The Lady and the Peacock (27 page)

The civil disobedience campaign was a watershed for the party. After that, said Ma Thanegi, “Everyone knew it was going to be dangerous. Some students living in Ma Suu's compound had monks chant a special mantra for the deceased over them, in preparation for sudden death. Some of them became monks or nuns for a few days.”

Some people in the party's office who did not want to face the consequences melted away, and quietly severed their ties with the party. “But,” said Ma Thanegi, “almost all of us around Daw Aung San Suu Kyi felt it would not be loyal to abandon her in the face of danger.”

The regime's reaction was furious and instantaneous: On June 6th they threatened action against any printers who followed the NLD's instructions, and soon afterwards launched a countrywide blitz on NLD publications. A week later 800 printers and publishers were summoned to a compulsory meeting and warned unequivocally to toe the SLORC line. “Decisive action” would be taken, they were told, against any of them who “slandered” the junta or the army.

Both sides were painting themselves into their respective corners. A military spokesman said martial law would remain in place even after elections had been held, and that it would not surrender power until a new constitution had been agreed by parliament. Suu countered by saying that the NLD could not participate in elections “until the question of the transfer of power is resolved.”

Then, in a speech delivered on June 26th, Suu broke the taboo that had retained its force throughout this year of tumult: She attacked Number
One by name, spelling out the charges which could be read between the lines of her address at Shwedagon.

“General Ne Win,” she declared, “[who is] still widely believed to control Burma behind the scenes, was responsible . . . fashioning the military into a body answerable only to him . . . The opinion of all our people is that U Ne Win is still creating all the problems in this country.” He “caused this nation to suffer for twenty-six years,” she pursued, “and lowered the prestige of the armed forces.”
¹²

It was a breathtaking assault: the distillation of a lifetime of antipathy, dating back to the effective exiling of her mother when she was sent to be ambassador to India in 1960. Suu could not guess the consequences of these words, but she knew enough about their target to guess that they could be severe. This was the all-powerful dictator who had not hesitated to have civilian protesters murdered in their hundreds and thousands. And even trivial annoyances provoked him to wild, disproportionate violence. One of his several wives had deserted him for good after he hurled a heavy glass ashtray at her in a rage, injuring her. When the peace of his lakeside villa was disturbed by a Christmas party at a nearby hotel in 1975, he had personally stormed round with a platoon of soldiers and taken part in beating up and humiliating the guests and destroying the band's instruments. When a European woman stood up to complain, he grabbed her party dress, ripped it down the front, and threw her back into her chair.
¹³
And this was the man whom Suu now chose to seize by the horns.

*

In the same speech, Suu rolled her party's siege engine up to the junta's walls. She introduced Burma's new calendar of martyrdom. The generals might demand that their country be called by a different name now, but if the NLD had its way they would have to swallow a raft of holidays to commemorate atrocities for which they were responsible: The people's uprising of 8/8/88, the Saw Maung crackdown of September 18th; Martyrs' Day, July 29th, with the list of martyrs brought up to date; and the most immediate, and the one aimed most precisely at Ne Win, the twenty-sixth anniversary, on July 7th, of the demolition by high explosives in 1962 of Rangoon University's Student Union building with an unknown
number of students inside, the event which had ushered in Burma's authoritarian era. Each of these dates, Suu told the press conference, would be marked by mass demonstrations.

What, besides reminding the world of how the army had treated its own citizens, would be the point of these demonstrations? For SLORC, which continued to believe, or claim to believe, that Aung San Suu Kyi was a puppet of the communists, it was as clear as day: This was the planned revolution. “They [the NLD] planned to start a mass uprising,” General Khin Nyunt, number two in SLORC, told a press conference in early August, “by inciting the people at Shwedagon pagoda as part of the confrontation campaign of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on July 19th, Martyrs' Day. Should that instigation have failed, they planned to try again on the anniversary of the ‘Four-Eights' [8/8/88]. Had the mass uprising taken place, they planned to garner more forces from within [the country] to oppose the government while from the outside the members of the Democratic Patriotic Army trained by the Communist Party of Burma would move in. They planned to move politically as well as militarily until an interim government was established.”

