The Lady and the Peacock (62 page)

This is why, of all the political figures to whom she has been compared, Gandhi is the only adequate comparison. A leader of the Indian National Congress, he was never contained by the conventional expectations of the political life, but burst those bonds time after time. He was a democrat inside the party, but he was seen by his millions of devotees as far more than a politician: as a sage, an embodiment of the Indian soul, and, in his clothing, his adoptive poverty and his devotion to the spinning wheel, as the apotheosis of the Indian peasant.

Suu is sometimes compared unfavorably with Gandhi in terms of strategic skill, and it may be true that nothing in her career matches the genius of his march to the Gujarati coast to make salt, in defiance of the Raj's taxation laws. But the idea that it was Gandhi who forced the British out of India is a myth. By the time Britain pulled out—to a timetable dictated by postwar British austerity and the hostility to British imperialism of the United States quite as much as by the power of the Congress—Gandhi was already lamenting the failure of his movement to yield a united nation. The last decade and more of his life, as the independence movement he symbolized was finally producing results, was a succession of failures. Yet while he lived Gandhi incarnated not merely the democratic hopes of India but its pride, its courage, its community-transcending solidarity, its will to shake off centuries of tyranny and reinvent itself. Those achievements dwarfed his failures on the petty political plane.

Something very similar is true of Aung San Suu Kyi, and explains why, despite her absence from the scene from 2003 to 2010, and despite the near-death of the NLD during those years, her influence continued to be the single most important counterweight to the brutal might of the army.

During these years, Burma's history consists of two parallel stories: the official one, which shows the steady and now almost unresisted consolidation of power by the SPDC; and the buried, underground history of the Burma which Suu represented and which like an underground stream was hidden from view most of the time, having no longer any legally permissible ways to show itself—but which then surged out, when the time was ripe, as an astonishing torrent.

*

The official story is best summarized in a series of dates. On May 30, 2003, as we have seen, Suu survived her assassination attempt but was taken into custody; she was later put in a purpose-built shack inside Insein Prison with a view of the gallows. She remained in jail for more than three months. In September it was rumored that she had gone on hunger strike—but it was untrue. She had been taken to hospital suffering from a gynecological complaint, which was operated on; there has been speculation that she had a hysterectomy. Afterwards she was not sent back to Insein but put in detention again in her home. The first photographs of her since her speech in Monywa in May 2003, taken with Ibrahim Gambari in November 2006—UN envoys had been refused visas for the previous two years—show her looking noticeably older, and very pale and thin.

Meanwhile the Seven-Point Road Map to Democracy announced in August 2003 was being put into effect. Khin Nyunt was now also in detention along with his family members, many of his subordinates were in jail, and his entire military intelligence apparatus had been dismantled. But where Than Shwe demonstrated great cunning was in retaining the road map even after he had sacked its architect. Without Khin Nyunt, and without Suu, it could still serve a useful purpose: In fact the absence of those troublemakers made it potentially much more useful to him.

The first requirement of the road map was for the National Convention to be reconvened, and so it came to pass, without the participation of the NLD. Almost unnoticed by the outside world with the exception of Beijing's punctilious Xinhua News Service, the National Convention met several times: from December 2005 to the end of January 2006, from October to December of the same year, and from July to early September
2007. At each of these sessions, leaders of the regime-sponsored NUP and other regime-friendly politicians sat down with representatives of the ethnic “nations” on the borders which had cut ceasefire deals with the regime, and the SPDC's bureaucrats coached them through the constitutional scheme they had concocted.

The result of their work, published in September 2007, was only the bare bones of a constitution, but its thrust was quite clear: to legalize and render permanent and indissoluble the preeminent power of the military over Burma's political life. The constitution was put to the people in a referendum in May 2008, just as the poor farmers of the Irrawaddy Delta were struggling to recover from a cyclone in which more than 130,000 of them died. The referendum sailed through, thanks to strong-arm tactics at polling stations throughout the country, setting the scene for the nation's long-delayed return to multiparty democracy—of a sort.

This constitutional cavalcade was interrupted in 2005 by the stunning news that the site on which builders had been working at a place called Pyinmana, four hours' drive north of Rangoon, for the past few years was not another—or not just another—military cantonment but Myanmar's new capital: Naypyidaw, “Abode of Kings,” located at the spot where Aung San, having switched sides, launched his offensive against the Japanese Army.

With a constitutional settlement under way, relative peace on the borders (though the army continued its war against the Karenni and the Shan, and its scorched earth policy against the Karen forced tens of thousands of Karen refugees into Thailand) and with the democrats well and truly gagged, the regime began to look more comfortable than it had in many years.

The much-ballyhooed Western sanctions were porous at best; the UN's finger-wagging was so laughably ineffective that it could safely be ignored; the ongoing plundering of the country's resources brought the dollars pouring in. And the regime had become adroit at playing its two giant neighbors, China and India, off against each other. Both were eager for minerals and for strategic regional advantage, and were happy to overlook almost anything to obtain them. India in particular, for a long time highly critical of the regime and its abuses, had learned to keep its mouth shut. “[The generals] are feeling feisty,” a Western diplomat told the
Financial
Times
in May 2006. “They have never been in as comfortable a position internationally as they are today.”

*

There is, however, an alternative history of Burma during these years, an underground history.

One man whose career embodies that history is a small, feline Burmese monk called Asshin Issariya. He has taken the nickname, or
nom de
paix
, of King Zero, because, he explains, Burma no longer has any rulers worthy of the name. I met him in the Thai border town of Mae Sot.

In this most traditional of Buddhist countries, the monks lost much of their central role as teachers after the British introduced secular education, but they retain vast importance as a moral force. According to Theravada belief, it is the devout life of the monk that helps the layman progress towards nirvana. The layman feeds the monk and the monk rewards the layman with merit. It is a symbiosis.

