The Lady and the Peacock (18 page)

But despite all the problems and misunderstandings, it was a brilliant start for the new party. Everywhere they went, Suu and her colleagues drew large, enthusiastic crowds. Party branch offices had sprung up in all the major towns, many of them spontaneously, with no input from Rangoon. There was no doubting the popular desire for change, and Suu had rapidly established herself as the preeminent focus and symbol of it. And although they were trailed everywhere by plainclothes police and agents of Military Intelligence, no one tried to stop their meetings from taking place. On October 26th a small student protest at the Shwedagon was quickly broken up by troops; ten days later an attempted demonstration by monks in the city was also dispersed. But the magic of Suu's name, combined with the fact that she was always careful to emphasize that her opposition to the regime was strictly nonviolent, appeared to have a mesmerizing effect on her adversaries. So far, at least, they let her get on with it.

Perhaps they were banking on her giving up and going home to Oxford and her family before too long; perhaps they were hoping that the growing throng of parties which had signed up for the election, who would eventually number 235, would drown out her voice and stifle her influence. And then there was the Aung Gyi factor apparently working in their favor.

Ever since independence, communism had been the great bogey of Burmese politics. In 1948 the Communist Party of Burma, headed by Suu's uncle Thakin Than Tun, her mother's brother-in-law, had refused to cooperate with prime minister Nu's democratically elected government and had resorted to armed struggle, seizing a large area in the Pegu Mountains northeast of Rangoon and forming an alliance with Chinese communists on the northeast frontier. When Norman Lewis traveled through the country in 1950, large areas were out of bounds because of insurrectionary activity by communists.

Neither in her writings before returning to Burma nor in her political speeches inside the country had Suu given any indication of communist sympathies. But Ne Win loyalists had already condemned the 1988 uprising as a communist plot, and Suu's family connection to the Communist Party, and the presence in the NLD's Central Executive Committee of known left-wing figures such as the lawyer Daw Myint Myint Khin, who had belonged to a Marxist study group in the 1950s, made the insinuation an easy one to make. And the state media, and Khin Nyunt, the bespectacled chief of Military Intelligence, an increasingly influential figure in the junta, made it frequently and boldly. Aung San Suu Kyi was “surrounded by communists” it was claimed; she was “going the same way as her uncle's Burma Communist Party.”
¹⁶

Attacks like that could be shrugged off; they were routine, and often laughable—as when Khin Nyunt claimed that the communists had first tried to promote Suu's mother Daw Khin Kyi as the leader of the 1988 uprising, overlooking the fact that the lady in question had been in a hospital bed and close to death since March.

What was far more worrying was when, in early December, Aung Gyi himself started to repeat the allegations: In perfect harmony, both Military Intelligence and the retired, supposedly anti-junta general claimed that eight members of the party's thirty-three-strong Central Committee were communists. Was it possible that Aung Gyi was still in cahoots with Ne Win? Could he be scheming with Number One to weaken or split the new party, or even destroy it?

If he had restricted himself to raising the alarm about reds under the bed, Aung Gyi might have damaged the party severely. But when he began publicly downplaying the importance of Suu in the party, he went too far, fatally underestimating his colleague and the support she enjoyed. At a dramatic meeting of the committee on December 3, 1988, his leadership was put to the vote. He lost, and had no alternative but to step down, taking some of the other baung-bi chut with him out of the party. Fortunately, however, several of the most capable ex-army men on the committee, including Tin Oo and Kyi Maung, stuck with Suu and the civilian intelligentsia, and were to be crucial to the party's later success. Tin Oo, the former Minister of Defense, replaced Aung Gyi as chairman.

*

Her stroke had precipitated her daughter's return home and thereby changed the country's destiny; for months now she had lain semi-paralyzed in her room on the ground floor of 54 University Avenue as a great popular movement came into being around her. Then on December 27th, at the age of seventy-six, Suu's mother, Daw Khin Kyi, finally died, and her strongest remaining link to her father was broken.

If she had died six or seven months earlier, before Suu's Shwedagon speech and all that stemmed from that, her death would have had a very different resonance. It would have been a final, punctuating event in Suu's life: The painful duty that had torn Suu so brusquely away from her family would have been concluded and, however conflicted her feelings about the turmoil in Burma, there would have been no understandable reason for her to prolong her absence from the family home in Oxford.

But now not only Suu but also Michael and the boys understood that the situation had changed definitively. In her final illness, Daw Khin Kyi had been a bridge for Suu: She had passed over that bridge, and on the far shore had found another duty, just as pressing as the need to care for a sick mother, and far more unpredictable in its consequences. Now her fears of separation had been realized, and there was no going back.

For all sides in Burma's churning national crisis, the death of Daw Khin Kyi marked a caesura, a break point, though one with different meanings and possessing the seeds of different hopes.

The regime could yet dream that Suu's entry into politics was a mere fling, a caprice, an aberration, and that now her mother was gone she would pack her bags and depart. They granted Michael, Alexander and Kim, who had returned to England in September, visas to come back, banking perhaps on the emotional tug of home to drag Suu away when they departed.

For the masses of people who had struck for weeks and weeks in the summer and who had been traumatized and silenced by the massacre of thousands of their fellow citizens, the death was by contrast their first opportunity since the events of September 18th to take to the streets en masse and show their solidarity with Suu—and, by implication, their hostility to the regime. Twenty thousand of them flocked to University Avenue after her mother's death to express condolences. Far more were ready to follow the hearse to the mausoleum.

