The Lady and the Peacock (52 page)

But readers were left in no doubt about the day's top story: “Dialogue between the State Law and Order Restoration Council Secretary-1, Lt-Gen Khin Nyunt and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi” as the headline put it. It was immortalized in no fewer than three front-page photographs, in the largest of which they beam at each other across an oversize bowl of flowers. No background was given, no mention of Suu's role in her party—no mention of the party at all, in fact—and no mention of the fact that she had spent five years and more detained at the regime's pleasure. But here it was, at last: “Dialogue” according to the headline.

“The discussions, which were frank and cordial,” ran the report, “covered the current political and economic situation of the country, the political and economic reforms . . . and steps that should be taken with a view to the long-term welfare of the nation.” The absence of grammatical errors suggests that Suu may have looked over the draft.

And that was it. After the talks finished she was driven back to University Avenue and house arrest. It was the closest she would come to negotiating with Burma's military rulers for the next eight years, and they went precisely nowhere. When rumors began to circulate that the two parties had reached an undisclosed agreement—the first step towards her release and an ongoing dialogue—she smuggled out a statement denying it. “There has not been and there will not be any secret deal with regard to either my release or to any other issue,” she insisted.

Both the empty “dialogue” and Suu's release nine months later reveal the importance of Japan's influence on the regime.
¹²
The Japanese ambassador's residence is within sight of Suu's house; on July 10, 1995, Japanese diplomats were the first foreigners to be tipped off about what was unfolding, and witnessed the white car carrying the chief of police pull into 54 University Avenue at 4
PM
to inform Suu that
she was free. The Japanese government then did as it had promised, welcoming her release, and indicating that aid to Burma would soon be resumed.

Although Japan's wartime control of Burma ended in disaster, the two countries for many years enjoyed a unique bilateral relationship. Not only had Aung San, Ne Win and other young anti-imperialists trained there, but many Burmese students were given scholarships to study in Japan during the war years, and formed an influential cadre of leadership afterwards. As the first Asian country to modernize and challenge the West, Japan felt under an avuncular obligation to help Burma as it took its first faltering steps as an independent nation.

Burma's generals learned much from the Japanese approach to dealing with the West. Japan's brutal experience during and after the Pacific War had taught it that the bullying demands of the West could not be ignored, but did not have to dictate the way the state behaved. They must be honored in form, but the substance was another matter. Japan was always urging the regime to do as Japan did after its surrender and erect a decorous constitutional facade, one which was acceptable to the United States in particular. For the same reason, they tried to get the regime to understand the importance of releasing Aung San Suu Kyi—not as a first step to negotiating with her, let alone ceding power to the NLD, but as a sop to the West. What mattered was to concede the symbolic demand. By doing the minimum necessary, the generals could carry on ruling and doing business just as before.

The junta eventually went along with Japan's ideas. Yet in the long run such diplomacy of gestures brings only grief. The gesture—in this case, the release of Suu—seems to contain the promise of further development, yet on further examination proves empty. What has been presented as promising proves to be treacherous, and what has been claimed to be a demonstration of sincerity turns out to be the opposite.

The straight-talking American ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, was to make that clear to the generals very soon. Visiting Rangoon in September 1995, two months after Suu's release, the highest-ranking American to meet the regime since 1988 told Khin Nyunt that merely releasing Suu was not nearly enough to persuade the world that it was making progress towards democracy. She urged other
countries including Japan to hold back on investing in Burma until more serious steps were seen.

Far from signalling a thaw in American–Burmese relations, Albright's visit saw them go into the deep freeze, with President Clinton agreeing to Congress's demand for the first American commercial sanctions against Burma since the ban on arms sales back in 1988.

*

One reason SLORC felt able to free Suu was because they had convinced themselves that she no longer mattered: The election result was a flash in the pan, six years is a long time, the demonising efforts of state propaganda had done their job—and besides, she was a woman! It was the same cocktail of wishful thinking and male chauvinism that had led them down the garden path in 1990. And it was to make them look just as foolish very quickly.

Suu never planned to give impromptu talks from the slightly undignified position of her front gate, teetering on a table and hanging on to the spikes; it just happened that way. On the day of her release, as the news raced through Rangoon, people began making their way to University Avenue. Inside, Suu had been joined by U Tin Oo and U Kyi Maung, two of her most senior colleagues, released from jail a few months earlier, and U Aung Shwe, who had been acting leader of the party while the rest were out of action. Soon her former student bodyguards and office assistants, many of whom had spent years in jail, were also streaming back along the road to sign up for duty again. Ma Thanegi, her personal assistant during the campaigning months, had told her before they parted in 1989 that she wanted to go back to painting full time and would not be available to help any more. But after Suu's release in 1995 Ma Thanegi was asked if she could help out for a few days until Suu found someone else. She agreed, and turned up the next day.

