The Lady and the Peacock (8 page)

Sein Lwin, “the Butcher,
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 who briefly replaced Ne Win as head of state in 1988, until forced from power by mass protests.

“Sein Lwin's takeover was aimed solely at preventing the loss of [Ne Win's] own power and security,” Michael later wrote to his brother.
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“As Ne Win's hit man and crony he's used to combining the role of court executioner, astrologer, sorcerer and alchemist—literally, not figuratively, in the peculiar mixture of magic and repression that the former regime has depended upon to stay in power, and which will now continue unabated.”

It was like offering the demonstrators a carrot—but then cracking them over the head with a stick before they could take a bite of it. It was like opening Pandora's Box but then trying to slam it shut again before anything got out.

For whatever reason, acting on whatever senile, cock-eyed calculation, the Old Man had planted a seed, and nothing would be the same again. “Up to then,” diplomat Martin Morland remembered, “the student movement . . . was completely unfocused. It was in essence anti-government: protest against brutality, a frustrated reaction against the inane policies, the demonetization, the hopelessness of the students, the lack of any future. There was no focus to it. Ne Win, unwittingly, provides a focus by calling for a multiparty system, and from there on in, the student cry is for democracy.”

And in that context, substituting the Butcher for the Old Man was like lighting the short fuse of a big bomb. The curfew, so destructive to the local economy, had been lifted at the end of June. Colleges remained closed, but a hard core of protesters had merely moved from their campuses to pavilions around the Shwedagon pagoda, the nation's most important Buddhist shrine, where they continued to organize. And when Sein Lwin's appointment was announced, the protests began almost at once. Martial law was declared the day after the congress ended, but instead of scaring people off the streets it simply raised the stakes. “Dissatisfaction among the public gave way to hatred,” wrote Lintner. “‘That man is not going to be the ruler of Burma,' was a common phrase repeated all over the country.”
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The Old Man himself had acknowledged that his country was ripe for profound change, and the fact that he had tried to eat those words as soon as they were out of his mouth could not alter it. He had indicated that the future did not belong to him and, the Butcher notwithstanding, that it might not even belong to the army. And quite quickly Aung San Suu Kyi became a very busy person indeed.

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How are we to explain the fact that this elegant, scholarly, middle-aged woman, who had not lived in her country for thirty years and who had never been involved in politics anywhere, suddenly became the focus of political speculation and intrigue?

Most countries in Asia that became independent after the Second World War found themselves, as the first or second wave of independence leaders died out, confronting the conundrum of legitimacy. When your
country has been arbitrarily ruled by foreigners, backed by the gun, for generations or centuries, how does an indigenous leader convince the people of his rightful claim on power?

In many cases, the solution to which people turned was dynastic. In India, the daughter of the first prime minister had fortuitously married a man called Gandhi; he was no kin of the great Mahatma, but that name plus the Nehru bloodline gave Indira Gandhi a claim to power which none of her rivals could match. Next door in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of a charismatic prime minister who had been hanged by a usurping general proved to have both the name and the mass clan following to become prime minister twice, even though she lacked the political gifts to become a great leader. And in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, too, variations on that dynastic theme have had a decisive impact on politics for generations.

In Burma, independent since 1948, Aung San, Suu's father, was venerated in every corner of the land: No town, at least in the areas dominated by Burmans, was without its “Bogyoke [General] Aung San” road or square. No public office was complete without its portrait of the national hero, killed before he could fulfill his destiny and lead the country to freedom, alongside the equally obligatory portrait of Number One. And for months now, in the absence of anyone of flesh and blood to follow, the protests that had thundered up and down the streets of the nation's cities and towns were often spearheaded by a young man or woman holding aloft the portrait of Aung San.

