The Lady and the Peacock (44 page)

But to read Suu's political career in this register is to overlook the way her thinking developed during the years of house arrest, especially during the very harsh period with which her detention began, and the way this new thinking linked up with a movement that had very quietly been gathering force in Burma for fifty years, though largely unknown to the outside world. It is also to overlook the fact that, despite the failure to capitalize on the early success and change the system, and despite her many years of enforced absence from society, she still enjoys the allegiance of the great mass of Burmese people.

These two facts—her quiet emergence as a symbol and talisman of the underground movement, and her continuing mass support—are closely connected. They explain why, for example, the mass monks' revolt
of September 2007, the so-called “Saffron Revolution,” culminated in one deputation of monks making their way through the military road blocks to her gate. They explain why the generals continue even now to regard her as the number one domestic menace to their continued rule, despite the fact that they have systematically dismantled the national cult surrounding her father and have done everything they can think of to marginalize and demonize her.

*

It is necessary to chart the development of her thinking after she was detained.

For Suu, steeped in the literature of Britain and India as well as Burma, the challenge for Burma was not to ape the political forms of the West, nor to find the right balance of tyranny and license to allow the capitalists to storm in and take over as they had done in Bangkok. The deformation Burma had suffered under Ne Win was an offense and an insult, a prolonged abuse to the nation's soul. The challenge was to find a way out of the trap Ne Win had constructed, the bunker he had turned the country into. Democracy was part of that, to be sure, but the true challenge was a far greater one than swapping one political system for another. And it was during her house arrest that she identified the chink of light that she dared to hope could lead her and her country out of the trap, the bunker, the labyrinth.

In the long essay Suu researched and wrote during her year in Shimla in 1986, she celebrated what India had achieved thanks to Gandhi, the “Great Soul,” and his contemporaries and forbears in the Indian Renaissance. “In India,” she wrote, “political and intellectual leadership had often coincided. Moreover, there had been an uninterrupted stream of able leaders from the last years of the nineteenth century until independence. This provided a cohesive framework within which social and political movements could experiment and mature.”
²¹
Such a framework was conspicuously absent in Burma—but that did not mean it could never exist: All it meant was that Burma's modern experience had been far too compressed for such an evolution to occur. She quoted a British scholar, J.S. Furnivall, founder of the Burma Research Society, who she felt was on the right track. He wrote in 1916:

We were looking for the human Burma, that mysterious entity of which each individual Burman . . . is on an infinitesimal scale a manifestation and a representative, which is a norm subsuming all their individual activities, and which represents all that is vital and enduring in this country as we know it; the partnership, as Burke puts it, between the dead, the living and those yet to be born . . .

For the Burma that we hope to assist in building is like some old pagoda recently unearthed and in course of restoration . . . [It is necessary] to clear away cartloads of rubbish. We have carefully to set in order the foundations and the whole building brick by brick, but I for one firmly believe that if the Burma of the future is to be a lasting fabric, it must be built up on the old foundations.
²²

Suu commented, “In such views can be seen the seeds of a renaissance: The urge to create a vital link between the past, the present and the future, the wish to clear away ‘cartloads of rubbish' so that old foundations might become fit to hold up a new and lasting fabric. But it was a renaissance that did not really come to fruition.”

Written shortly before her return to Burma in 1988, with her encounters with Burmese students in Japan and their hopes for her so fresh in her mind, it is clear that the essay was more than the dissection of some dusty old intellectual movements. Whether consciously or unconsciously or somewhere between the two, Suu was limning her own task and her challenge: what someone with her parentage, education and knowledge of the world might dream of achieving. It had culminated in the High Noon of Martyrs' Day, in calamitous defeat, detention, humiliation, dispersion. But beyond those awful experiences, and in a strange way
through
and
thanks to
those awful experiences, she glimpsed a way out. And it all began with meditation.

*

That intellectual and spiritual journey is a large part of the story of the past twenty years: how and why she remained relevant and inspiring to her people—and to millions more beyond Burma's borders—despite everything its rulers could do to render her irrelevant, alien and extraneous. In the process she has at least made a start on creating a new Burma “built
on the old foundations” as Furnivall put it—one built on the truths of Buddhism, but not in the old, mechanical, reductive version for which Burma became notorious—“acquiring merit” to assure a more auspicious reincarnation—but living the religion's values in one's everyday life. “When people have been stripped of all their material supports,” she wrote during her first years of detention, “there only remain to sustain them the values of their cultural and spiritual inheritance.”
²³
The generals had stripped “all their material supports” from the best and brightest in Burma, and reduced Suu herself to a walking shadow. Now the only way forward was back.

O
N
Sunday May 27, 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi, still under detention in her home, cast her vote in her country's first free general elections for thirty years. The ballot paper was put into an envelope which was sealed and taken from her home by a regime official.

To most foreign observers, it looked like a futile gesture. For weeks the international media had been scrutinizing Burma's upcoming poll and concluding that it was bound to be rigged.

The military junta had done everything in their power to ensure a good result—a win for the National Unity Party (NUP), the junta's tame proxy party, as the BSPP had been rebranded.

The top leadership of the NLD had been put out of action, with Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest since July 20th. U Tin Oo, the retired general who was chairman of the party and who had been detained the same day, was sentenced to three years' hard labor in December and taken to Insein Jail. Most of their closest colleagues had been jailed and would not re-emerge for years. The party was now run by a skeleton staff of those who remained at liberty, led by U Kyi Maung, aged seventy-two, the tubby, wisecracking former colonel who had been one of the first people to join Suu two summers before.

