The Lady and the Peacock (10 page)

a lie: She's not a leader. She refused to lead. We need a leader. The rest wanted to join with her but I said no, I'm still looking for a leader.

But then two days later a friend of mine who was also a colleague called in on me and said, Daw Suu wants to talk to you. He rang her number and gave me the phone and I said, “How are you, sister?” (because at university it's our custom to call any girl our age or somewhat older Ma Ma, “big sister”). And she said, “Will you come to my home? We need to talk.” I said, “No, I already heard you say that you didn't want to lead the movement.” She said, “Shall we sit down and talk about it?”

So I went there on August 16th with two others, a high school student called Aung Gyi and a university student, one of the leaders of the student movement, called Koko Gyi, and we sat down with Suu and she explained that she didn't want to be an opportunist, she didn't want to take over a movement that was already going on—but if people really needed Aung San's daughter, she said, “I will do it.” But then she said there were so many other considerations, her family life, her two kids, her ailing mother, etcetera. So I said, “The point is, we really need you. We expected your elder brother, Aung San Oo, to be available to help us”—and there were a lot of rumors [about him] in Burma at that point. But he was never interested in Burma or in Burmese political issues or anything. He just happens to be the son of Aung San.

So then she said, “All right, let's start working, because I know something about the Burmese situation through my books and my research, but I have been away from the country so maybe you can fill me in on that part.” So we decided to work together as a team. And that's her skill as a leader, as I see it. She never takes the upper hand, she never uses her family background to dominate. She never acts like that.

In fact, in the time it took Suu to persuade this young academic to give her a second chance, she had already made her first political intervention, behind the scenes as she preferred. It was as modest and decorous in form as it was ambitious in content. On August 15th, she and Hwe Myint, one of her earliest political allies, wrote to the Council of State, the circle of elderly generals grouped around Ne Win, to propose that they set up a
“People's Consultative Committee,” made up of people outside the BSPP, “to present the aspirations of the people in a peaceful manner within the framework of the law.”
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The letter went on, “In the words of the song which roused the patriotism of our people . . . ‘For the good of those to follow/without regard for ourselves,' so is this proposal presented with the good of future generations in mind.”

Suu's ad hoc University Avenue think tank was up and running: The proposal carried the endorsement of U Nu, Burma's first prime minister after independence, and other leading politicians from the pre-Ne Win era. But—as so often in years to come when appeals went out to Burma's generals from her address—there was no reply. Clearly, more direct methods would be required.

*

As the democracy movement came into existence around her, Suu was still in the bosom of her family, with all that implied—still nursing her gravely ill mother, keeping her sons up to the mark with their studies, stealing spare moments to resume work on her dissertation.
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But at the same time she found herself the beating heart of what would soon become the most important political movement her country had seen since independence.

“The boys are in fine form,” Michael reported. “Alex is relaxed and happy—trouncing me regularly at squash in the Australian Embassy Club, Kim is swimming, both of them spend time reading to their grandmother . . . There is a constant stream of visitors . . .”

A month later, after the children had flown back home to start the new school term, the life of the house had become even more hectic. “You have no idea how every second of the day is occupied,” Michael wrote. “One of my main tasks is to see that Suu gets some sleep.”

U Win Tin, a stubbornly contrarian journalist who had been silenced for years by Ne Win and who was at the time vice president of the journalists' union, was one of many drawn to Suu's door.
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Three separate groups formed around her, he explained:

In Rangoon everybody knows everybody and all the union strike committees—from the lawyers' union, the doctors' union, the students'
union and so on—wanted to make contact with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. So two or three people from each committee used to come to her house for talks lasting two or three hours, about the political situation outside, the government, the military and so on—that was one group.

After the strike started on August 8th, masses of people started coming into the city from the suburbs of Rangoon, maybe ten miles away, just walking without anything to drink or anything to eat—they did not dare to drink the tap water because there were rumors that it had been poisoned. It was very hard for them because the weather was very hot and humid, but people came down to the middle of town anyway because most of the offices are located in the downtown area. And as they marched and marched they shouted slogans, and anybody passing through from Rangoon's northern suburbs to the center of town has to pass in front of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's house. So it was very easy for them [to come there] and they shouted slogans and tried to meet Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

There was a man called Thakin Tin Mya, now he's an old man like me, he's about ninety, he used to be a communist and a leader of the nationalist organization DoBama before the war. He was a very good organizer, he knew almost everybody in Burmese politics, and he formed a group to talk to all these people coming past the house hoping for a meeting: to ask their names and their leader's names and their group's name and whether they are involved in strike action and so on. In the evening he made reports to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and these reports became a sort of briefing in which he explained the contribution people were making to the strike, not only in Rangoon but also in the small towns and so on. And that was the second group.

And the third group was formed of people like me, senior politicians, journalists, writers and so on: We were her political consultants, thinking what we should do and so on.

The pressure of events—the host of people now clamoring for Suu to take some kind of initiative, and the failure of her proposal for a consultative committee to elicit any official reaction—were steadily pushing her towards the point of no return. Every evening, when all the different advisory groups had gone home, she and Michael sat down to talk over the day's events. Eventually they decided there was no other way out: Suu would have to stand up and be counted. But with troops at every
crossroads with orders “to shoot to hit,” in Ne Win's words, if the martial law ban on assemblies was broken, the last thing she wanted to do was provoke another bloodbath.