So powerful was the desire for a figure around whom the protesters could unite that in July posters were stuck up all over Rangoon, announcing the imminent return from exile of Aung San Oo, Aung San's oldest child and only surviving son. “He's coming to lead us,” went the rumors, “he is the one we are waiting for.” But that hope was vain: Many years before Aung San Oo had settled in San Diego with a steady job as an engineer, and had taken American citizenship. During the uprising of 1988 he sent messages of solidarity to Burmese students in Tokyo, where his brother-in-law lived, some of whom cherished the hope that he would galvanize the Burmese diaspora.
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But the hope came to nothing. He “was not cut out to lead the exiles,” says Dr. Maung Zarni, who was a student in Tokyo at the time and read out some of those messages. “Worse still,
after his failure to establish himself as the leader of the Burmese exiles he became an annual ‘state guest' in Rangoon where he and his wife were wined and dined by the generals.”

Maung Zarni, today a sociologist and a prominent activist in the Burmese diaspora, pointed out that the dynastic principle is in fact far weaker in Burma than in many other developing countries, from North Korea to Syria: Neither Ne Win nor his ultimate successor Than Shwe managed to hand over power to their children, despite being the nation's preeminent rulers for a total of more than forty years.

But then in the Burmese context Aung San was unique, as Maung Zarni explained. “According to my great uncle, who was a friend of Aung San and roomed next to him at Rangoon University when they were both undergraduates in the 1930s, Aung San was from his student days consumed by the single-minded pursuit of Burma's liberation by any means necessary,” he said. “In place of economic wealth—Aung San left virtually no material possessions to his widow and two surviving children—or a powerful political machine, he left a legacy as unquestionably the most popular and revered nationalist of his time.”

And if Aung San was unique, Aung San Suu Kyi was to prove no less so. Though nobody could have guessed it at the time.

Her home on Inya Lake was directly across the water from the huge villa where General Ne Win resided, surrounded by 700 troops, reclusively holding court. And as a new and even more desperate cycle of protest and repression got under way, a host of people with different ideas and agendas began beating a path to her door.

Watching on television that fateful session of the BSPP at which Ne Win resigned, “She, like the whole country, was electrified,” Michael Aris later recalled. “I think it was at this moment . . . that Suu made up her mind to step forward. However, the idea had gradually taken shape in her mind during the previous fifteen weeks.”
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And now it took shape in the minds of many others, too. After Ne Win announced his decision to resign, “Suu's house quickly became the main center of political activity in the country and the scene of such continuous comings and going as the curfew allowed,” Aris wrote.
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“Every conceivable type of activist from all walks of life and all generations poured in . . . She began to take her first steps into the maelstrom beyond her gates . . .”

A
UNG SAN SUU KYI
had not lived in Burma since she was fifteen, nearly thirty years before, but her connections to her homeland were far from tenuous. Her presence was expected on July 19th, when, accompanied by the most senior generals in the Tatmadaw, the Burmese Army, she laid a wreath at the Martyrs' Memorial in central Rangoon, to commemorate her father's death. It was the most resonant day in the young republic's calendar, and Suu was one of the principal actors in it.

There were other reasons, too, for Suu to spend as much time as she could in the city of her birth. Her mother was aging and grateful for regular visits; Suu's surviving brother Aung San Oo came over far less frequently from the United States. On a recent visit she had stayed four months. As a result Suu's Rangoon life was perhaps as rich and full as her life in England. Her Burmese was not merely fluent but up to date and idiomatic. She was in town often enough and long enough to have a social life; she saw the high-ranking people her mother saw. And that gave her access to a very particular set of people.

Daw Khin Kyi's appointment as Burma's first-ever woman ambassador was a signal honor, and one she could hardly have declined. One can understand why General Ne Win wanted her out of the way in the run-up to his coup d'état: Though never a political figure in her own right, she represented a certain vision of her nation, one symbolized by her late husband and by the man who took his place to become independent Burma's first prime minister, U Nu, a vision in stark contrast to Ne Win's. She must also have known the truth behind the rumor that on one occasion her husband, disgusted by Ne Win's compulsive womanizing, had ordered another officer in the Burma Independence Army to kill him.
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But the officer flunked the task, for which, it was said, Aung San gave him such a ferocious kicking that decades later he still bore the scars.

