The Lady and the Peacock (17 page)

When Burma's last king, Thibaw, came to the throne, he was persuaded by his mother and consort that “he would never be safe till the princes were put out of the way,” Scott writes. “Seventy of the royal blood, men, women, and children, were murdered in the next three days, and buried within the palace, in a long trench dug for the purpose. The eldest prince . . . died shrieking for mercy at the hands of his own slaves, whom he had often tortured . . . The poor old regent of Pegu . . . had his nostrils and gullet crammed with gunpowder, and was thus blown up.”

The massacre of Thibaw's rivals was widely reported in foreign newspapers and its bestiality helped the British build the case for ending the Burmese monarchy and imposing their rule on the whole country. But from the Burmese point of view, the clearing away by a new monarch of rivals to the crown was a familiar and prudent custom. “Many Burmans defend it warmly,” Scott pointed out, “on the plea that it secured the peace of the country.” Otherwise there would always be the risk of those snubbed by the soothsayers staging a rebellion when they felt strong enough to do so.

Burma's royal massacres were startling on account of their scale, but nowhere in the world does a king cut a deal with pretenders to his crown; in traditional monarchical systems, the only place for a royal rival is in exile or under the ground. Burma's tragedy, one which Suu was acutely aware of before she went home, was that history had given the country no opportunity to discover that there were ways in which power could be both asserted and shared.

On the far side of Burma's northwestern border lies the world's largest democracy. India was no less feudal and monarchical than Burma when the British marched in to usurp its history, but it emerged from centuries of colonial subjection with a democratic system that has survived for more than sixty years. Why was India able to sustain such a system while
Burma, despite being encumbered with far fewer social problems than India and with a higher standard of living and rate of literacy, relapsed into tyranny after a mere decade of democratic experiment?

It was a question which Suu had long pondered, and the result was the most mature piece of writing of hers yet to see the light of day: an essay entitled “Intellectual Life in India and Burma under Colonialism,” written while she and Michael were in Shimla in 1986.

Democracy was able to sink roots in India, she argued, because the British had deliberately set out to create an intellectual elite educated in English to run their Indian administration. This elite was able to throw off the restrictions of traditional vernacular education and open themselves to international influences, while remaining in touch with their own traditions. The result was people like Gandhi. “Gandhi was of a practical turn of mind that looked for ideas to suit the needs of situations,” she wrote. “In spite of his deeply ingrained Hinduism, Gandhi's intellectual flexibility made him accept those elements of western thought which fitted into the ethical and social scheme he considered desirable.”
⁹

Burma was colonized more than two centuries after Bengal, and when the British cast around for a native elite to help them administer the colony, the Burmans were both outnumbered and outclassed linguistically by the Indians and Chinese to whom the British had opened Burma's door—“peoples,” as Suu pointed out, “so much more experienced in dealing with westerners and their institutions.”

Then much later, when the British tried to create the University of Rangoon by amalgamating two existing colleges, raising the academic standard and making them residential, they were met by violent protests: “There was . . . in the Burmese mentality,” writes Suu, “an ingrained resistance to elitism: . . . education of a national character should be made available to as broad a section of the population as possible.” But this salutary motive meant that it was very difficult for Burmese equivalents of the giants of colonial India—people like Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Gandhi and Nehru, all members of the English-speaking elite—to emerge.

The intense frustration of this failure radiates from an article written by Aung San in the 1930s while still a student. “We are fully prepared to follow men who are able and willing to be leaders like Mahatma
Gandhi,” he wrote. “. . . Let anybody appear who can be like such a leader, who
dares
to be like such a leader. We are waiting.”
¹⁰

It was of course Aung San himself who emerged to lead. But while he was able to lead his country to the threshold of independence, he could not transform its political culture: That was a task beyond the capacity of a single individual, however charismatic, or of a single generation. It was a transformation that, at independence, remained unfulfilled.