There is no indication that the NLD had prepared such a plan; Suu's commitment to nonviolence had been so consistent and was by now so well-known—and endorsed by the pacific and disciplined behavior of NLD rallies, even the huge ones—that a violent takeover with Suu at the head was literally unthinkable. “We don't have any intention to seek a confrontation,” Suu insisted to the
New York Times'
Steven Erlanger in a telephone interview. “We intend to carry on peacefully with our rallies. We do not want any trouble.”
¹⁴
At a rally outside the Sule pagoda in downtown Rangoon on July 3rd, attended by more than 10,000 people, she urged SLORC to agree to hold talks with opposition parties in order to “thrash out existing misunderstandings.”

But there had never been much talking between the two sides. And this time the regime's answer came not in words but deeds: the arrest the following day of Win Tin, the journalist who had been there at the creation and who was one of the most combative and articulate figures in the party. It was a blow that stunned his colleagues, Suu included, and from which the party struggled to recover. He was to remain in prison for nineteen years.

More answers came within days. The army rolled back into town, sealing the university completely to prevent the gathering for the planned commemoration of the destruction of the Student Union building. And lest anyone question the need for that many troops to control a nonviolent movement, bombs started going off, one that same day at an oil refinery in Syriam, killing two refinery workers and badly injuring a third, a second on July 10th at Rangoon's City Hall, killing three and injuring four. Three young NLD members were picked up and accused of the refinery bombing. “Now it is obvious who is behind the recent bombing,” said Khin Nyunt, “and plans to disrupt law and order.”
¹⁵
The allegation, given the NLD's nonviolent track record, was laughable—but menacing. As a foreign diplomat remarked, the bombings could be terrorism—or the work of agents provocateurs, providing the excuse for another crackdown.

A bare week remained to Martyrs' Day: The Burmese state's founding rite was now embroiled in bitter recrimination. The aim of the ceremony was to recall those who had died for Burma's independence and inspire the country with gratitude and patriotic pride; instead it now threatened to add yet more pages to the martyrs' roll, and further stain the nation with blood and hatred.

SLORC decided to pretend that nothing had happened in the intervening year. On July 16th, reverting to the mode of icy protocol last glimpsed on the eve of Daw Khin Kyi's funeral, they sent round an invitation to University Avenue, politely requesting Aung San Suu Kyi's presence at the Martyrs' Mausoleum, near the Shwedagon, for the usual annual event. Also included in the invitation was U Soe Tint, an old friend of Suu's family, the principal of Rangoon's State School of Fine Arts and Daw Khin Kyi's regular escort at the event in years past.

The leaders of Suu's party convened to consider the invitation. “After CEC meeting,” wrote Ma Thanegi, “Ma Suu decides she will not attend. She will march with her followers later, after the official ceremony, when the mausoleum is opened to the public.” She was sticking to the party's plan, come what may. “NLD was quite sure it could control the masses—but SLORC almost accused NLD of planning a mass revolt,” Ma Thanegi wrote. One Burmese journalist, a veteran stringer for Agence France-Presse called U Eddie Thwin, desperately tried to obtain the regime's
assurances that it would not slaughter the marchers as long as they remained peaceful. “He was at the daily press conferences of SLORC and kept asking questions to find out if we would be safe if we simply marched and did nothing else.” After great persistence he was rewarded with a reply in the affirmative. “Finally he got the reassurance, I think on the evening of 18th,” she wrote. “He called me and I told Ma Suu about it.”

But at almost the same moment SLORC sent army trucks with loudspeakers round the city to send out a very different message. There was to be no marching: People were free to pay their respects to the nation's martyrs on July 19th as usual, but only in ones and twos. A new martial law decree, number 2/89, laid down that any groups approaching the mausoleum consisting of more than five persons would be subject to three years' imprisonment, life imprisonment, or death, sentences that could be imposed by army officers on the spot, with no need for a court hearing.

