The Lady and the Peacock (59 page)

The new calendar of visits, submitted to and approved by the military authorities in advance, covered much the same ground as the earlier ones. The journeys began in June 2002; Suu traveled in a new Toyota Land Cruiser, and to counter the USDA threat her team included a significantly larger number of student bodyguards than previously.

They visited Mon state, to the east of Rangoon, where Ma Thanegi had noted in 1989 that the crowds were the biggest in the country; the watery land of the Irrawaddy Delta west and north of Rangoon, where Suu was born and where, in February 1989 in the village of Danubyu, she had narrowly avoided being shot dead. They went southeast to Karen state, bordering Thailand, where she paid a second visit to U Vinaya in the town of Thamanya, the celebrated anti-regime monk, now ninety-two and increasingly frail, whom she had first met after her release in 1995 and whose work in creating a town animated by metta she had described in her “Letters from Burma.”

They visited Arakan state on the border with Bangladesh, Chin state, bordering India in the northwest, Shan state to the northeast, site of her father's agreement with Burma's ethnic races in 1947, and many places in between—some ninety-five townships altogether, as the regime later recorded.

On May 6, 2003, she arrived in Mandalay, Burma's old capital, for the second time since her release, and made a number of sorties into the
surrounding countryside, the last of which began on May 29th and would take her west to the town of Monywa.

The journey was planned as carefully as a military manoeuver—which in a sense it resembled, despite the authorities' formal approval of the itinerary. Suu had warned her companions that if they were attacked by the USDA, they were not to retaliate. So their only hope of safety was in careful planning, and in numbers.

Wunna Maung, one of her bodyguards, said later in testimony to the US Congress:

Before our journey we heard many rumors that local officials of the military regime were training their troops with blunt weapons, including clubs, spears and iron spikes. For this reason, Daw Suu advised us to absolutely avoid any words or behavior that might lead to confrontation with any members of the military. She told us that if we were attacked we must not fight back. Even if we are struck or killed, she said, we should absolutely not fight back.
²

Suu was well aware of the potential danger they faced. During one of the most tense periods of her previous spell of freedom, in November 1996, the secretary of the USDA, U Win Sein, who was also Minister of Transport, had told a meeting of villagers near Mandalay that killing Aung San Suu Kyi was their duty. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, “the creator of internal political disturbances” must be “eradicated,” he said. “Do you understand what is meant by eradicated?” he asked them. “Eradicated means to kill. Dare you kill Daw Suu Kyi?” Villagers within earshot later testified that he repeated the question five or six times but received no reply.

Given this high-level interest in her elimination, Suu was taking no chances. At 9
AM
on May 29th, seven NLD cars and twenty motorcycles rolled out of Mandalay on the road west. In the lead, a few hundred yards ahead of the rest, was a scout car; next came Suu's dark green Toyota, driven by a law student called Kyaw Soe Lin, one of the party's legal staff, followed by two other cars filled with senior NLD figures, including party vice-chairman U Tin Oo, then the cars of local supporters. The group consisted of about a hundred people in all.

The trouble that awaited them had been carefully prepared. Starting six days earlier, the military authorities in the area, under the command
of plump, pasty-faced Lieutenant Colonel Than Han, had mustered local USDA members from townships around the town of Shwebo, sixty miles north of Mandalay, a total it is claimed of about 5,000 men, and brought them to the grounds of Depayin High School along with more than fifty lorries and ten pickup trucks, to train them for the assault. On the day of the attack they were issued with their weapons: bamboo staves, baseball bats, sharpened iron rods, and similar crude implements, many of them specially made by a local blacksmith.

Less than two hours after the NLD party's departure, as they approached the town of Sagaing, hundreds of USDA members were waiting for them. “Before entering Sagaing,” said Wunna Maung, “we witnessed about six hundred people holding signs that read, ‘We don't want people who don't support the USDA.'” They were chanting the same slogan, as if they had learned it by rote. But their numbers were dwarfed by thousands of townspeople behind them, who were drowning them out with cries of “Long Live Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.”