The party Aung San headed at his death, and which constituted Burma's first independent government in 1948, the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL), was not recognizably a party in the Western sense. Rather it was “a loose confederation of political parties and local influential leaders and strong men,” according to the American Burma expert David Steinberg. “Its membership ran the gamut of left to left-center positions that were socialist to some degree. More important, the AFPFL included a broad array of individuals reflecting the essential personalization of power; each leader had a power base and his own entourage, and sometimes armed supporters.”
¹¹
This “personalization of power,” the absence of an ideological coherence that could hold the party together, led to the League eventually splitting into two opposed camps based not on policies but on personalities—which in turn allowed the army to take its first bite of power, four years before the final takeover.

Burma had not digested the concept of a loyal opposition, or of power that could be shared or delegated through society's different strata. As in many other traditional societies, writes Steinberg, “power was conceived as finite.” To share power, “from center to periphery, between leaders, etc,” was to lose power: It was a zero-sum game. “Loyalty becomes the prime necessity, resulting in entourages and a series of patron–client relationships. Those outside of this core group may therefore be considered potential adversaries—a ‘loyal opposition' thus becomes an oxymoron.”

Gustaaf Houtman cites three reasons why the concept of “opposition” has failed to gain any traction in Burma. First, “the centralization of power lying with a king or general” means that “the regime views opposition with suspicion and is unwilling, perhaps even unable, to allocate it a place in its political scheme.” Secondly, “expressions of opposition are . . . equated with confrontation, and therefore armed force.” And thirdly, “opposition is seen as threatening to ‘harmony' and ‘national unity.' Indeed, the
overarching emphasis on national unity means that the idea of opposition is literally equated with the ‘destruction of unity.'”
¹²

In her speech at the Shwedagon, Suu had repeatedly invoked the need for “unity,” as her father had done. Yet from the perspective of Ne Win and his cronies, Suu and her new party embodied a fearful assault on the mystical concept of national unity, and a mortal challenge to their rule—all the more menacing because it was launched in the name of the very man, Aung San, whose achievements were the basis of their own claims to legitimacy.

“In Burma,” writes Houtman, “those who declare themselves opponents to the regime are either extremely courageous or extremely foolish—there is little in between.”
¹³
As Aung San Suu Kyi set out to carry word of her new party and its democratic promise to the corners of the country, she would soon discover exactly how courageous she and her colleagues would need to be.

*

If Saw Maung's promise of elections within three months—before the end of 1988—was to be fulfilled, the NLD had no time to waste. Yet almost at once it was embroiled in the factionalism that has been the besetting sin of Burmese politics since the time of Aung San. In this case it was an outbreak of hostilities between the baung-bi chut, the former military men, and the intelligentsia. Almost inevitably it developed into a fight between right and left.

Brigadier General Aung Gyi was the odd man out in the party's leadership. Formerly a close ally of Ne Win and his subordinate in the 4th Burmese Rifles—the regiment that provided all the military elite throughout the Ne Win years—in 1988 he had been the first figure from the military establishment to attack Ne Win's policies openly. He had been purged from the junta twenty-five years before, in 1963—yet he was unblushingly open about his continued affection for the army, and careful to avoid attacking his old boss in person. In the speech he made at the Shwedagon the day before Suu made hers, he urged his audience to heed the words of the new, “moderate” president, Maung Maung. Shortly before the crackdown of September 18th he had “guaranteed” that there would
be no army coup, and vowed to commit suicide if he was wrong. It was rumored that he remained on close terms with senior figures in SLORC.