The scene was set, in other words, for another bloody clash. Yet mercifully, this time around it didn't happen like that. For their part, SLORC made no attempt to relegate the funeral of the widow of the nation's founding father to the capital's shabby margins: In accordance with Suu's request, they sanctioned the lady's burial in a ceremony tantamount to a state funeral, at the mausoleum close to the Shwedagon where the remains of Supayalat, King Thibaw's consort, of U Thant and of Aung San himself were interred. They even paid some money, more than 1,000 dollars, towards the funeral expenses, and approved the building of a new monument to house the remains.

These gracious concessions were further enhanced when the regime's new strong man, General Saw Maung, visited University Avenue the evening before the funeral to sign the condolence book, accompanied by Khin Nyunt, the intelligence chief who was also the Minister of Internal and Religious Affairs. They stayed for tea; referring to the massacres perpetrated by the army between September 18th and 20th, the president told Suu that he was distressed that his karma had resulted in him presiding over “this blot” on the army's honor, adding that he had no wish to cling to power.
¹⁷
What Suu said in reply is not recorded, but it was the closest to a meeting of minds that would ever occur between the two of them.

The public also behaved well. The regime had warned chillingly that the funeral could lead to “another round of disturbances”—words that could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then Suu stepped up to put the matter in more dignified terms. Two days after her mother's death, she issued an appeal for calm, published in the
Working People's Daily
(the regime's English-language newspaper) on December 29, 1988. “As there will be a very large crowd of people at my mother's funeral procession,” she wrote, “I humbly request the people to be calm and disciplined in sending my mother on her last journey . . . so that the funeral ceremony may be successful.” She added, “I would also like to request the people to abide by the funeral committee's arrangements and security arrangements.”

The people, 100,000 of them according to Reuters, did as they were told. The junta helped out by not attending, and by keeping the army in barracks: As so often in the long and strange interaction of the Burmese people and its armed forces, the masses swarmed through the capital in a temporary vacuum of visible force, kept in order by student marshals
wearing the same red armbands as during the strikes of August and September. Students sang anti-government songs and waved the NLD's peacock flag. The coffin was carried from Inya Lake in a flower-strewn hearse, led by monks and followed by Suu and the family and a substantial group of foreign diplomats, a walk of two hours under the hot sun. At the end of it the people dispersed peacefully. Suu's relief was immense. “I hope this occasion has been an eye-opener,” she told the
Independent
by phone. “If we have cooperation and understanding we can do things peacefully. The people are not out for violence for violence's sake.”
¹⁸

Already her thoughts were turning to the future: not Oxford, in the depths of another English winter, but her next campaign tour. Michael, of course, would not be able to accompany her: Even if his visa had permitted such a long stay, his presence was required to look after his sons as they returned to school. So as a second best he suggested to Ma Thanegi, Suu's personal assistant, who spoke such excellent English, that she might like to write a diary of the campaign, to keep him in the picture. Ma Thanegi was happy to agree.

A page from the campaign diary kept by Ma Thanegi, Suu's friend and companion. On the campaign trail Suu's fans developed a penchant for spraying her with cheap perfume. Here, Ma Thanegi quotes Suu telling her, “You know, Ma Thanegi, I've gone up in the world—they sprayed me with Charlie instead of Concord!”

T
HE
junta's policies made no sense. General Saw Maung had promised multiparty general elections within three months, had insisted that he would not stay in power long and promised that he would hand over power to the winning party in the election. Dozens of new political parties had registered. Yet it was effectively illegal to conduct an election campaign. Assemblies of more than five people were still banned. Rangoon was still under martial law. All newspapers except the purged and dreary
Working People's Daily
had been closed down. Television, still black and white, stuck just as doggedly to the party line.

How on earth was a political party to get its message out?

Aung San Suu Kyi tackled this challenge in the simplest and most direct manner possible, by merely ignoring the junta's rules and going out on the road to meet the people. She had seen little of her native land other than the major cities, and those she had not visited for many years. And her people, as she was beginning to think of them, had never seen her. With elections due any time—the timetable was in fact very vague—the sooner she got started the better.

It was a form of political action inspired by Gandhi, who like Suu had spent decades in foreign parts but after his return to India devoted years to criss-crossing the subcontinent, to the impotent fury of the British, and these journeys were to become the hallmark of her career. It is tempting to think of them as a series of jaunts, and Ma Thanegi's diary, which is full of humor and acute observation, tends to reinforce that impression. Yet these journeys were always perilous, because every mile of the way Suu and her party were challenging the writ of the regime. On two occasions she came close to being killed. That was a hazard she was keenly aware of from the outset. As Ma Thanegi wrote in her diary about one excursion, “Gandhi is Suu Kyi's role model and hero. Everyone knew it was going to be dangerous: Some of the students had the Tharana Gon sutra chanted over them to prepare themselves for sudden death, a mantra recited in
Buddhist ritual over the body of the deceased. Some became monks or nuns for a few days in preparation.”

Suu's attitude was comparable to that of the sannyasin, the Hindu renunciate. Her mother and father had passed away. She had forsworn both the duties and the pleasures of family life for this cause. Burma's democratic future was no longer for her some abstract issue, worthy of her support: It was the cause she was living for and that defined her life, the cause she now identified with totally, whatever might be the consequences.