myself was still shouting at the captain. But somebody came up beside me and pushed me towards the side of the road.”

Suu herself recalled,

In front of me was a young man holding our NLD flag. We were walking behind him in the middle of the street heading home for the night, that's all. Then we saw the soldiers across the road, kneeling with their guns trained on us. The captain was shouting to us to get off the road. I told the young man with the flag to get away from the front, because I didn't want him to be the obvious target. So he stepped to the side. They said . . . they were going to fire if we kept on walking in the middle of the road. So I said, “Fine, all right, we'll walk on the side of the road . . .” And they all moved to the sides.
⁶

But for the irate young captain, the gesture was too little, too late. “Captain Myint U said he would still shoot if we were walking at the sides of the road,” Ma Thanegi wrote.

At this point Ma Ma walked out into the middle of the road, the boys after her, and by that time she was so close to the soldiers that she brushed past them. They stood petrified, clutching their arms to their chests and looking pale.

I had such a stab of sick fear when I saw her pass through but within seconds she was safe.

Just before this I vaguely heard someone shouting, “Don't do it Myint U, don't do it Myint U!” and I thought it was one of our NLD people, not knowing it was one of the majors who had been ambling behind after us.” She learned later that his name was Major Maung Tun of 1-08 battalion. “He came up running and ordered Myint U not to fire—the captain tore off his epaulettes, hopping around in the dust raised by our group and his own feet and shouting, “What are these for, what are these for?”

I listened for a few minutes thinking he was speaking to us but then realized it was not so. Then I followed Ma Ma and others home to the NLD office . . .

Why did Suu walk back into the middle of the road, risking death? She explained that the captain's rejection of her proposal to walk at the side of the road struck her as “highly unreasonable.” “I thought, if he's going to shoot us even if we walk at the side of the road, well, perhaps it is me they want to shoot. I thought, I might as well walk in the middle of the road . . . . I was quite cool-headed. I thought, what does one do? Does one turn back or keep going? My thought was, one doesn't turn back in a situation like that.”
⁷
In a later interview she said of that split-second decision, “It seemed so much simpler to provide them with a single target . . .”
⁸

She added, “I don't think I'm unique in that.” In situations of sudden danger, “you can't make up your mind in advance what you'll do; it's a decision you have to make there and then. Do I stand or run? Whatever you may have thought before, when it comes to the crunch, when you're actually faced with that kind of danger, you have to make up your mind on the spot . . . and you never know what decision you will take.”

She remembered noticing the reaction of the soldiers who had been aiming at her. “We just walked through the soldiers who were kneeling there. And I noticed that some of them, one or two, were actually shaking and muttering to themselves, but I don't know whether it was out of hatred or nervousness.”

It was this incident which, more than any other, created the mystique of Aung San Suu Kyi, while at the same time—in this land of the zero-sum game—effectively dismantling that of the army. If anyone still doubted that she was her father's daughter, true-born child of the man who had defied both the British and the Japanese and come out on top, they could doubt it no more. When, on July 19, 1947, assassins burst into the conference chamber where he was holding a cabinet meeting, Aung San's response—as instinctive as Suu's in Danubyu—was to stand up and face them: Their bullets tore apart his chest. That was heroism, and returning to the middle of the road in Danubyu and keeping on walking was heroism, too. Suu may be right in saying that she is not “unique” in the way she reacted to a moment of grave peril, but her whole prior life had been a preparation for that moment.

“Ma Suu and I were once tidying the glass-fronted cabinets where [her mother] Daw Khin Kyi's clothes were kept,” Ma Thanegi later recalled. “She took out a white scarf with a large patch of dried blood on it, and
said that when her father died all her mother could say was, ‘There was so much blood! There was so much blood!'

“It was her father's blood. I broke out in goose pimples; I was trembling, with tears in my eyes, to be touching the blood of our martyr, our hero, our god. That must be the most memorable moment of my life.”

Word of what had happened and what had so nearly happened helped to consolidate Suu's reputation among the deeply superstitious Burmese public, many of whom now began to consider her a female bodhisattva, an angel, a divine being. The fact that she had survived the army's attempt to kill her was proof positive of her high spiritual attainment: only someone “invulnerable to attack,” “guarded by deities” and “subject to adoration” could have come through alive.
⁹
She was “a heroine like the mythical mother goddess of the earth,” one admirer wrote three years later, “who can free [us] from the enslavement of the evil military captors.”
¹⁰

In January Suu had told the
New York Times
reporter, “I don't want a personality cult; we've had enough dictators already.” But it didn't really matter whether she wanted it or not. Now she would be stuck with it, forever.

I
N
a letter to her husband written soon after the near-death incident at Danubyu, Suu tried to make light of the risks she was now running, making her High Noon encounters with the army sound more like a rather mucky Girl Guide camp. “Alas, your poor Suu is getting weather-beaten,” she wrote, “none of that pampered elegance left as she tramps the countryside spattered with mud, straggly-haired, breathing in dust and pouring with sweat.”
¹

The self-portrait does not convince: It is very hard to imagine the sylph-like Suu, the very embodiment of Kipling's “neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land,” running with sweat; Ma Thanegi, herself a very ladylike Burmese, was awed by the way Suu sailed through these journeys. “Hours and hours of travel, with stops for her speeches, meetings with supporters etc., and she could do that for days on end, still looking fresh and peaceful,” she noted in her diary.

