The Lady and the Peacock (26 page)

Two things were happening at once. On the one hand the National League for Democracy, the officially registered political party of which she was secretary general, was touring the country, meeting the people, preparing as best it could for multiparty elections to be held under the auspices of the ruling military junta, when they would be ranged against the former ruling party and a host of others. So far so legitimate, so almost normal.

But at another level there was a war going on—a war for the future and for the identity of Burma. Her country, Suu said, had gone dramatically off the rails, and now it was her duty, as her father's daughter, to put it back on the right track.

This pitted her not against the other political parties but against the army itself—and against the Burmese state that the generals had fashioned. It was all wrong, she said, they would have to start again from scratch.

Overwhelmingly, the people were on her side. No one could doubt it. But how did you get there from here? What process did she envisage?

By casting Ne Win and his circle as the ones responsible for leading the country to perdition, she cut away the ground from under them. The deal offered by General Saw Maung was multiparty elections leading to democratic rule, a process to be supervised by SLORC. But by heaping doubt on the legitimacy of the army's rule, she undermined their role in the process.

She had every reason for doing so, given the many thousands of unarmed protesters the army had massacred to stay in power. It was a revolutionary posture: It echoed the calls for the overthrow of army rule emanating from the ethnic armies on the border, and the thousands of students who had joined them there. Yet the difference was that she was in the heart of the country, with the army watching her every move, and she had committed her party to nonviolence.

So what did she foresee? A march on Rangoon by millions of her supporters, herself like the French Revolution's Marianne, brandishing the party flag? Ne Win and Saw Maung and the rest clambering on board the last helicopter and flying away, like the Americans leaving Saigon, like Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos fleeing Manila? Khin Nyunt tamely surrendering the keys to the kingdom like Poland's General Jaruzelski?

Looking back on those hectic months from more than twenty years later, knowing, contrary to the excited claims at the time, that history did not in fact end after all, it is easy to underestimate the intoxication in the air.
⁶
It is with the wisdom of hindsight that we see her and her party's errors. But one wonders if wiser counsel might not have seen that they were headed, quite fast, into a cul-de-sac.

According to Ma Thanegi, there were some in the party's Central Executive Committee who argued the case for cutting a deal with the army, for the sake of effecting a democratic transfer of power. She singles out Kyi Maung, the former army officer who had been with Suu from the outset and who was to lead the party to its election victory after Suu and the other top leaders were detained. “Around that time, I was talking to U Kyi Maung and U Win Tin,” she wrote in her diary, “and U Kyi Maung said to us that what we must have is a democratically elected government. If in exchange we have to guarantee the generals' security or their wealth, never mind: We must give them anything they want.”

But harsher voices insisted on ratcheting up the pressure, and they were to prevail.

*

The party set about undermining the regime at the most fundamental level: by hijacking the calendar. March 27th was Armed Forces Day, the annual occasion for a Kremlin-style parade of military hardware through the center of Rangoon. This year it also marked General Ne Win's return to the spotlight, his first public appearance since his explosive speech to the party the preceding July. But the NLD succeeded in stealing the show, despite Number One's cameo: They told the world they were renaming the event Fascist Resistance Day—the name given it by Suu's father—and making it the occasion for popular demonstrations
against
the “fascist” army. In the first major demonstrations since the September bloodbath, thousands of students took to the streets of Rangoon and Mandalay.

Two weeks earlier the NLD had sprung another constitutional ambush on the regime by declaring March 13th Burma Human Rights Day—the first anniversary of the killing of student protester Maung Phone Maw, the outrage that precipitated the uprising. More new holidays were to be declared as the year wore on. Every nation is defined by the holidays it marks; it is the way the story of the nation punctuates the passage of time. By proclaiming these new or revived national holidays, the NLD tried to wrest that function away from the regime, further weakening its legitimacy.

Then there was the question of religion. As her threat to the regime increased, Suu's enemies continued to claim that she was surrounded by communists. In Burma's simplified political landscape, the opposite of a communist was a Buddhist, and the best way to prove that your enemies lied was to play up your piety. In fact this came easily to the NLD. Everywhere they went the monks provided hospitality. They also accepted Suu's alms and turned out in sizeable numbers to listen to her speeches, steadily building a spirit of fraternity and complicity between the party and the
sangha
.

