Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (16 page)

In May 2009 came the first whiff of a bizarre story concerning Suu Kyi – and the lake. The state-run newspaper the
New Light of Myanmar
reported that an American man had been arrested while swimming, at night, away from Suu Kyi’s house. It emerged that fifty-three-year-old John Yettaw, a devout Mormon who had fashioned his own homemade wooden flippers for the swim, had spent two nights in the home of Suu Kyi, who, under the terms of her house arrest was not allowed any guests unless sanctioned by the authorities. Suu Kyi had begged him to leave, but had felt obliged to offer him hospitality when he pleaded exhaustion. As a matter of principle, she later said, she did not report his presence to the security guards in front of her house. The motivation for Yettaw’s escapade was unclear; his family in Missouri said he was mentally ill and they were unaware that he had even travelled to Asia. As far as Suu Kyi was concerned, the middle-aged American was an unwelcome guest, and her aides said she had only allowed him to stay because he complained of feeling unwell. Speculation swirled on the Internet. What was behind it all? Was he a CIA spy? Or a regime stooge? As odd as it seemed, many people believed the latter, that Yettaw was sent to mess things up for Suu Kyi just as her term of detention was about to expire and there was the possibility that she would at last be freed. In fact, the most accurate description of Yettaw was probably an ‘eccentric’ – he acted alone, believing he was on a mission to save Suu Kyi. But his antics were a gift to the military authorities, who, true to form, arrested her at her home and put her on trial for breaching the terms of her house arrest.

For a few days during the monsoon season of 2009, a fleet of limousines and four-wheel drives with diplomatic plates cruised up the rain-soaked Insein Road each morning, whipping up arcs of spray that soaked the sidewalks and slippered feet of pedestrians. The convoy was heading north to the prison where Suu Kyi’s trial was held in a special court. Foreign diplomats had been given permission to attend, giving the outside world the first chance in years to catch a glimpse of the delicate, composed woman who, even in the most difficult of circumstances, always managed to find a fresh flower to wear in her hair. ‘She seemed to crackle with energy,’ said British ambassador Mark Canning, who sat in on the trial. The Philippines chargé d’affaires, Joselito Chad Jacinto, was equally charmed. ‘She exuded an aura which can only be described as awe-inspiring,’ he enthused. Suu Kyi was not allowed to approach the benches where the diplomats from Britain, Australia and Asian nations were seated, but she rewarded their daily attendance with a gracious smile and called out to them in English: ‘I hope to meet you again in better times.’ The thirteen-week trial was dismissed as a sham, Suu Kyi was convicted and another eighteen months were added to her sentence. Those ‘better times’ she had referred to seemed a remote, unlikely prospect. I never expected that I would meet Aung San Suu Kyi. Neither did I anticipate the dramatic political changes that were to follow, and nor did anyone else.

*

The barrier breached, we surged forward, past the sign saying ‘Restricted Area’. An uncertain pause then, as if we expected to be stopped, but no, the police had stepped to the side of the road, watching, smiling even, their guns slung casually over their shoulders. Incredulous at our freedom, we sped to a trot, then a full-on gallop, the joy of the moment manifested in laughter, little leaps, and punches into the warm, twilight air. The eighteen months had passed, and we were racing towards Aung San Suu
Kyi’s house, because (although we didn’t yet completely believe it) it appeared that the Lady had just been released from her latest stint of house arrest. Two hundred yards down University Avenue, on the right, was the house, a tatty fence, grey metal gate, the red sign of her National League for Democracy party, and above that a rain-battered portrait of her heroic father, General Aung San. I had joined the crowd of hundreds of Suu Kyi supporters who had thrown off their fear to come to see their heroine. They thronged around her gate, holding aloft portraits of their leader, some with little playing card-sized pictures they may have kept hidden in their pockets for years. The crowd pulsed with excitement. ‘Long Live Aung San Suu Kyi!’ Our eyes were fixed on the gate. Suddenly there she was, standing before us, beaming at us. We leapt into the air, as one. ‘
Amay Suu, Amay Suu
!’ ‘Mother Suu! Mother Suu!’ the crowd screamed.

