Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (14 page)

He was an instinctive journalist. If there was information, Win Tin wanted to share it. (Many of his imprisoned colleagues who missed out on the digital revolution during years of incarceration emerged wary of new technology. But Win Tin had embraced it – his smart phone was his new, constant companion.) When Burma’s civil war broke out in 1948, Win Tin had already entered the University of Rangoon. It was not safe to go back to his hometown, some one hundred and twenty miles north of the city. He stayed in the capital and in 1950 found work – by day at the Burma Translation Society, while also putting in shifts as the night editor for Agence France
Press. A few years later, he won a scholarship to go to the Netherlands as a journalism apprentice. He found it lonely, but focused on learning as much as he could in this strange, new environment. Mimicking the reporting techniques of George Orwell, he moved lodgings frequently, living in a working-class suburb, then a wealthy neighbourhood ‘just to know how people are’. One carefree summer, he hitchhiked his way around Europe, from England to Greece.

At that time, Win Tin was the only Burmese in the Netherlands. He thought about other expatriates in Europe and the United States – mostly students and junior doctors – who might be longing for news from home. He had plenty of sources in Burma who were writing to him with news, none of it good. Burma was unstable. The economy was in pieces. The countryside had been carved up into territories controlled by rival rebel groups or government loyalists. Chinese nationalist soldiers roamed the Shan hills. Amid the chaos, rice exports had slumped, and the timber mills, oil wells and jade mines of British rule barely functioned. Win Tin tracked down a company in Germany that produced typewriters with the Burmese script. He hitched a lift across the border and returned with one, typed up his first four-page newsletter and copied it with a Cyclostyle machine. He posted the newsletter to all the addresses he had, and constantly sought out more readers, topping up his mailing list. He imagined the young men (and handful of women) feeling lonely in their lodgings in Sheffield or Berkeley. ‘Even if people lived in the same house or the same room I would send them their own copy by name,’ he said. ‘When you are abroad, it is nice to get something addressed especially to you.’

By the time he returned to Burma in 1957, Win Tin had already been marked out as a dissident. He set up several newspapers, some of which were closed down or suspended. In 1968, at the time of the Prague Spring, the information ministry,
nervous about his influence, banished him to Mandalay, hoping a provincial posting would quieten him. But Mandalay was a city of writers, poets and students, with a radical buzz, which Win Tin instantly embraced. He would sit in a pavement teashop, on a wooden stool under the shade of a tamarind tree, discussing political ideas. He found himself freer, and, as editor-in-chief of the widely read
Hanthawaddy Daily
, his influence grew. At nine o’clock each night an editor from the state censor – the Press Scrutiny Board – would call to go through the sentences or articles to be deleted from the following day’s paper. ‘He called from Rangoon, and of course in those days the line was not too good,’ said Win Tin. ‘Sometimes I would just not pick up the phone. Sometimes I would say, “Sorry, I can’t hear you very well,” and publish the stuff anyway.’

Win’s Tin’s political connections afforded him some latitude. The country’s leader, Ne Win, liked him. Having seized power in the 1962 coup, the army general had brought an end to Burma’s post-independence chaos, but was now gaining a new reputation as an autocrat and an economic bungler. Ne Win’s ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’, which combined elements of extreme nationalism, Marxism and Buddhism, was helping to ensure that the country was making none of the economic progress of its neighbours. The free press was crushed, and most high-profile journalists were locked up. Despite his reputation as a bluff military strongman, however, Ne Win had an intellectual side and sought out the company of the original, freethinking Win Tin. Each time he came to Mandalay, usually en route to his summer residence in the hill station of Maymyo, the general would invite the journalist for dinner. Win Tin cared little for the dictator, but used the improbable relationship to his advantage. ‘It was a great safeguard for me,’ Win Tin said.
‘Because the authorities knew of my contact with Ne Win, they didn’t dare be too harsh.’