At his monastic university in Rangoon, Asshin Issariya learned to take the educational duties of the monk seriously. “My first teacher was very interested in politics,” he said. “This was a great advantage for me. As he always listened to the BBC, I could also hear it every day. In this way I learned about the situation of our country . . . I felt strongly that when I graduated I would need to do something strong for our country.”
¹

In 2000 he set up a small library in the university. In the same year he and some other monks went into the delta region where Suu had been blockaded during one of her attempts to travel into the countryside. “We went with the hope of being able to ask her advice about what we should do,” he said.

They were unable to meet her, but when they went back to Rangoon, Military Intelligence sent the university authority a report on their trip with a warning. “The university decided to close our library,” he said. “They said that if we continued to operate our library the regime would close the entire university. So I decided to leave the university because I could not run my library.”

But the library bug had bitten him. Not by chance, setting up a chain of public libraries was Suu's dream before she became involved in politics.
Anybody who seeks to change Burma soon runs up against the fact that the first thing to change is the level of ignorance. He said:

I left the university and moved the library to the village in Rangoon division where I was born and raised. I organized for a lot of people to read the books.

Then I went to Mandalay and met another monk at the Buddhist University there, and we started teaching English, Japanese, French and computers. We also opened three libraries in Mandalay as well as a library in the university. By 2004 we had opened a total of fourteen libraries, all in monks' organizations. The library itself is open but within each library there is a section of political books that is kept secret.

While the National Convention slowly worked through its agenda, in the real world inhabited by the Burmese masses life was becoming harder than ever. In late 2006 the price of rice, eggs and cooking oil shot up by 30 to 40 percent. Burmese monks are closely in touch with the cost of living of the ordinary people: Tightening circumstances are soon reflected in the amount of food they receive in their alms bowls. So effective had been the terror tactics used by the regime in 1988 that very few people had dared to protest openly in the intervening years, and it had been around a decade since the last mass demonstrations. But so unacceptable were the price rises that in February 2007 a small protest against them was held in Rangoon. The authorities stamped on it hard, jailing nine of those involved.

Laymen knew they could anticipate swift and brutal repression when they took to the streets in protest, but the rules were different for monks: There is a powerful religious taboo against harming them. That is why King Zero and some of his brothers conceived the idea of a “peace walk”: not a conventional protest but a religious procession, consisting solely of monks, chanting sutras, “for the poor,” as he put it. “Two other monks and I from Mandalay and Yangon met secretly in Thailand to discuss how to do the peace walk and we planned it in detail, we told the foreign media about it. The idea was to do a peace walk because the people in our country are very poor,” he explained. “We put up stickers all over the cities.”

But the initiative was overtaken by events.

As we have seen, the final meeting of the National Convention was held from July to September 2007. It was the crowning session of a constitution-writing process that had begun fourteen years earlier.
But in mid-August 2007, acting with the same arrogant dispatch as Ne Win when he demonetized high value banknotes in 1987, Than Shwe removed at a stroke the government subsidy from fuel. This caused the price of petrol and diesel to rise immediately by 66 percent, while the price of Compressed Natural Gas, used by buses, went up 500 percent in a week. Immediately the cost of travel went through the roof, adding another intolerable burden to the lives of the poor.

Protests against the cuts began in Rangoon on August 19th, led by a small group of activists, members of the “88 Generation Students,” those blooded in the events of that year, several of whom had recently been released from jail. Prominent was Min Ko Naing, the leader of Rangoon's students nineteen years before. But repression was swift and violent, and thirteen of the protesters, including Min Ko Naing himself, were beaten and arrested. The regime was quick to suspect a revolutionary conspiracy behind this tiny protest. The civil unrest, according to the
New Light of Myanmar
, was “aimed at undermining peace and security of the State and disrupting the ongoing National Convention.”

On September 1st, King Zero and his colleagues met to discuss the situation. Four days later, a small demonstration in the town of Pakokku, on the Irrawaddy River near Pagan, which included monks, was broken up by troops; in the process some monks were beaten up and tied to trees and at least one disappeared. The next day young monks from the town took to the streets again and demanded that the regime apologize for the attack on their brothers, giving a deadline of September 17th.

No apology was forthcoming, so the Peace Walk, led by King Zero, U Gambira and others in the newly-formed All Burma Monks' Alliance, began in earnest. First in Rangoon then in Mandalay and subsequently in other towns, the
sangha
began to walk through the streets, sometimes empty-handed, sometimes with their bowls turned upside down to indicate their repudiation of the military.

The processions began small but grew day by day: On September 24th the march in Rangoon consisted of 30,000 to 100,000 monks, making it much the largest show of popular strength since 1988. It stretched through the city for nearly a mile. To the extent that anybody had noticed it in the first place, the concluding session of the National Convention earlier in the month, the crowning triumph of Than Shwe's
rule, disappeared under this tsunami of indignation: the unprecedented sight—flashed around the world on satellite television—of tens of thousands of barefoot monks padding down Rangoon's imperial boulevards in the driving rain.

Under the monsoon downpours they walked at the steady pace of Buddhist monks everywhere: neither pounding nor ambling, not marching in lockstep like soldiers but clearly a body of people, a corps on the move, saturated with rain, bare feet slapping on the slick tarmac.

If it was a political event it was of the most minimal kind: no banners, no slogans, no speeches, no protection, no masks, no helmets, no weapons. No shoes, even. They only carried flags, the multicolored flag of Buddhists.

Until the bloody days of the crackdown they faced no resistance: no police, not even one, no soldiers, not even a hint of control; just these irresistible human rivers swelling with endless new tributaries and streams. Marching, they chanted over and over the Metta Sutta: