The Lady and the Peacock (45 page)

But with all the top leaders now out of action and the party facing heavy intimidation by the junta, getting the NLD's message about its program to the voters was complicated: Grassroots party workers had to go about their work like drug dealers, sidling up to potential supporters and discussing what was on offer under their breath. But at least they had a manifesto to work from.
²

It was a resoundingly reasonable document. Burma today lacked a constitution, it pointed out. The new one would be written in collaboration with all the other parties whose representatives won seats in the
Pyitthu Hluttaw
or “national assembly,” as the parliament was called. The powers of executive, legislature and judiciary would be separated. National sovereignty would be vested in the parliament, to which all other organs of state, including crucially the army, would become accountable. The conflicts that had raged around Burma's borders for decades would be ended by giving the “ethnic nationalities” greater autonomy than the 1947 constitution allowed them, including “the right to self-determination with respect to . . . politics, administration and economic management in accordance with the law.” Education, health care and social welfare, so brutally cut back under army rule, would be given far greater attention than before. The economic liberalization that SLORC had started to introduce would be pursued, though the interests of Burma's farmers would be protected.

*

And pigs would fly: The NLD might dream and scheme all they liked behind their prison bars, but it seems with hindsight that the military had no intention of ceding power, whatever the election result. And they were confident that the people,
their
people, so used to being “water in the cupped hands” of the army, comfortably familiar with the forms and foibles of the old BSPP, now the NUP, would in the privacy of the polling booth turn their backs on dangerous novelty and show due gratitude to the force that had kept them safe from foreign machinations all these years.

So confident were the generals that they began to relax a little. They admitted a handful of foreign journalists and television news crews to watch the Burmese line up and vote. As polling day approached, martial law restrictions were partially lifted. The soldiers thronging Suu's villa were temporarily replaced by police in plain clothes. Army and uniformed police disappeared from the streets. It was the usual Burmese vanishing trick, as seen on the day of Suu's mother's funeral, another manifestation of the “zero-sum” attitude to power, where the army is
either overwhelmingly present or totally absent—but even if absent, everyone knows they are not far away. The NLD took advantage of the pull-back to take to the streets in their pick-up trucks, imploring the people of Rangoon to be sure to give them their vote.

In the end the people needed no imploring. The lines began forming outside schools and government offices where voting was to take place early on the morning of May 27th. The army was again conspicuous by its absence: The voting was overseen by civilians, as if Burma's conversion to civilian rule had happened by magic, overnight. People put on their Sunday best to perform this important and extremely rare civic duty. As in India, every registered party was symbolized by an icon depicted on the voting slip. These included a beach ball, a comb, a tennis racket and an umbrella. Powerfully evocative symbols such as the peacock were banned, but the NLD had cannily chosen the
kamauk
, the farmer's straw hat, to symbolize their party—making it easy for their supporters to indicate their preference while appearing to wear normal rustic costume.

Nationwide, more than twenty million people were eligible to vote. In seven constituencies where the army was fighting insurgents, polling was cancelled altogether; in many other border areas, only a fraction of registered voters managed to vote because of the violence. But in most of the country the turnout was heavy, with some 72 percent casting their votes in total.

The most glaring anomaly about the election was that it was held in a constitutional vacuum, the old 1974 constitution having been dissolved in the so-called “coup” that brought SLORC into being in September 1988, and not replaced. It was assumed by the NLD and other parties that the first, vital task of the winning parties would be to draft a constitution. But how that would happen had not been spelled out.

Late on the night of polling the Chinese news service, Xinhua, was the first foreign news agency to report the first result of Burma's first election for thirty years: The NLD candidate for Seikan Township in Yangondaw, a woman called San San, obtained over half the votes cast.

That result was followed by a flood more. And to the shock and horror of the military, the overwhelming majority of results went the same way. Voters did not care for the Evergreen Young Men's Association, the National
Peace and Comfort Party, U Nu's League for Democracy and Peace, nor for the army's favorite, the NUP. Aung San Suu Kyi's party was sweeping the board.

Results continued to dribble in over the coming days, and practically all of them tended the same way. The junta had said it would take three weeks for all results to be known, but it became clear within twenty-four hours that Suu's party, all of whose top leaders were in jail or detained in their homes, had won a landslide victory. And nobody knew what to do next.

This, according to Bertil Lintner, following events as closely as he could from Bangkok, was when the NLD missed its best opportunity to change Burma for ever—without a shot being fired in anger. “At the last minute the regime had allowed the foreign media in,” he pointed out—and this gave the NLD a rare and precious weapon, one which they totally failed to use.

This was before electronic media and so on, but nevertheless the world media came in, including television networks, for the actual election day. Once they had seen the way things were going the government searched for ways to delay and delay and delay the counting of the votes, saying, oh, we have to bring the ballot boxes to Rangoon and count them here and things like that, and it would take a long time. But it was already clear that the NLD had won.

What the NLD should have done at that point [before all votes were counted but when it was clear that they had won] was to declare victory: to hold a press conference at the party headquarters in Rangoon, invite the entire media, and say, we've won the election and therefore it is ridiculous that our leader is under house arrest. At three o'clock this afternoon we are going to go and liberate her. And then they could have sent out a lot of speaker vans around Rangoon to tell everyone to go to University Avenue at three o'clock. And millions of people would have shown up. They could have lifted off the gates and carried her off to the television station and she could have been put in charge and called for calm and the loyalty of the armed forces and all the rest of it. It would have been all over in forty-eight hours.
³

But nothing of the sort happened: the reason being, Lintner, says, that the party was now essentially leaderless.

