The Lady and the Peacock (63 page)

Sukhino va khemino horitu, sabbasatta bhavantu sukhitatta, ye keci panabhutatthi, tasa va thavara va-navasesa; digha va ye va mahanta, majjhima rassaka anukathula . . .

“May all sentient beings be cheerful and endowed with a happy life,” they chanted. “Whatever breathing beings there may be, frail or firm, tall or stout, short or medium-sized, thin or fat, those which are seen and those unseen, those dwelling far off and near, those already born and those still seeking to become, may all beings be endowed with a happy life . . . As a mother protects her baby, her only child, even so towards all beings let us cultivate the boundless spirit of love . . .”

Everywhere they marched, the cameras of undercover Burmese video journalists, working for an independent Burmese news organization based in Norway, the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), captured them and the images went round the world.

In the West the mobilization of the monks was soon being called “the Saffron Revolution,” to be set alongside all the other “color” revolutions, Orange, Green and so on, that had changed the political face of Eastern Europe. But it made an uneasy fit: The monks had no banners, no apparent leaders, they shouted no slogans and made no speeches. They just chanted and walked.

Monks on the march in Rangoon, September 2007.

Ingrid Jordt, the American anthropologist and former Buddhist nun, was frustrated by Western misunderstandings of the phenomenon, misunderstandings which she feared could put the monks' lives in danger.

I got a call from Seth Mydans of the
New York Times
who said, “I'm writing an article about the militant monks, I just need a few quotes from you.” I told him, you're not going to get any because you've got it all wrong. If the
New York Times
writes that Burma has militant monks, then you have given carte blanche to the regime to crack down on those monks tomorrow, because that would mean they are playing politics. And he didn't use that phrase in his piece, and the uprising went on for twenty days or something, because they couldn't crack down on monks when they were just being moral admonishers.
²

As the monks' movement gathered momentum, I returned to the region to report it. At Mae Sot on the Thai border one refugee monk explained to me why monks take to the streets.

“To play a violent role would be far from our beliefs,” he said. “But we can have a mediating role. When Lord Buddha was alive he mediated between one particular king and the people who were rebelling against him, in a peaceful way. We monks are Buddha's sons and so we try to follow in our father's footsteps.”

In the same town I met Dr. Naing Aung, one of the student leaders in the uprising of 1988 who had fled into exile after the massacre that brought that rebellion to an end and who was still a leader of the democratic movement outside Burma. He explained to me what had changed between 1988 and 2007:

The big difference is that when we came out of Burma we were preparing for the armed struggle to overthrow the regime. We came out and began training to fight alongside the ethnic armies that were fighting the regime.

But now the protesters inside Burma are for the unarmed struggle. They want to win it by winning people's hearts. It requires more courage because they are facing fully armed soldiers and they have no weapons. But they say, anyway we can't compete against the army in armed power—but we can compete in terms of the support of the masses, in terms of truth and justice. They have been taking up Gandhian methods, what we call political defiance: demonstrations, boycotts, refusing to have religious communication with the regime . . .

The scenario sketched by Naing Aung was of a nation, estranged from its rulers for more than a generation, which far from giving up the struggle for freedom had discovered new resources for the fight in its traditional faith, and new ways to carry on that fight—of which the monks' uprising was the first sign. And in choosing these means and this new nonviolent vanguard, people were also falling in with the woman for whose party they had voted in overwhelming numbers. Aung San Suu Kyi had written:

In Burma we look upon members of the
sangha
as teachers. Good teachers do not merely give scholarly sermons, they show us how we should conduct our daily lives . . . In my political work I have been strengthed by the teachings of members of the
sangha
. . . Keep in mind the hermit Sumedha, who sacrificed the possibility of early liberation for himself that he might save others from suffering. So must you be prepared to strive for as long as might be necessary to achieve good and justice . . .
³

The fact that the monks' protest had erupted so soon after the conclusion of the National Convention may have been a coincidence, but it was instructive. Than Shwe had sought to correct one of Burma's glaring anomalies, the fact that it lacked a national constitution and was ruled ad hoc by soldiers and emergency decrees. By this means he hoped to persuade his people, and the world, that Burma was back on a good course. But nothing he did could remedy the moral decay and corruption of which that anomaly was only one of many signs.

The climax of the uprising—captured only by a mobile phone camera—came on October 24th, when the barricades parted and one column of chanting monks was allowed to come almost to the gate of Suu's home. Suu came out of the gate and saluted them with tears in her eyes as they continued chanting.

The crackdown began the next day: The regime threatened violence if the marches did not cease. Soldiers surrounded the Shwedagon, the mustering point for Rangoon's marches, and on the night of September 26th began raiding monasteries, beating, arresting, forcibly defrocking and killing monks. When monks and members of the public defied the overnight repression to march again in Rangoon, troops opened fire, killing at least nine including Kenji Nagai, a Japanese video journalist, shot dead in cold blood. The murder was recorded by
Democratic Voice of Burma's
brave undercover cameramen and the shocking images sent around the world.