More USDA members had massed at another stop the party reached in midafternoon, but again their numbers were swamped by Suu's supporters and their action came to nothing. Suu and her colleagues carried out their prearranged program, reopening local NLD offices closed years before by the authorities, hanging up signboards outside them, making speeches to large crowds, then moving on to the next stop. All the time they were closely observed and filmed by local police and agents from Military Intelligence.

By 6
PM
the NLD entourage reached Monywa. The military made them welcome by cutting off the town's electricity supply—or so Suu's supporters charge, though it may just have been one of the regular power cuts. They also made sure that the abbot of a local monastery whom Suu intended to visit was away on official business. None of this inhibited the local people from turning out in huge numbers to greet the visitors, and the next morning, after spending the night at a supporter's home in the town, Suu addressed them from the balcony of a building in the town center. No one present could have known that this would be her last speech before a Burmese crowd for more than seven years.

She began talking soon after 8:30
AM
. Early May, before the rains break, is the hottest time of the year in upper Burma, and even at this
hour of the morning her listeners were fanning themselves to keep cool. But the heat had not discouraged them from turning up: Practically the entire population of the town was there, packing the square in front of the building, spilling back into the streets and lanes leading away from it, standing in solemn silence in the full sunshine—only one umbrella was visible—then breaking into raucous applause when she said something they liked. There might have been twenty thousand people packed into that roasting hot public space. A few of them drifted away before she finished, but of the state-sponsored critics who had turned out to abuse her the day before there was no sign.

Suu wore a sky-blue silk
htamein
and a large cluster of yellow jasmine flowers in her hair, and her heavy fringe flopped down over her eyebrows.
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Lines under her eyes betrayed the fatigue of the trip, which had already lasted nearly a month, her longest outing since her release, but as usual she spoke vigorously, fluently and without notes. When the audience clapped and cheered, she smiled and wobbled her head from side to side appreciatively, a charming, unconscious gesture she had perhaps picked up during her teenage years in Delhi.

She was recognizably the same woman who had galvanized a million listeners—even those who could not hear a word she said—in the grounds of the Shwedagon pagoda nearly fifteen years before. But she was not the stern, girlish, shouting figure of that occasion. Here was a mature leader, familiar with the rigors as well as the pleasures of being a public figure; familiar also and apparently quite relaxed about being the unique focus of the hatred of the most powerful men in the country. It was a burden she had grown accustomed to; now, with her husband gone and her sons grown up, bearing it had become her life.

She began, as so often before, with a reference to her father. He had visited the town in 1947, when he was “quite tired,” she said, and came to Monywa for a rest; he had commented that he found the people “very prudent.” “I have to say,” she went on, “that [for me] Monywa is strong and firm rather than prudent. . . . In 1988 Monywa was extraordinarily firm, and I feel that it is now even stronger.” The place went wild.

“The reason for this,” she pursued, “. . . is because the people don't like injustice. They don't like bullying.” But during her trips around Mandalay earlier in the month, she said, “members of the USDA tried
every method to destroy our works by means of bullying. We had to be very patient.”

Now she chose her words carefully. “We believe that everyone has the right to demonstrate,” she went on. “. . . But they are not staging true demonstrations. They forced some people to join them.”

It was clear that the USDA's persistent intimidation had become the dominant theme of the tour, one it was impossible to avoid. So, in her characteristic way, she met it head on.

“We do not react to them,” she said. “We only report them to the authorities. But the authorities are taking no action . . . because they argue that they are doing things within legal boundaries. As the authorities are taking no action, the members of the USDA are becoming more daring.” She told the crowd that at several villages in previous days,

they threatened our supporters with sticks, machetes and catapults. But we didn't react to them. We only reported the case to the police station. The next day they increased the harassment . . . When we came to Monywa we heard about the one-sided bullying [here], we heard how the USDA was mobilizing its members . . . We also saw them do it along the way: There were cars with many [USDA] demonstrators. Other people are banned from using cars, are not allowed to hire cars, but they have many cars . . .

Yet the size and warmth of the crowds that came out to greet her gave her heart, she said. Everywhere she went, “The people have been supporting us in massive numbers. I believe they support us because they can't stand bullying and injustice . . .”

The speech over and the ceremonies of reopening the town's NLD office concluded, the party set off again, bound for Shwebo district, thirty miles to the northeast. As usual, they had obtained full authorization for this journey in advance, but as the jabs and taunts of their enemies intensified, they must have felt like an army patrol traveling through hostile guerrilla country: never sure when the next attack would come or what form it would take.

And now, as they headed towards Depayin township, the army joined in the harassment. “When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi arrived near Zeedaw village,” an eyewitness later testified, “military authorities from the Northern Command headquarters stopped the convoy including the cars
of the people of Monywa who had come to see them off.” Suu and her party were permitted to proceed, but when her supporters returned later to the same village on their way back to Monywa, “the police waiting in readiness beat them up and put them under arrest.”

Unaware of this, Suu and her team drove on to the town of Butalin, where she once again performed the ceremonial reopening of the local party office. They were now deep into the flat paddy fields of the countryside, far from any sizeable town and even further from the gaze of foreign diplomats and journalists. They stopped at the little town of Saingpyin, where Suu had an emotional encounter with the family of the local NLD MP-elect, who was still serving a jail sentence. Meanwhile her minders sent a car on to scout the road ahead. Ominously, it failed to return. Motorcycles were sent to find out what had happened to it, but they too disappeared.

Still miles from their destination, with darkness closing in, Suu and her team were driving blind into
terra incognita
, with a hostile army presence behind them and no way of knowing what lay ahead.

By the time they arrived at the little village of Kyi it was pitch-dark. They had not planned to stop here, but a little way beyond the village the headlights of Suu's car picked up two elderly monks sitting on the roadside, who hailed them as they approached.

“They asked if Suu could address a gathering,” Kyaw Soe Lin, her driver, recalled. “I told Daw Daw”—“aunty” Suu—“that we shouldn't stop as we usually get harassed around dusk. But the monks said they had been waiting for Suu Kyi since the evening before and requested that she give a speech and greet them.” To turn down such a request from two old monks would be the height of bad manners, whatever the circumstances. Suu fell into the trap. According to Kyaw Soe Lin, “Daw Daw said we should stop for them.”

But the old men were not monks at all but imposters from the USDA. And as the convoy halted on the road while Suu decided how best to accede to their request, the full fury of the USDA fell upon them.

Four vehicles which had been tailing them, two lorries and two pickup trucks, now roared up alongside the convoy and armed men poured out, shouting anti-Suu slogans. When the local villagers, who had come out of their houses to see what was going on, started shouting back at them, the
USDA thugs attacked them with iron rods, bamboo staves and baseball bats. One of the USDA lorries took a run at the villagers in its headlights, and the villagers scattered in terror—whereupon a much larger USDA force—four thousand according to some eye-witnesses, though the figure is impossible to verify—who had been waiting to ambush the convoy poured from the sides of the road and attacked the NLD cars and their motorcycle outriders and local supporters.

“We watched helplessly and tried to show courage,” said Wunna Maung, the bodyguard.

Because we had been told to never use violence, we tried to protect Suu's car by surrounding [it] with our bodies in two layers. As we waited, all the cars behind us were being attacked, and the USDA members beat the NLD members mercilessly. The attackers appeared to be either on drugs or drunk.

The USDA members struck down everyone, including youths and women. They used the iron rods to strike inside the cars. I saw the attackers beat [NLD vice-chairman] U Tin Oo and hit him on the head before they dragged him away. He had a wound on his head and was bleeding.