He was in other words a very ambiguous figure to lead the nation's most promising opposition party, and when the rift at the top became open, Suu acknowledged that she had made a mistake in bringing him on board. “I went wrong,” she told U Win Khet, one of her close assistants, privately, “but not without a reason. I held a personal grudge against Aung Gyi, but when I started to work for my country I decided to set personal grudges aside.”
¹⁴

The general and Suu eventually parted company, but not before Aung Gyi had caused serious trouble to the fledgling party. He had left Rangoon in late September or early October, ostensibly for a “holiday in Maymyo,” the British-built hill station northeast of Mandalay. “But on his way there he stopped at every town in between,” Ma Thanegi wrote, “held meetings and announced that anyone contributing 30,000 kyats to the National League for Democracy would become a candidate in the election.”
¹⁵

This idea, which would have brought in useful funds at the cost of branding the party as an association of the (relatively) rich, would have been anathema to Suu and the rest of the party's leadership. But they only found out about it weeks later, when Suu had to clear up the mess in his wake.

Life in Burma was returning to a sort of blighted normality by the end of October as Suu and her closest colleagues, including Ma Thanegi, set off up-country, defying martial law to hold the first mass political meetings of Suu's career. The general strike which had begun on August 8th collapsed on October 3rd, workers returning to their posts under threat of mass dismissal. Two weeks later Rangoon's banks reopened for the first time since the start of the uprising. SLORC appealed to the 10,000-odd students who had fled to border areas to return, opening reception camps in border areas under government control and promising to treat them not as insurgents but only as “misguided youth”—sending them home to their parents—if they surrendered by November 18th. In an indication of the regime's credibility problem, very few took up the offer, and there were reports that some of those who did were imprisoned, tortured and even executed.

Suu set off from University Avenue with her team on October 30th in a convoy of cars. She traveled in a cream-colored Japanese Saloon owned
and driven by Myo Thein, her preferred driver, nicknamed “Tiger.” On either side of her in the back were two of the young men with whom Ma Thanegi shared her office duties, Ko Aung and Ko Myint Swe. In the shoulder bag carried by Ko Myint Swe—which to a Burmese identified him as the literary man he was when off duty—were Suu's water bottle, headache pills, smelling salts and tissues, plus a few sweets in case her voice threatened to give out.

It was the first time an opposition political party had set off on the campaign trail in more than a generation, and in this first foray they visited the four states of Magwé, Bago, Sagaing, and Mandalay in the flat and hot Burmese heartland north of Rangoon, meeting the staff of the NLD branch offices which had already begun springing up across the country. But everywhere they went Suu was obliged to correct the picture Aung Gyi had left behind when he had visited a few weeks before.

“At every single rally and meeting Suu had to explain and refute U Aung Gyi's announcement,” Ma Thanegi recalled. “By the time we got to the town of Shwebo she was exhausted about it, saying that she had been able to do no campaigning work for the party because her whole time was occupied explaining that Aung Gyi's announcement, inviting contributions in return for becoming the party's candidate, was without foundation. Many people were angry about it.”

There were other problems, too. Political campaigning was a phenomenon with which people had no familiarity, but the personality cult of Suu had already spread across the country. “At some places, meetings took too long and we got behind schedule because people at NLD offices insisted on reading out long poems or speeches,” she wrote. “This was the same all over the country. Then there were the people who wanted to have their photos taken with Suu, or while they handed bouquets to her, and at the same time not caring if the stalks of the flowers were poking in her face. Others insisted on spraying her with cheap perfume, sometimes spraying it right in her face. Aung Aung”—one of Suu's young student bodyguards—“and I [Ma Thanegi] had to be very rough with these people.” Some of the many people who wanted to be seen with Suu would crowd onto the stage with her, alongside her aides and bodyguards.

For a generation the only form of political activity in the country had been that provided by the BSPP; lacking any other role models, the
self-appointed leaders of the freshly sprung League branches emulated the former ruling party, Ma Thanegi remembered. “If a township or village had set up a branch of the NLD, its leaders, chairman, secretary and so on, chosen among themselves, welcomed us in expensive style, dressed in silk
gaung baungs
(a sort of turban) and silk longyis, their wives wearing silks and long scarves, all of them looking exactly like apparatchiks of the BSPP, and with the same haughty look on their faces.”