In January the regime sought to neutralize the threat posed by Suu's personal popularity by barring her from standing as a candidate because of her marriage to a foreigner—a new rule. Her image was everywhere in the NLD's campaign, on banners, T-shirts, posters, badges and scarves; cassette tapes of her campaign speeches were sold from market stalls. But the lady herself was firmly locked away.

General Khin Nyunt, head of Military Intelligence (MI) and the second most powerful man in the junta, in two long speeches drove home the message that Suu's party was a menace to the country's future. On August 5th, he repeated the now-familiar claim that the NLD had been infiltrated by communists. The following month, at a press conference where he
spoke for seven hours, he made the diametrically opposite allegation that Suu and her party were at the heart of an international rightist conspiracy involving powerful foreign countries. The speech was later published in a 300-page book with the catchy title
The Conspiracy of Treasonous Minions and Traitorous Cohorts
.

Emasculating the NLD, however, was only part of the task of manufacturing a good result. SLORC now set about tackling the remaining challenges with military thoroughness.

Other enemies of army rule were put under house arrest, including former prime minister U Nu.

The regime identified city neighborhoods with a high proportion of opposition supporters and broke them up. In the months leading up to the election at least half a million people around the country were forced to abandon their homes in the cities and move to crudely constructed and malaria-ridden new townships far away.

Practically all conventional forms of campaigning, including rallies, door-to-door lobbying and media interviews, were banned. Criticism of the military was a criminal offence. Gatherings of more than five people remained illegal under martial law rules, though each party of the ninety-three registered for the poll was allowed to hold a single rally, on condition that seven days' notice was given. Each was also permitted a single, pre-approved ten minute statement on state television, and fifteen minutes on state radio.

To make sure the heavens were on their side, the regime made sure to pick a good day: May 27th contained a plethora of lucky nines, two plus seven for the day itself, plus the fact that it fell in the fourth week of the fifth month.

An offer from the US to send election monitors was tartly rebuffed, and all foreigners were banned from the country for weeks before the election.

On the eve of polling, the generals could be well pleased with their handiwork: Myanmar, as she now was, had been through the wringer in the past twenty-four months since Ne Win's crass decision to demonetize the currency then throw a spanner into the constitutional arrangements by raising the possibility of multiparty elections. But since the locking up of “that woman” as Ne Win referred to Suu (he refused to pronounce her name), the situation had improved all round.

The socialist ideology which had conditioned policy for a generation was consigned to the waste bin along with the BSPP, and Burma reopened for business. Some Western countries may have found it awkward dealing on normal trade terms with a country that had slaughtered thousands of its unarmed citizens in cold blood, but Thailand, Singapore and South Korea had no such inhibitions, snapping up contracts to extract timber, jade, precious stones and seafood at bargain prices.

A South Korean company, Yukong, became the first foreign company to be allowed to explore for oil onshore, rapidly followed by Shell, Idemitsu, Petro-Canada, and finally the American oil firms Amoco and Unocal. When the army roared into downtown Rangoon on September 18, 1988, the nation's foreign exchange reserves had been less than $10 million. Now they were between $200 and $300 million.

Tight security prevented any significant demonstrations to mark the anniversaries of the great uprising of 8/8/88 or the military crackdown of the following month. Meanwhile, in a further sign of America's softening approach, the generals and Coca-Cola signed a deal to bottle its drinks in Burma. To demonstrate to the general public and the world at large that SLORC knew a thing or two about good governance, a major clean-up campaign was launched, reminiscent of the operation by Ne Win himself in 1958 under his caretaker government, and Rangoon's public buildings gleamed with fresh paint.

The governments of western Europe and the US remained dubious, unwilling to forget how SLORC had come to power. But an election run with military efficiency, producing a solid working majority for the NUP—or with the votes shared between such a plethora of parties that the army would be fully justified in retaining control—would surely bring them round.

*

The regime might have been more circumspect about the election—might have booted it far into the mists of the future, claiming that they needed to wait until true stability had been achieved—if they had seen what Suu saw as she traveled round the country with her party.

The concept of democracy had been much bandied about in Burma since Ne Win's momentous speech. But what did the Burmese really
know about the subject? Those over the age of forty-four would have vague memories of the last free election in which they were entitled to vote, which U Nu had won with a large majority. But anyone under that age, brought up in a one-party dictatorship which shut the country off from the outside world, would be hazy about it.

Knowledge may have been thin, but as Suu went on the campaign trail in the first half of 1989 she found insatiable interest. “More than a quarter-century of narrow authoritarianism under which they had been fed a pabulum of shallow, negative dogma had not blunted the perceptiveness or political alertness of the Burmese,” she wrote in an essay during campaigning:

On the contrary . . . their appetite for discussion and debate, for uncensored information and objective analysis, seemed to have been sharpened.

There was widespread and intelligent speculation on the nature of democracy as a social system . . . a spontaneous interpretative response to such basic ideas as representative government, human rights and the rule of law.

The people of Burma view democracy not merely as a form of government but as an integrated social and ideological system based on respect for the individual.
¹

The state media might scorn imported concepts such as democracy and human rights as somehow “inimical to indigenous values,” but Suu maintained that they cohered fully with the faith system which was at the root of Burmese culture. “Buddhism . . . places the greatest value on man . . . Each man has in him the potential to realize the truth through his own will and endeavour and to help others to realize it . . . The proposition that the Burmese are not fit to enjoy as many rights and privileges as the citizens of democratic countries is insulting.”