The Lady and the Peacock (42 page)

On July 21, 1989, a SLORC spokesman announced that Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo, the NLD chairman, were to be confined to their homes for a minimum of one year “because they have violated the law by committing acts designed to put the country in a perilous state.” They had been detained under the new rules enacted earlier in the year permitting summary justice by the military without recourse to the courts.

That was bad enough. But all Suu's closest comrades, the forty-odd men and women, including her friend and companion Ma Thanegi, who had spent Martyrs' Day at her home together as the army once again clamped the capital in an iron grip, had been taken off to Insein Jail. Only she and Tin Oo had been left on the outside.

Suu demanded to be taken to join them in prison. When the regime refused, she went on hunger strike. She would eat nothing, she said, unless they agreed to her demand and put her in jail with the rest. In the meantime she would take only water and fruit juice.

Alex, now sixteen, and Kim, eleven, were with her at home—Michael had sent them on ahead while he attended to essential business following his father's death—but now they found themselves spectators to a battle of wills that had nothing to do with them, and that they must have struggled to comprehend.

When news reached Michael of his wife's detention, he set out to join his family as quickly as he could. Fortunately he already had a valid
Burmese visa in his passport, so he was able to leave almost at once, informing the authorities that he was on his way. But when he landed at Rangoon's Mingaladon Airport on July 24th, he discovered that he had arrived in the thick of a major crisis.

“As the plane taxied to a halt,” he wrote, “I could see a lot of military activity on the tarmac. The plane was surrounded by troops . . .”
²
Aris would not have been human if he had not been a little apprehensive: The assassination of Filipino opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr., shot dead on the tarmac of Manila's airport as he returned from exile, was only six years in the past. But no violence was offered him. Aris was escorted away by an army officer, forbidden to make contact with the British Embassy, and told that he could join Suu and the boys if he agreed to abide by the same terms of detention as Suu. He consented promptly and was driven from the airport to University Avenue, where he found the house surrounded by troops. He wrote later:

The gates were opened and we drove in. I had no idea what to expect.

I arrived to find Suu in the third day of a hunger strike. Her single demand was that she should be allowed to go to prison with all her young supporters who had been taken away from her compound when the authorities arrested her. She believed her presence with them in prison would afford them some protection from maltreatment. She took her last meal on the evening of July 20th, the day of her arrest, and for the following twelve days until almost noon on August 1st, she accepted only water.
³

It was another Danubyu, another stand-off, in the series of confrontations that have punctuated Suu's political career, but for the first and only time her husband found himself thrust into the role of go-between. It was clear that the authorities had no intention of agreeing to her demand. So either the family could sit there and watch their wife and mother waste away and die, or they would have to find a compromise.

Dying, he insisted to her, would do no good to the imprisoned students or anybody else. So under her husband's persuasion, Suu agreed to moderate her conditions: She would agree to stay where she was and break her fast on condition that she was given the regime's solemn word that the NLD members who had been locked up would not be maltreated in prison.

The house no longer had a working telephone—to Suu's and the boys' amusement, some soldiers had turned up with a large pair of scissors and snipped the cord after her detention began—so Michael passed on his wife's terms to the officers who came to the compound regularly to look in on Suu. They listened to what he had to say, then went away: Clearly the matter was beyond their competence.

Meanwhile Suu was dwindling away. Already back in February she had been “fragile and light as a papier-mâché doll,” according to Ma Thanegi's diary. Throughout the self-imposed ordeal Suu was “very calm,” Aris wrote, “and the boys too. She had spent the days of her fast resting quietly, reading and talking to us.” But Aris himself was at his wits' end. “I was less calm,” he confessed, “though I tried to pretend to be.” Finally the agony of waiting was broken and he was summoned to a full-dress meeting of senior army officers at Rangoon City Hall to present Suu's demands, recorded by the military's video cameras for posterity. And on August 1st, a week after his arrival and twelve days after the start of her fast, the tension was broken.

“A military officer came to give her his personal assurance, on behalf of the authorities, that her young people would not be tortured and that the cases against them would be heard by due process of law,” he wrote. “She accepted this compromise, and the doctors who had been deputed to attend her, whose treatment she had hitherto refused, put her on an intravenous drip with her consent. She had lost twelve pounds in weight. I still do not know if the authorities kept their promise.”
⁴

She had lost one set of boys—the NLD's student members—and now she was about to lose the other ones: her family. They had a full month together after the beginning of her house arrest. Michael's visa was about to expire but the authorities agreed to extend it so he and his sons could return to Britain together. “Suu recovered her weight and strength in the days ahead,” he wrote. “The boys learned martial arts from the guards. We put the house in order.”
⁵
Then, September 2nd rolled around, school beckoned, and the three of them departed—never to be reunited as a family again.

Suu has always been very reluctant to say much about the personal, emotional costs of her choices, and about the ill effect of those choices on her children she has said next to nothing. “As a mother,” she told
Alan Clements, “the greater sacrifice was giving up my sons”—but then added immediately what is always the corollary: “I was always aware of the fact that others had sacrificed more than me.”
⁶
Coaxed by Clements to say a little more, she added, “When I first entered politics, my family happened to be here with me tending to my mother. So it was not a case of my suddenly leaving them, or they leaving me. It was a more gradual transition which gave us an opportunity to adjust.”

There will be readers to whom those words may seem unacceptably hard-hearted. But Suu was weighing them carefully. In her long war of wills with the regime, all of this was ammunition. The last thing she wanted to do was give her jailors the idea that she or her family were suffering intolerably, that the slow torture of separation was working.