By the late 1980s, Win Tin was one of Burma’s most prominent journalists and head of the Journalists’ Union. Like so many of the country’s brightest and best, he was swept up in the unrest of 1988, when students marched down the streets shouting democracy slogans, workers from lawyers to dock labourers went on strike, and revolutionary politics were openly discussed in hurriedly printed pamphlets and impromptu meetings in tea shops. The year before, Burma had been designated by the United Nations as one of the world’s least developed nations. That same year, without warning, the government had taken the twenty-five, thirty-five and seventy-five kyat notes out of circulation. There was no exchange of old bills for new; families lost their cash savings overnight. As became the pattern in Burma, it took an economic shock in an already desperately poor country to push people on to the streets. The demonstrations began on Rangoon’s university campuses. On 16 March 1988, students marched between the city’s two major universities, Rangoon University and the Rangoon Institute of Technology. They were cornered by soldiers and police near Inya Lake. Some fled, some were shot and beaten to death, some driven into the lake to drown. Another forty-one students suffocated to death in a police van outside Insein Prison, and hundreds more were arrested. On 23 July, General Ne Win resigned, only to be replaced by General Sein Lwin, the head of the riot police. The pro-democracy protests intensified.

Forty-three-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burma’s independence hero, was back in Burma from her home in Oxford to nurse her mother, who had suffered a stroke. She spent her days at her mother’s bedside in Rangoon General Hospital, but was becoming increasingly involved in the protest movement.
She arranged a meeting with the Journalists’ Union to discuss the unfolding events. ‘She was a famous man’s daughter, but she had no experience at all, she was just a housewife,’ Win Tin recalled. By August, when students and workers united in a general strike that paralysed the government, she was meeting with the union every day. It took a while for Win Tin to recognise Suu Kyi’s leadership qualities, and it wasn’t until a mass rally on 26 August, when the revolutionary’s daughter made her first public speech, that he was fully convinced. ‘We had already seen she had a sharp mind, and that she was a lively person with a jolly sense of humour, and very intelligent too. But I didn’t know whether she was good enough to be a political leader until she made the speech at Shwedagon. Her talk was very clear, straightforward. She was concise and very precise. Her Burmese was perfect, and she never dropped in English words, which is a bad habit of many people here. We were all completely taken with her.’

From then on, Win Tin and Suu Kyi worked closely together. The activists held talks with the government, but hopes for a smooth political transition were ruptured by the 18 September coup against the ruling Burma Socialist Programme Party. A new military order, the self-styled State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), took over, and soldiers were quickly deployed across the country, breaking up strike centres and blockades. Nine days later, in response to the renewed crackdown, the National League for Democracy was formed, becoming the democracy struggle’s most recognised political movement. Win Tin was one of its founders, along with Suu Kyi and retired General Tin Oo. One of Win Tin’s jobs as party secretary was to transcribe Suu Kyi’s speeches for publication. ‘It was never necessary to edit the speeches or change the syntax, it was always perfect,’ he recalled. ‘One of the things I admire about her is her ability to talk to the people and
cut through to what is important.’ The momentum was strong, and hundreds of thousands joined the party in months. Excited by his new political role, Win Tin began to read the works of Henry Thoreau, who had conceived the philosophy of civil disobedience – an argument advocating individual resistance to government to draw attention to unjust rule. He was struck by the ideas, and believed Thoreau’s political thinking could be a force for change in Burma. ‘No government can wage a war if no one believes in it,’ he said. In June 1989, Win Tin started a movement of civil disobedience, travelling the country to urge people to join the cause. It took only a month for him to be arrested.

*

Win Tin was convicted of charges including spreading anti-government propaganda and sentenced to three years in prison. Internationally, it was a time of both crackdown and emerging freedom. Just weeks before, Chinese troops had massacred demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. But in Poland, voters had elected a new, Solidarity-led government, and in South Africa, President P.W. Botha met the imprisoned Nelson Mandela for the first time. With fresh charges piled upon him while in prison, Win Tin, one of thousands of pro-democracy activists imprisoned by the Burmese junta, would not be freed for nineteen and a half years. Nearly all of his prison life was spent in solitary confinement. The pain of isolation was intense, and he suffered physical agony as well. For the first eight years of his incarceration he had no teeth. ‘In one beating in the first week I lost all the front teeth in my upper jaw. My other teeth were weak and broken. After four or five months a dentist came and removed all of my teeth, except for a few in the lower jaw. I asked for dentures – at my own expense, of course – but for years they refused.’

The staple prison food was low grade, chewy brown rice. ‘Because the rice was so hard, I couldn’t eat very well. I would try to soften it with my gums. But my eating ability diminished. My stomach contracted. I suffered. I can only eat three or four spoonfuls of rice, even now.’