The NLD mishandled it. When Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest, the party was decapitated. They were all arrested, Ma Thanegi, U Win Tin, all the smart people in the leadership. So the initiative went to the second rung
in the party, people like U Kyi Maung, a nice old man, a retired army colonel. Kyi Maung was strong enough to keep the whole thing together and lead it through the election to victory. But then he said, now the military has shown some goodwill by letting the election happen and making sure the vote goes fairly, so we have to show some goodwill too and not push things.

They didn't lose their nerve, they just miscalculated. By saying okay, they've shown some goodwill, we have to show some goodwill, they gave enough time for the military to re-group and strike back.

U Win Tin, founder member of the NLD, during his nineteen years in jail.

Instead of marching en masse to University Avenue and setting their leader free, the NLD erected a large blackboard outside its headquarters to keep the public abreast of what was happening—a homely version of the vote-athon apparatus of modern TV news channels. It stood there for weeks as the results continued to arrive from distant corners of the country. Every time a new result came in it was chalked up on the board. In the early days the crowds watching the board spilled from the pavement onto the road, hundreds strong, and every time a fresh NLD win was written up, they sent up a cheer of approval.

But then after a few days, with many seats left to declare but with the NLD on track for an overwhelming victory, the novelty wore off and the numbers began to dwindle. It was all very fine, people said to each other—but what did it mean exactly? What was supposed to happen next?

In mid-June, more than two weeks after polling, SLORC admitted that, with many constituencies still to declare results, the NLD had already won an absolute majority. In the end they won 392 of the seats they contested, slightly more than 80 percent of the total. But in fact the scale of their victory was even greater than that: Their allies in the ethnic states, running under the umbrella of the United Nationalities League for Democracy, the UNLD, won 65 seats. Their ally in the Shan States, the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, became the second biggest winner nationwide, with 23 seats. Overall the NLD and its allies won more than 94 percent of the seats. The United Nationals Democratic Party of U Aung Gyi, the former general who had been Suu's colleague at the head of the NLD before turning on it, won a single seat. The NUP, despite (or rather because of) its backing by the army and its decades in power under the BSPP avatar, won a mere 10 seats.

Compounding the shock for SLORC and adding an extra element of paranoid unease was the fact that several constituencies where serving soldiers constituted the majority of voters, such as Dagon township in Rangoon, had elected NLD MPs.

The political landscape of Burma was turned inside out, and even the army could not deny that something had happened. But in mid-June they clearly had no idea what to do next, frozen in the headlights of hostile public opinion.

“The final result is expected within the next week,” reported Terry McCarthy and Yuli Ismartono in the
Independent
on June 15, 1990.

But the military has so far refused to be drawn on how power will be transferred to a civilian government, when this might happen, or when they intend to release Aung San Suu Kyi . . .

The military, confident up to a week before the elections that there would be no clear winner and that it would easily be able to manipulate the Assembly, is now left without a master plan, and the old paranoia is starting to creep back in.
⁴

A spokesman for the regime, asked about SLORC's plans, sounded as if he was discussing the aftermath of a nasty ambush in guerrilla country rather than a victory for democracy in the sight of the world. “We don't know who is our enemy and who is not,” he told the
Independent
, “so we have to tread very carefully.”
⁵
Asked whether SLORC would be dissolved after a transfer of power, the spokesman, Colonel Ye Htut, told the paper, “Yes, but as you know, SLORC is the army itself. SLORC will be dissolved, but the army will continue to exist . . .”

It was not until July that SLORC was ready with a coordinated response. It was a textbook example of the tendency of authoritarian regimes, following Orwell, to say that two plus two equals five. The elections were not, as the foreign press had mischievously reported, for the purpose of electing a government, they said. All that was a misunderstanding. There was no constitution, so how could there be a government? First there must be a constitution, then a government. So what those 485 people—or a fraction of them, to be selected by SLORC, plus a supplement (in the event it turned out to be a very large supplement, 600 percent of the elected quota) of army officers to advise them—had been elected to do
was write a constitution. Only after the constitution had been written and ratified could a civilian government take office. Until then—SLORC remained in charge.

It was not an entirely new theme. At the beginning of May, McCarthy had reported, “The army is indicating that the elected body will not be a national assembly from which a government will be chosen, but rather a constituent assembly, empowered to write a new constitution for the country.”
⁶
The need for such an assembly before power was handed over had in fact been repeatedly voiced by Khin Nyunt, the ambitious heir apparent, the man “who breathes through Ne Win's nostrils” as the Burmese put it.
⁷

But Khin Nyunt had been contradicted repeatedly by General Saw Maung, the head of the junta, who had said after the crackdown of September 1988 that he would “throw flowers in the path of the government” and that the sole task of SLORC was to pave the way for the new, elected government. On January 9, 1990, he reiterated, “It is our duty to hold an election so that a government can be formed. Once the election is over, it will not be the Defense Forces' responsibility to see that a government is formed . . . ”
⁸
On polling day itself he said it once again: As the
Economist
reported on June 2nd, “While he was casting his vote, General Saw Maung, the leader of the State Council, told a journalist that he would hand over power to whichever party was victorious. Various spokesmen from the army and the foreign ministry have said that a newly elected government could ‘move as quickly as it likes to take power.'”