And the ordinary people of Rangoon came too. By July 11th, the day after her release, thousands were milling around the gates of Suu's house, hoping for a glimpse of her. Her first instinct was to go and mingle with them, but Tin Oo and Kyi Maung discouraged it: She was still frail after her years of austerity, and some crackpot, or regime agent, could
take advantage of her proximity to do her harm. So instead a table was taken out of the house and pressed up against the steel gate and, to the delight of those gathered on the other side, suddenly her head appeared above it, flanked by her lieutenants. They clapped and roared their welcome.

She spoke for ten minutes, telling them that democracy could still be achieved, that patience was required, and that she and her party hoped soon to be in dialogue with the regime. Then she got down again. But if the Military Intelligence agents in their pressed white shirts and sunglasses, beadily observing the goings-on, imagined that that would be the end of it, they were soon to be disabused. Some of the crowd went away but more arrived. They stayed all night. By the morning there were even more. Out of simple politeness, Suu got up on her table and spoke again. And still they didn't go home. A microphone and loudspeakers were rigged up so it was more like a proper meeting. They were still there the following day, so she addressed them again. And so on.

This went on for an entire week and still the crowds did not disperse. Finally Suu and her colleagues realized that no work was going to get done if this continued, so instead of daily meetings they persuaded people to come only at the weekends, when she and her top colleagues would take it in turns to talk.

Suu at the gates of her house, giving a speech.

The weekend chats quickly became the hottest ticket in Rangoon—metaphorically speaking, because attendance was free. By September they had become a fixture of the city's week. “Tourists are making a beeline for 54 University Avenue,” Agence France-Press reported on September 12, 1995, “just for a glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi . . . Typical of the tourists is a young woman who told AFP she was a law student who traveled all the way from the United States to see Burma's Nobel Peace Laureate. ‘Ever since I read her book
Freedom from Fear
'—the collection of essays by and about her first published in 1991—‘I had this burning desire to meet Aung San Suu Kyi personally,' she said.”

But the tourists—Suu sometimes tossed them a few words in English—were a small minority. Most who came were the same ordinary citizens who had flocked to her election campaign meetings. “Hundreds gather in the street to hear her preach reconciliation and exchange banter with the crowd,” the
Economist
reported on November 4th. “The gatherings are more organized now than when she was first freed. An atmosphere
of happy spontaneity persists, but in front of her, like bouncers at a pop concert, stands a row of young men in grey T-shirts emblazoned with her portrait.”

A British diplomat who served in Rangoon from 1996 said that SLORC's generals weren't the only ones still in denial about Suu's popularity. “I was constantly being told by my ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] colleagues that Suu was a complete busted flush, yesterday's person, that people hadn't really heard about her anymore,” he recalled. Yet these claims didn't survive a reality check. “When we traveled around, I was often approached by Burmese villagers who said, ‘It's great what you are doing for Suu, we all love her, keep it up . . .'”
¹³

*

The frozen détente between Suu and the regime could not last. She demanded dialogue, and got silence. They wanted her silence, and got adoring crowds listening to her speeches. Finally, they wanted her party's compliance in what they called the National Convention—and the party decided fairly quickly that it would not give it.

The National Convention, set up in 1993 after Than Shwe had taken charge of SLORC, was the junta's answer to the problem of what to do about 1990's election result. But as months turned into years and the Convention made no discernible progress, it became clear that it was essentially a way to postpone the whole question of multiparty democracy indefinitely.

The Convention's task was to draft the principles of a new constitution—the necessary preliminary, the dogma now went, to a handover to a democratically elected government. It consisted of slightly less than a hundred MPs-elect, plus six hundred appointees of the junta, overwhelmingly military men. The NLD had signed up to the Convention while Suu and her top colleagues were in detention. But as soon as she and her old colleagues were able to take a good look at it, they realized it was a device to put a legalistic gloss on the military's refusal to acknowledge the election result, and to legitimise their rule.

“The military's primary provision from the inception of the process,” wrote David Steinberg, “was that the military would play the primary role in the society.”
¹⁴
Chapter I, 6 (f) of the draft constitution which the body
was set up to rubber-stamp referred to “enabling the Defense services to be able to participate in the National political leadership of the State.” It was, in other words, a way to enshrine and perpetuate the status quo. And in November 1995, Suu, Tin Oo and Kyi Maung announced that the party was pulling out.

*

If the National Convention was, in the NLD's view, the wrong way to go, what was the right way? What would a well-governed Burma look like?

Suu's first excursion outside Rangoon after her release was to the town of Thamanya in the province of Pa'an, a day's car ride out of the capital to the southeast. Various explanations have been floated as to why it was important for her to go there. One put forward by Gustaaf Houtman is that, given the flat refusal of the junta to agree to start negotiating, it was in search of an intermediary—another Rewata Dhamma, the man who had brought about her first meetings with the generals. “Aung San Suu Kyi's initial intention,” he wrote, “appeared to have been to visit a monk greatly respected by both the people and the members of the regime, with the aim of working towards reconciliation. Some even speculated that she met with some high-ranking military officials at Thamanya in preparation for future dialogue.”
¹⁵