But even less persuasive is the jolly, carefree mood Suu evokes in the letter. Brigadier Myint Aung's intemperate captain may have been particularly melodramatic in the way he tried to enforce the regime's martial law provisions, but he was not out of step with SLORC—a point borne out by the honors he was later to receive from the regime. The truce between the two sides after the death of Suu's mother in December was no more than a memory now; both were bitterly aware that they were heading for a showdown in which only one would remain standing. A joke current in Rangoon in those days went that Ne Win's favorite daughter Sanda had challenged Suu to a duel. Suu declined, saying “Let's just walk down the street together unarmed and see which of us gets to the other end alive.”
²

Of course the contest was absurdly unequal. The army had already shown itself capable of terminating the democracy protests by the simple stratagem of slaughtering a few thousand demonstrators. Since those bloody days in September, very few people had ventured out into the
streets to protest. Yet this impertinent woman held public meetings day after day, in flagrant breach of martial law, and her presence provided the pretext for thousands to come out and greet her. Why not do what Captain Myint U had so nearly done in Danubyu and simply eliminate her?

Two factors stayed the regime's hand. One was who she was. Because of her father and his unique and central place in independent Burma's founding myth, she was the closest thing the nation possessed to royalty. The generals felt the tug of that themselves—hence the presence of General Saw Maung and Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt on her doorstep in December, offering condolences on her mother's death. For forty years the Burmese state had elaborated and glorified the cult of Aung San; Ne Win's chief claim to legitimacy was that he had been that fiery young general's comrade in arms. It was what ensured the loyalty and unity of the armed forces, however crassly the Old Man and his underlings might govern. Pull down that column and the whole house could come crashing down.

The second factor was that, as young American protesters had chanted at the National Guard on the streets of Chicago in 1968, the whole world was watching. Despite coming to politics so late, Suu was quick to realize that her familiarity with the outside world, her fluent English and her ease at communicating with foreigners gave her a huge advantage over her insular, monolingual and deeply paranoid antagonists.

Burma's encounters with the outside world had for a century and a half been unremittingly bruising, from their serial humiliations by the British to the catastrophe of the Second World War, which saw the country devastated twice over. By bottling the country up, Ne Win had insulated it from most of the turbulence which shook Southeast Asia during the postwar years: He had saved it from being sucked into the Chinese civil war and the Vietnam War. But in Suu the army had an enemy who had spent half her life abroad and for whom foreign parts held no terrors. This advantage of hers was constantly to throw the regime off balance: They could never be sure what their treatment of her might provoke the foreigners to do. Fear that the United States could attack them was one of the motives for moving the capital from Rangoon to an up-country site well inland in 2006. As recently as 2008 they seem to have been genuinely afraid that the Americans could use Cyclone Nargis as a pretext to invade.

So while keen to reassure Michael that the worst that menaced her was mud and sweat, on her return to Rangoon Suu was also quick to make sure her diplomat friends knew all about what had happened. She paid an urgent visit to Martin Morland, the British ambassador, at his residence, to brief him, while Ma Thanegi also got busy. Nita Yin Yin May, the embassy's information officer and a friend of Ma Thanegi's, immediately sent news of what had happened to the BBC. Within a few days, Danubyu was fast becoming a legend both at home and abroad.

Nita Yin Yin May, OBE, courageous information officer at the British Embassy and NLD activist imprisoned in 1989 when she was already pregnant. She gave birth in prison. She now lives in London and works as a producer for the BBC.

“April 7th,” Ma Thanegi wrote on her first day back in the office, “early to work and managed to send word of Danubyu incident to Bangkok through a family friend of Ma Suu . . . She typed the weekly news release herself and also sent letter to
Asiaweek
which she had translated herself . . . . Central Executive Committee meeting, very long one. Wrote out draft of very gentlemanly and furious letter to SLORC about Danubyu incident. All very worried at close shave.”

*

Meanwhile the show had to go on, the schedule was set. The very next day they went back once more to the Irrawaddy Delta—this time bound for the village where Suu was born. Though her parents' home was in Rangoon, her mother had taken refuge here with her two young sons in the last weeks of her pregnancy after Aung San had defected to the Allied side in the war. And now the people of the village were eager to welcome their most famous daughter.

“April 8: left Rangoon 6
AM
from Nan Thida Jetty,” Ma Thanegi wrote. The last and longest stretch of the journey was “by cart, a very long way under blazing sun . . . Lovely lunch at monastery. The village donated 20 bags of rice to NLD. Ma Ma was feeling guilty about taking them until they assured her they have enough food for themselves.

“April 9: got up at 4:30 to leave Dedaye by 5:30. Ma Suu said, ‘What a scandal if I said ‘
Matabu, matabu
, I'm not getting up, I'm not getting up and went back to sleep . . . ' I said no scandal, everyone else would cheer and go straight back to sleep.”