That evening, too, Burma's brief experiment with
glasnost
came to an abrupt end. The last accredited foreign correspondent to leave Rangoon was Reuters reporter David Storey—perhaps the first and last correspondent to be deported from the country despite having his visa in order. “I was picked up at my hotel at night on the 18th, after curfew, although I had a valid journalist visa,” he recalled. “I was treated firmly but politely and it was clear that they did not want any journalist to cover the events that followed. I was taken to the airport in a jeep, guarded by a section of the troops, and had to spend the night on a cot on the floor in the departure lounge. The following morning I was put on the first flight to Bangkok.”
¹⁶

So subscribers to the Reuters wire service were not to learn what happened late on the evening of July 18th: The thousands of fresh troops rumbling into the city, including battalions that had been used to crush the protests the previous August; the road blocks set up on main roads and the barbed wire stretched across them; the hundreds of what Military Intelligence deemed to be troublemakers picked up; the particularly ugly detail of the city's hospitals being told to prepare for an influx of casualties. Telephone and telex lines to the outside world were cut, and Burma went back into its shell.

*

It was at dawn on Wednesday, July 19th, Martyrs' Day, that Suu and her colleagues learned of the army's preparations.

“I arrived at Ma Suu's home around 7:30 am,” Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary. “By tradition a food offering for monks took place at the party's headquarters at dawn on the 19th of every month. Present at the offering was a party member called Soon Kyway who had arrived on foot from Tharkayta, a satellite town. She told Daw Aung San Suu Kyi that she saw many checkpoints on the streets and feared for Ma Suu's safety. Others, too, urged Suu to reconsider her plans.”

The dreadful massacres of September 18th and 19th, 1988, which had also been preceded by army warnings, were still a garish memory. There was no reason to suppose the army would behave any differently this time.

“Daw Aung San Suu Kyi then decided she would not march out,” Ma Thanegi went on. “She wrote out a message, which she had someone type up on wax duplicating paper, saying that in order to protest people must stay home and boycott the ceremony. She signed it, then hundreds of copies were printed and people sent off immediately to distribute them all over town.” Explaining the decision, Suu told her party colleagues, “We do not want to lead our people straight into a killing field.”

Before the age of Facebook it was not simple to call off a major rally at the last moment. And, anyway, after days of feverish preparation, many students were unwilling to fall into line.

“Thousands of students disregarded Suu's message,” Ma Thanegi wrote. “For days now they had been hyped up over the march. They did not meet at the football field as planned but marched out from their own meeting places.”

The army stopped them from approaching the mausoleum. “Many beaten up with batons and many thrown in jail,” she wrote. “All through the morning we got news of students being chased and beaten up on their way to the mausoleum.”

A surprising number succeeded in evading arrest. “About 10:30
AM
Moe Hein came running to Ma Suu's house to tell her about how many had managed to escape from the army by running away. Her only comment was, ‘Why did they run? Why didn't they sit and take it?' before stalking off into her office. I thought, she's thinking about Gandhi and the salt march.”

No deaths were reported on July 19, 1989—in contrast to the thousands massacred exactly ten months earlier. Suu's hastily duplicated flyer had helped to avert a bloodbath. But the real confrontation still lay ahead.

*

Nobody could be sure what was going to happen next, but it was clear that it would be nothing good: The rift between the two sides had gone too far to be mended. Many people in the movement were already in prison. The rest would not have long to wait.

“The next day Aung Aung [Suu's head of security] called me very early,” wrote Ma Thanegi, “saying it was not wise to come, things looked bad. I said in that case I should be there.

“When I got to the house, Ma Suu told me that the previous night she could not sleep until she had decided that she should be arrested.” If that was to be the fate of her colleagues, Suu was determined that she would share it. “Then, she had a good sleep and she had just told Aung Aung to call the local authorities to tell them to come and arrest her [. . .] The party's Central Executive Committee arrived for a meeting around 9
AM
and by 9:30 the compound was surrounded by troops and no one was allowed in or out. I heard that U Nu, Burma's first democratic prime minister, came to the gate in his car but was turned away by the soldiers.” An inveterate opportunist, the man who a year before had insisted that he was still the legitimate prime minister had turned up wearing a rice farmer's bamboo hat, the NLD's electoral symbol.