It was 13 November 2010 when Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from seven years of house arrest, radiant and calm, as if she had never doubted this day would come. After a day of speculation as to whether she would actually be set free even though her sentence had reached its end, in the late afternoon the police had suddenly removed the barriers on University Avenue. Moments later she was there, standing at her fence in a lilac jacket with, of course, the customary flowers in her hair. Her head and shoulders were above the metal spikes of the gate; presumably she was standing on a stool or ladder behind it. Fleetingly, her hand reached up to smooth her swept-up hair. She smiled and nodded, and made a victory sign with her right hand. Minutes passed; the crowd was torn between yelling her name and wanting to hear her voice. Her fingers touched her lips, and there was quiet. ‘There is a time for silence and a time for talking,’ she told her supporters. ‘We will work together, united. Only then can we achieve our goal.’ Mobile phones were held up to click photographs, and
flashes of light danced like fireflies as darkness fell. The sight of the cell phones, Suu Kyi said later, was new to her; she had never spoken into a mobile and didn’t realise they could take pictures too. Next to me were two men, sweating and elated, clutching their postcard-sized Suu Kyi portraits. ‘Very happy, very happy!’ they shouted above the din.

It was all that needed to be said. Suu Kyi’s freedom brought pure joy, a visceral reaction to the righting of a wrong, and excitement that this inspirational leader would again be able to guide her supporters, plan policies with party colleagues and enjoy some simple pleasures that had been denied to her for so long, like speaking by telephone to her two sons. But while joy was unbounded, expectations were not. The release of Suu Kyi came six days after the government had held Burma’s first elections for twenty years, an event that had brought not optimism, but more a sense that the army was just looking for new ways to hold on to power. Under the new constitution pushed through in 2008, the military would hold 25 per cent of the seats in the new parliament in Naypyidaw, and the vote itself was blatantly rigged in favour of the army’s proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which scooped up the bulk of the remaining seats. There was reason to be wary. This was the third time that Suu Kyi had been freed after a total of fifteen years of detention spanning more than two decades. On previous occasions, the junta had fairly quickly found reason to re-arrest her. In 2003, when she had been free for just a year, Suu Kyi’s convoy was attacked by a government-hired mob at a rally in the central Burmese town of Depayin and more than seventy of her supporters were killed. The authorities detained her again ‘for her own protection’. So hope was tempered with realism. For all the excitement of that day in November, few Burmese people, after so many years of disappointment, dared to dream of a better future. ‘We feel powerless now, more than
ever,’ Ma Thida, a health worker who I had met through my NGO work, told me. ‘The government is releasing her because they think they have won the election and can control her and the country completely. How can she do anything?’

*

The next day, a Sunday, Suu Kyi addressed her supporters again, this time from the balcony of the NLD headquarters under the gleaming stupa of Shwedagon Pagoda. She had told us, in her no-nonsense, schoolmistressy manner, to be there at twelve o’clock sharp. But this was Burma, where things do not run like clockwork. By midday, the crowd was still swelling chaotically on the Shwegondine Road. It sprawled across the street and up the grassy bank on the other side. At first cars were crawling through the mass of people, slowly, politely, with no beeping – as is the Burmese way – but then the pressure of newcomers from both ends grew too strong, and the people were packed in too tightly to move even if they had wanted to. There was one person who had to get through, though, and at about quarter past (late herself) Suu Kyi arrived in the obligatory beaten-up Toyota Corolla, which squeezed to within ten metres of the building before her security detail – a dozen burly boys wearing white Aung San Suu Kyi T-shirts – formed a ring around her and virtually carried her inside. A football stadium roar went up. One of the NLD ‘uncles’, the senior party members who had tried, with limited success, to keep the party on course while their leader was imprisoned, came out to the platform set up at the front of the two-storey building and urged us to be quiet, and to sit, before the Lady would address us. Sit? It seemed impossible. Our backsides would take up a lot more ground space than our two feet. But these were orders and this was a compliant, eager crowd. So down we all went, holding on to the shoulders in front of us and finding ourselves in great intimacy with our neighbours, bottoms and laps concertinaed. By mid-
November, the ferocious strength of the Burmese sun should have begun to wane, ready for the comfortable winter months of December and January. But on that clear day, the sun beat down on us with force, and sweat streamed down happy, expectant faces.