As has been mentioned earlier in this book, the unique aspect of Suu Kyi's long ordeal—one which marks it off sharply from the otherwise comparable experiences of people like Soviet dissident Sakharov or Nelson Mandela—was that, as the regime made amply clear to her, she could have brought it to an end by agreeing to leave the country for ever.

One of the things that made it psychologically bearable to remain cooped up alone while her family was on the other side of the world was the thought of them coming out to see her in the school holidays. But the regime was canny and cruel enough to see that, and to sever that heartstring now. Soon after Michael and the boys got back to Oxford, they learned that this would be their last trip to see Suu—or at least the last one they could bank on. The Burmese Embassy informed Michael drily that the boys' Burmese passports were now invalid because they were no longer entitled—on what grounds was not explained—to Burmese citizenship. “Very obviously,” Aris wrote, “the plan was to break Suu's spirit by separating her from her children in the hope she would accept permanent exile.” Until 1988, the longest time Suu and her children had been separated was a month. Now it was to be more than two years before they would see each other again.

*

In the flower-scented tranquility of University Avenue, Michael, Alexander and Kim had watched Suu shrink and dwindle and fade, then,
once agreement with the authorities was reached, return to her normal state. But meanwhile outside in the city's streets the State Law and Order Restoration Council set about killing off the democracy movement once and for all.

Suu's apprehensions about the treatment of her party comrades, the motivation for her hunger strike, were not in the least fanciful. In the year since the crackdown of September 18, 1988, three thousand alleged activists had been jailed; that number doubled in the four months between Suu's detention and November 1989, and included many of her colleagues in the party. They were summarily tried by the newly empowered military tribunals, but they were also frequently tortured: One month after Suu's detention began—three weeks after the end of her fast—a declassified American Embassy cable revealed that the torture of political prisoners included burns to the flesh by cigarettes, electric shocks to the genitals and beatings so severe that they caused permanent damage to eyes and ears and sometimes death.
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Hundreds more such prisoners were also punished in a way that was to become routine as the small but brutal civil wars on the frontier dragged on. They were forced to work for the army fighting Shan insurgents in northern Shan State, either lugging the army's equipment as porters or forced to walk ahead of the troops as human mine-detectors: If they were not blown up, it was safe for the soldiers to follow.

The mobilization of millions of Burmese against the military regime in the past year and a half now elicited a terrible retribution. Suu has always insisted that simply being confined to her home she had far less to complain about than colleagues who lacked the protection of her name and fame, and she is right. “The military regime seeks not only to break down the identity of former political prisoners,” said a report by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, reviewing thousands of cases of abuse since 1988, “but to make them walking advertisements for the consequences of speaking out against the regime. Many former political prisoners repeatedly explain that once they are a political prisoner they are always a political prisoner.”

Some of Suu's most senior colleagues were silenced more or less permanently. Win Tin, the veteran dissident journalist on the NLD's Central Executive Committee, was sentenced to three years' hard labor
on October 3rd, but his term was repeatedly extended until he was finally set free in 2008, after nineteen years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement. And two days after Win Tin was sent down, the man who had become one of Suu's first political mentors when she returned to Rangoon to nurse her mother, the writer and war hero Maung Thaw Ka, was given a twenty-year sentence which, given his frail condition, was in effect a sentence of death.

Maung Thaw Ka, his name almost unknown outside Burma, is a good symbol of the awakening that had occurred since the spring of 1988, and of how ruthlessly and vindictively it was now being trampled. It was he, the fifty-one-year-old naval officer-turned-writer, who had given Suu a tour of the places in Rangoon where troops had killed students in the early months of the revolt, long before she decided to offer her involvement; it was he, with his big ears and wedge of a nose and a paunch showing through his striped shirt, who shared the little podium with her when she gave her maiden political speech at Rangoon General Hospital.

Like Tin Oo, the former defense minister, his career spanned the heyday of Aung San as well as that of his daughter. He was serving in the Burmese Navy during the war when the British forces handed the ship on which he was serving, the
May Yu
, over to Aung San's command. It was he who led the guard of honor when Suu's father was piped aboard.

He went into the navy as an ordinary seaman, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. In 1956 the ship he was serving on was wrecked, and he and twenty-six shipmates took to two life rafts. One of them sank, with the loss of all on board; seven of the men on the second raft also died but he and the others survived for twelve days on boiled sweets and rainwater before being rescued. The book he wrote about the ordeal,
Patrol Boat 103
, made him famous. When he retired from the navy in 1969 he quickly became one of Burma's best-loved writers: Unlike Win Tin, whose refusal to compromise in his journalism led to him being effectively silenced for many years before 1988, Maung Thaw Ka was editor in chief of a state-sponsored magazine under the socialist regime, and wrote witty and gently satirical pieces that were immensely popular. As a retired sailor he was expert at sailing close to the political wind without being capsized.

The Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner, who knew him as a friend, said, “He was a lovely man. Before 1988 he would travel around the country
and give lectures on literature. Agents from Military Intelligence always occupied the front row of seats in the hall, but he was a war hero so it was very difficult to punish him.”
⁸
He also wrote poetry, and translated much English poetry into Burmese, including Shakespeare sonnets and poems by Donne, Herrick, Shelley and Cowper. His English was fluent. Through the years of Burma's enforced seclusion he was one of the few who insisted on throwing open windows to the world.

With the uprising of 1988 he saw a chance of real change coming to Burma and seized it, befriending Suu and helping her to understand in detail how the movement was developing, cosigning a letter to the authorities in August 1988 protesting the brutal suppression of demonstrations, and joining the Central Executive Committee of the NLD when it was formed. But he went further than that: He also wrote an open letter to the Burmese Navy, exhorting the service to stand by the people in opposing the military junta.