Win Tin was always kept apart from others. He would be separated from another occupied cell by three or four empty chambers, to make talking difficult. If he was taken out to exercise in the yard, he was taken alone. His meagre meals were passed to him through the bars of the cell. During the few spells he spent in Insein’s prison hospital, he was kept apart from the other patients. Psychologically, he was never broken, but it took him a while to acclimatise to his new environment. In 1992, an NLD member, Aung Kyaw Oo, who was elected to parliament in the 1990 general election (the junta had ignored the result), was installed in a cell a few doors down from Win Tin in Block 3, to where the former journalist had been moved. They made some contact, calling out to each other after lockdown. They tried to befriend the guards, giving away the milk powder and coffee delivered to them by friends and family in fortnightly packages.

The guards began to allow Win Tin, Aung Kyaw Oo and the other prisoners a little contact with each other. Sometimes they could share a few words as they took their toilet pails to empty in the latrine in the morning, and after lockdown in the evening they would chat through the bars of their cells. Win Tin, a community organiser his whole life, tried to formalise the arrangement – setting up committees, electing representatives, trying to make things better; it was in his blood. Win Tin always felt responsibility for others. ‘We decided to create a movement in the prison in two tiers. The first was the social tier.’ From 6.30 to 8.30 in the evening, the inmates of Block 3 – all of them political prisoners – would sing, tell stories and share
experiences, all through the bars of their cells. They got to know each other. They would celebrate birthdays, pooling their supplies of salt, sugar, tea and coffee powder from the visitors’ care packages to give as a gift.

Next came the ‘political tier’. After two months, the prisoners made plans to set up a Joint Action Committee. Win Tin was excited when he told me: it was clear that this had been the point when the adrenalin of politics had begun to flow again. The prisoners came from many political backgrounds: there was Ko Jimmy, a famous student leader of the ’88 uprising, communists, ethnic politicians from Karen and Shan parties, members of the Democratic New Society party, and the NLD. But politics had to adapt to prison conditions. ‘We decided against taking adversarial positions, but to operate by consensus, this was the only way it could work in prison. Political life was a bit different there, not everything depended on doctrine and ideology. We had to make allowances. Sometimes people would feel depressed, sometimes they were in a bad mood. Sometimes they just weren’t strong enough to cooperate.’

The committee started producing pamphlets of three or four pages, discussing political ideas and current affairs. They would ask visitors for news of the political situation outside and write it down. Sometimes they would smuggle in newspapers, or parts of newspapers, hidden in bowls of rice brought by relatives. ‘The paper was dirty and oily, but we would clean it and read it, then we could use the paper again,’ Win Tin said. ‘We were always short of paper. Our activities helped to boost our morale: focusing on this kind of thing stopped us from becoming distorted and depressed.’ Over the years visitors smuggled in letters, books and magazines. In the other direction, the prisoners sent out letters to loved ones, reports on prison life, and even submitted a dispatch to the United Nations, detailing abuses at Insein. The
guards were bribed with milk powder and cheroots to turn a blind eye. Emboldened by their success, the prisoners planned their most audacious move yet. They wanted a radio. Messages were sent out via visitors. One day in the summer of 1994, a transistor radio (with earphones) was smuggled into Insein Prison in a bowl of unappetising, greasy rice. ‘It was wonderful. We would listen at night. One person would listen and take notes, and when it was safe hand it to another person, so it wasn’t in the same place. After that we began to publish our newsletter every day. We had purpose. We began to think of ourselves as useful people.’

Those days Win Tin would later recall as the best of his prison life. But in November 1995, rumour reached senior Insein officials of agitation in Block 3. The chief warden ordered that the prisoners be taken out and the cement floor drilled up. ‘They thought we were hiding something,’ said Win Tin. ‘And we were.’ In his cell was a squat-down, ceramic toilet bowl. One night he had pulled it out of the floor and under it hidden his precious, smuggled possessions: notes and letters from outside, books and a copy of
Newsweek
magazine. He had also hidden an iron rod that he had found in the exercise yard. To cover the broken surround around the toilet, Win Tin had mixed paper and water to make his own cement, and dried it to make a lid that he could remove when necessary to access his belongings. The search by senior wardens unearthed the stash, along with those of other prisoners, bringing an abrupt end to those golden days of plotting and smuggling, the committees and the newsletters, the political thrills that Win Tin craved.