A monk covers his eyes against smoke during the uprising.

“This popular uprising marked a new era in post-Independence Burmese politics,” says Jordt. “Burma had finally entered the age of information.” For the first time the Burmese people were able to see political reality—protest and violent repression—played out in real time on their televisions.

In an open-air coffee shop in the town of Kaw Thaung, in the far south of Burma, where I was reporting the uprising—the closest I could get to the action, Rangoon being under lockdown—one large television was tuned to a Japanese samurai drama, the other to CNN. During those days, much of the American channel's news coverage was devoted to “the Saffron Revolution” with shots of tens of thousands of marching monks intercut with clashes on the streets, lorries full of troops and trashed monasteries. The customers in the coffee shop watched round-eyed and in silence.

According to Jordt, Than Shwe's violent suppression of the protests, which millions of Burmese saw with their own eyes on television or the Internet, put him in a special category of vileness.

In suppressing the monks' uprising, Than Shwe claimed in the state-run press that he was merely acting as a “good king” and punishing what he claimed were “bogus monks” who were betraying their cloth by turning political. “But that claim simply did not stand up in light of the images of monks being violently abused and beaten, of monks' corpses floating in the rivers,” she said. “These were horrific images that shocked the devout nation of Buddhists. Than Shwe was seen as nothing more than a monk killer. The regime's claim that these were only bogus monks was dismissed, as were the claims that the monks were playing politics.”

The Burmese were in no doubt, says Jordt: They expected any day that Than Shwe would “descend head first into the hell realms,” unless his astrologers and sorcerers were clever enough to come up with some black magic—
yadaya
in Burmese—to keep that fate at bay.
⁴

Where did that leave Aung San Suu Kyi, locked up in her home throughout these events?

“She is seen as a witness, a moral compass for her country,” says Jordt. “Where she has the greatest traction is in her role as moral exemplar.”
It is a role analogous to that of the monks: They shape the morality of individuals by exemplifying morally ideal behavior, while Aung San Suu Kyi plays a similar role in the political realm. “Her virtue-based politics . . . contrasts starkly with the ruling generals' oppressive and cruel reign,” Jordt said.

Her power lies in being a witness to the process of moral degradation and violent oppression by the military regime. She inspires the populace to recall or imagine a different kind of social contract between ruler and ruled based on the highest human aspirations of compassion, loving-kindness, sympathetic joy and equanimity: the four sublime states of mind.

When the file of monks was permitted to walk down University Avenue and stop at the gate of her home, this performance evoked the way in which the
sangha
traditionally conferred its moral endorsement on an aspiring ruler, sanctifying their claim through recognizing their virtue.

She thereby became, to invoke a Burmese notion of political legitimacy, the “rightful pretender to the throne.”

The Burmese believe that evil acts provoke reactions in nature. Eight months after the violent suppression of the monks, in May 2008, the regime announced the referendum to endorse the new constitution that had been rubber-stamped by the National Convention—the fourth step on the road map. But days before the referendum could be held, a violent cyclone struck the country, killing 138,000 people, mostly poor farmers in the Irrawaddy Delta, rendering 2.4 million more homeless and causing billions of dollars in damage.

Jordt says that popular opinion in Burma was in no doubt that the disaster had been provoked by Than Shwe's abuse of the monks. “Cyclone Nargis was taken as a sign that the regime was illegitimate and that the country was being punished as a whole for the rulers' bad actions against the monks,” she said. “A little poem was secretly circulated through the population, encapsulating their dire expectations”:

Mandalay will be a pile of ashes

Rangoon will be a pile of trash

Naypyidaw will be a pile of bones.

J
OHN WILLIAM YETTAW
, who lives in a small mobile home in the Ozark Mountains, Missouri, is a four-times married Vietnam War veteran and a devout Mormon; a man who believes that God speaks to him and sends him on urgent missions.
¹

One of his three ex-wives has said he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. NLD sources have referred to him, not without reason, as “a nutty fellow” and “that wretched man.”
²
What is also true, however, is that under the compulsion of God, or trauma, or plain nuttiness, he did what even the most enterprising journalists had not bothered to attempt—neither I nor Kenneth Denby nor even John Simpson, during the many years of Aung San Suu Kyi's detention: He made his way to her home, under the noses of her many guards, not once but twice.
³

He didn't get an interview, but then that was not what he was after. His mission was to warn her that terrorists planned to assassinate her, then pin the blame on the junta.

His first visit came during a twenty-six day trip to Burma in November 2008. During her years of detention, as well as the mother and daughter who kept house for her, there were numerous guards both at the razor-wire barricaded gate, and inside the house. The first time Yettaw made his way to her home—swimming across Inya Lake with the help of home-made wooden flippers—he failed to meet her: He was stopped at the shore and eventually sent on his way, after leaving a copy of the Book of Mormon for Suu as his visiting card. Acting no doubt on information from one of the people who had intercepted him in the grounds of her home, he did not swim back across the lake but took the easy way out, walking along the lake shore then through a drainage pipe which brought him out near the American Embassy.