Despite remaining silent in public, Daw Khin Kyi's disdain for Ne Win and his behavior were well known—which is why it suited Ne Win for her
to be packed off to India. Other prominent figures he feared could cause him problems were also given diplomatic appointments far away. Seven years later, as Suu was preparing to sit her Finals in Oxford, Daw Khin Kyi took early retirement and returned to Rangoon.

Back in University Avenue she lived extremely quietly, rarely leaving home except for an annual medical check. As in Delhi, she continued to entertain: Ne Win himself was among the people she invited over for lunch. At least once he and his then wife, Kitty Ba Than, accepted the invitation. Both Suu and her brother were present on that occasion; Suu remembered Kitty Ba Than making light conversation. But Ne Win himself merely ate and said not a word.
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Perhaps he had noticed the flag flying at her gate, the original flag of the Union of Burma, with five small stars circling a single large one, which he had abolished and replaced in 1974.
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It was her discreet symbol of defiance: Over the years, and very unostentatiously, her home on Inya Lake became a point of reference for the growing number of influential people—academics, journalists, senior army officers in disgrace—who had reached the conclusion that Burma was in need of a new direction. And at least a handful of them had encountered Daw Khin Kyi's daughter, listened to her conversation, noted her qualities and drawn certain conclusions.

As early as 1974, when the dishonorable treatment given by the regime to the corpse of its most famous son, the late Secretary General of the UN, U Thant, provoked violent demonstrations, the regime had called Suu in and enquired if she intended to get involved in anti-government activities. “I replied that I would never do anything from abroad, and that if I were to engage in any political movement I would do so from within the country,” she wrote later.
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U Kyi Maung, a colonel in the army who had been imprisoned for years for opposing Ne Win's coup and who later became one of the founders of the NLD, said that he first heard that Suu was thinking of going into politics from a mutual friend in 1987.
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Twice the friend, U Htwe Myint, mentioned her interest. U Kyi Maung however was unmoved.

The fact is that, until Ne Win's stunning speech of July 23, 1988, there was no way into Burmese politics: With only one party permitted by law, it was the ultimate closed shop. Then suddenly, as the nation's political
and economic crisis reached a head, the doors were thrown open. From being a no-man's-land, overnight Burmese politics became a free-for-all. And the elegant and sober lady of 54 University Avenue became the focus of intense speculation.

U Kyi Maung, though he later became one of her closest colleagues, is scathing in his early estimate of her. He met her first, he said, “by chance, at the home of a mutual friend here in Rangoon. It was back in 1986 . . . We spoke for only a few minutes. My most lasting impression was how shy and reticent she was. She seemed like a decent girl who had no interest in frivolous talk or gossip. In fact, I remember thinking how peculiar it was that I never saw her laugh . . . Anyway the point is that she didn't impress me at all. Except by how young she looked. She must have been about forty-two at the time but she could have passed for a girl of seventeen.”
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But a man known to the Burmese public as Maung Thaw Ka saw far more in her than that. A Burmese Muslim whose tall figure and craggy face betrayed his roots in the subcontinent, he had been a captain in the Burmese Navy;
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after his vessel was wrecked he survived twelve days at sea without food or water until rescued by a passing Japanese ship. His account of the ordeal became a bestseller. Invalided out of the service, he reinvented himself as a witty and popular journalist and an acclaimed poet. He became head of the Burmese Literary Society, and traveled around the country giving talks about books and writing. He was a known opponent of the regime, and Military Intelligence agents always occupied the first row at his lectures.

It was only natural for the woman now embarked on a postgraduate degree in modern Burmese literature to seek out this substantial literary figure. But whatever information he gave Suu about books and writers, of more immediate value was his detailed knowledge of the first five months of the Burmese insurgency. “He took her around Rangoon,” said Bertil Lintner, who subsequently got to know him, “and showed her, ‘Look, this is where people were shot.' He took her to the site of the so-called Red Bridge incident, the White Bridge incident, Sule pagoda, everywhere that students were killed.”
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It was a crash course in the political story so far.