When Suu Kyi emerged, in daylight this time, I could feel around me the desperate, searching hope channelled into this one woman, and wondered at the pressure she must have felt. But if she felt it, she did not betray it. Her voice clear and warm, her speech unscripted, she spoke of her hope for a new, democratic Burma. ‘You must go away and eat a lot of rice, to give you strength for the struggle ahead!’ she told the masses crammed before her. ‘None of us can do it alone. We must work together.’ It was clear Suu Kyi had lost none of her famous charisma. She somehow managed to single out individuals among the sea of faces for a look or a smile. In one extraordinary moment, she locked eyes with a young, bare-chested activist in the heart of the crowd who raised a clenched, tattooed fist in return. Also among us were secret service agents, poorly disguised with their neat, side-parted hair and darting eyes. Everyone knew who they were and everyone ignored them. No one cared. As before in Burma, I felt the strength of the collective, the power and fearlessness that solidarity can bring. Yet beneath all the excitement, it did not seem cynical to regard Suu Kyi’s release as a gimmick, a PR stunt on the part of the regime. More than two thousand political prisoners remained behind bars, the government had just presided over a fraudulent election, and the septuagenarian Than Shwe remained in power. What had really changed? The person most able to answer that question, the one who had truly seen it all before, was the Lady herself.

*

I paced around the garden, the only place I could get a signal, yelling into the cheap, Chinese mobile phone. It had a little telescopic aerial that I had just pulled up in case it helped. This was a phone that supposedly could not be traced back to me. It contained a $50 SIM card that gave me a measly number of call minutes, after which I had to throw the SIM card away and buy another one – with a new telephone number. My regular phone was rented from a Burmese friend – a common way of avoiding the arcane bureaucracy of acquiring a mobile – and I didn’t want to land her in trouble by using it to call the NLD’s number. It was at least my sixth call of the day to them; I was running down my credit in my quest to secure the hottest ticket in town – an interview with the newly released Aung San Suu Kyi. The man acting as Suu Kyi’s gatekeeper, the NLD party spokesman Nyan Win, I knew well, having met and interviewed him already. I tried to play up my credentials as a Rangoon-based journalist (I didn’t keep that a secret from the NLD, they were the dissidents after all, but I always went by my pseudonym, just to be on the safe side). I hoped my record of reporting on the NLD’s struggles would push me up the list. It was hard to say. Nyan Win, a government attorney before he joined the democracy movement, started off the week his usual even-handed, inscrutable self, but became more and more stressed under persistent pressure from the gang of foreign journalists who had sneaked into Burma to cover the dramatic events and were now desperate for their moment with the Lady. He hung up on me a few times, but I couldn’t blame him. Nyan Win was an erudite, softly spoken lawyer, not a spin doctor, and I often wondered after that whether part of him yearned for the days of blissful isolation when Suu Kyi was imprisoned and the press rarely bothered him.

On Wednesday, four days after Suu Kyi’s release, I phoned Nyan Win for about the twenty-eighth time. Expecting another brush off, I was dumbstruck to be
told the Lady would see me the next day. I was to come to the NLD’s headquarters at two o’clock. (Of course I would rather have met her in the house where she had spent all her years in detention, but it was clear that the terms of this interview were not up for negotiation.) I would get thirty minutes with her. My heart raced as I sat down to write out my questions. I emailed the
Independent’s
foreign desk. I thought through some contingencies in case I was followed by the MI agents stationed across the road from her office. I took a taxi into town to buy some more phone credit. On Anawrahta Street, where there was a cluster of Indian-run stores selling cameras, laptops and mobile phones, I walked past a little shop called Face, painted white, pristine and minimalist, and strangely out of place in Rangoon’s grimy city centre. It sold beautifully packaged creams and lotions arranged on glass shelves. I had been thinking of taking Suu Kyi a gift – a departure from the usual journalistic code of ethics, but this seemed to be a special circumstance. Some expensive body lotion, lavender-scented hand cream, surely these little luxuries had been denied to her over all these years? I knew from reading about Suu Kyi that even democracy icons were not immune to vanity and she clearly enjoyed looking after her appearance. On the occasions that she had been allowed visitors under house arrest she had requested not only books – which she loved – but also Max Factor lipstick and mascara. I went inside and bought her a gift set, wrapped beautifully in a white box tied up with a purple ribbon.