So she took steps to prevent it—and in the process discovered the extent of her influence.

Despite his communist background and the help he was providing to Suu, Thakin Tin Mya, her gatekeeper, was a member of the ruling BSPP and in good standing with the country's political establishment.
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At Suu's urging he set up a secret meeting for August 23rd between her and U Tin Aung Hein, the Minister of Justice and one of the few people in Ne Win's inner circle not tainted by corruption. Suu confided in the Minister that she intended to make a public speech aimed at bringing an end to the bloodshed in the country—and she wanted him and his boss to know that she had no political aspirations and no hidden agenda.

The Minister replied with a piece of advice: The troops lining the streets regarded Ne Win as the father of the army, he said. “So please don't launch any attacks on him, and don't incite the people to do so, either.”
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Suu readily agreed, but had a specific request to make: To reduce the risk that her first public appearance would precipitate another massacre, she asked the Minister to petition Ne Win to allow the crowd to gather, despite the martial law provisions.

U Tin Aung Hein promised to do what he could. And he was as good as his word. The next day martial law was lifted; Maung Maung, four days into his presidency, announced that, in accordance with Ne Win's proposal in July, a referendum would be held to decide between a one-party and a multiparty system; and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi gave the first public speech of her life.

It was a brief affair, delivered in the grounds of Rangoon General Hospital. Suu stood on a petrol drum to speak, wearing a white Burmese blouse and looking, as U Kyi Maung had observed, about seventeen. At her shoulder stood the shipwreck survivor and poet Maung Thaw Ka, with a quizzical expression on his craggy face. Who can say, he seems to be thinking, what this might lead to?

Grasping the microphone, she expressed her desire to see Burma move swiftly to a political system “in accord with the people's desires.” She said she further wished that the people would show discipline and unity and
use only the most pacific methods of demonstration. So far, there was nothing to disturb Ne Win's sleep. Then she told them that she would be speaking again at greater length two days' hence—this time at the Shwedagon pagoda.

*

Ralph Fitch, an English merchant who saw the pagoda in 1586, called it “the fairest place, as I suppose, that is in the world.”
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Norman Lewis called it “the heart and soul of Rangoon, the chief place of pilgrimage in the Buddhist world, the Buddhist equivalent of the Kaaba at Mecca, and, in sum, a great and glorious monument.” Its special holiness, he explained, “arises from the fact that it is the only pagoda recognized as enshrining relics not only of Gautama, but of the three Buddhas preceding him.” The value placed on the huge shrine was made manifest in the treasures lavished on it by successive kings, the guaranteed method—according to the somewhat mechanical dictates of traditional Theravada Buddhism—of speeding one's approach to Nirvana. “It was the habit of the Burmese kings,” Lewis goes on, “to make extravagant gifts for the embellishment of the Shwedagon, diamond vanes, jewel-encrusted finial umbrellas, or at least their weight in gold, to be used in re-gilding the spire. The wealth that other Oriental princes kept in vaults and coffers was here spread out under the sun to astound humanity.” And its impact on the visitor, Lewis discovered, was quite as powerful as its importance suggested it should be. “I plunged suddenly into the most brilliant spectacle I had ever seen,” he reported of his arrival on the pagoda's expansive terrace. “In the immediate background rises a golden escarpment, a featureless cliff of precious metal, spreading a misty dazzlement.”
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A statue draped in gold inside the Shwedagon shrine.

But the Shwedagon is far more than just a brilliant place of pilgrimage. Affirming the centrality of the Buddhist tradition at the heart of the nation's identity, it became the focus during the 1920s and 1930s of the first mass demonstrations against British rule.
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Aung San delivered some of his most inflammatory speeches here, and is buried nearby. By announcing that she would speak at the Shwedagon, for the first time Suu showed her willingness to throw the charisma of her name behind the uprising. And the regime's response was instantaneous.

Relations between Suu and her mother and the regime had never been less than correct all these years. Suu's frequent appearances at the Martyrs' Day event in July was the extent of their co-involvement, and both sides handled her father's name and fame with great care and respect, exquisitely conscious of how much it meant to all of them. But suddenly, as she stepped into the maelstrom, all that was forgotten. Overnight thousands of leaflets were printed, stigmatizing Suu as the puppet of a foreign power, as a “genocidal prostitute,” the whore of a foreign bastard.
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In grotesque caricatures, the first of many to appear over the years, Suu and Michael were depicted having sex. “Take your bastard of a foreigner,” they commanded, “and leave at once!”

Suu and her party left University Avenue at 8:30
AM
in a convoy of eleven vehicles. Anonymous bomb scares and assassination threats had heightened the tension of the day. One of her advisers urged her to don a bulletproof vest for protection.
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“Why?” she retorted. “If I was afraid of being killed, I would never speak out against the government.” Already her supporters were getting a glimpse of her mettle. To guard against unpleasant surprises, dozens of the students who had been frequenting her home over the previous weeks, wearing long-sleeved white shirts and dark longyis, formed a large though unarmed bodyguard.

“We didn't go along the main road,” Nyo Ohn Myint the lecturer recalled, “because there had been many rumors and we were afraid of being attacked—an army captain was arrested in downtown Rangoon with a lot of machine guns, he had supposedly been assigned to assassinate her. He confessed after he was arrested by members of the public, who then beat him.”
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