The monks had been central to the legitimacy of the Burmese kings: The palace sustained the
sangha
in material ways, paying for the building and maintenance of their pagodas and monasteries; conversely the
sangha
, by receiving alms from the court and performing ceremonies and rites at the king's behest, endorsed his right to rule. That was the rock on which the pre-modern Burmese state rested.

The destruction of the monarchy by the British smashed that symbiotic, sanctified model of governance—which is the main reason the monks were in the vanguard of protest throughout the colonial period. Burma's first prime minister, the pious U Nu, had strongly revived the bond with the monks—but the self-consciously “modernizing” Ne Win had spurned it as an anachronism, leaving a fine vacuum for the NLD to occupy.

Then there was the whole question of what democracy might involve. When SLORC had announced multiparty elections in September 1988, it seems to have been acting on two assumptions: One, that the mass of people would vote for the only party they had ever heard of, the BSPP, rebranded the National Unity Party (NUP); and two, that the votes of those that didn't vote NUP would be so divided that they would have no weight. General Saw Maung, the regime's new figurehead, promised that after the elections the army would return to barracks and have no further political role; and when he saw that 235 political parties had registered for the election, he must have congratulated himself on the success of his plan. Burma could emerge from this democracy charade with international esteem—and with the army still in charge behind the scenes, as before.

But during Suu's epic journeys in April and May 1989, that prospect began to change. The NLD began to consolidate its position, building bridges with other parties and ethnic groups that threatened this
comfortable scenario. Aung San Suu Kyi, wrote Gustaaf Houtman, “had such success making alliances between many political and ethnic groups, much like her father . . . that it looked as if she had the ability to unify the opposition in a manner that would leave no political role” for the army.
⁷

On every front the army was getting squeezed. It was time for it to fight back.

*

For the regime, Aung San was now the problem. Fundamental to the creation of a modern Burmese identity in the preceding half century, he had now been hijacked by his daughter and her followers. Far from being a benign symbol of military rule, he was becoming the rallying cry of the revolution. It was time to unhitch Burma from Aung San. That this was an urgent necessity became clear from the One Kyat Note fiasco.

Practically all currency notes in Burma since independence bore Aung San's image—just as every town had its street and square named after him, every public office had its framed portrait of him, every schoolchild had his or her head full of his courage and wisdom. But when the regime introduced a newly designed one kyat note in 1989, the designer showed his anti-regime feelings in a very delicate manner.
⁸

The note was to bear a watermark with Aung San's image—the usual high cheekbones, pursed lips and chilseled jaw of the national hero. But by subtly softening the lines of the jaw and making slight modifications to the nose, mouth and cheeks, the father's image morphed into the likeness of his daughter.

The note was printed and in circulation before this elegant act of subversion came to the regime's notice: All around the country people hoarded the notes, whispered about them, and pointed out how the designer had also incorporated the figures 8/8/88, the date of the general strike, into his design of concentric petals on the watermark. As soon as the scandal was discovered the note was withdrawn from circulation—and from then on no Burmese banknotes ever bore Aung San's image again.

Nothing was said about it, there was no Moscow-style airbrushing of the past, but Aung San's legacy began to fall into disrepair like an
abandoned pagoda. The museums dedicated to the hero were no longer kept up. While Aung San Suu Kyi was attacked as a vassal of the colonialists and a sexual libertine whom her father would have disowned or killed, the museums in the village of Natmauk, in the restored house where he was born, and in the grand house at 25 Tower Lane, the family's Rangoon home at the time of his death, were allowed to run down. Every year in the run-up to July 19th, Martyrs' Day, the date of his assassination and the biggest national holiday of the Burmese year, Rangoon University professors used to fan out into the city's schools to give lectures on the meaning and achievement of the hero's life. But not this year, and not ever again.
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So in the absence of the founding father, what did SLORC have to offer? It was a subject that was clearly preying on the generals' minds—and on May 30th, less than a week after Suu's return from the far north, they hit on something original.

On that date they set up a twenty-one-member “Commission of Enquiry into the True Naming of Myanmar Names.”
¹⁰
Though notionally a scholarly body, all but four of its members were from the military. If Aung San had forged an identity for the nation in the chaos of the Second World War, the challenge for the generals was to go much further back—by building a bridge to the line of kings that the British had deposed.

All over South Asia the postcolonial era has seen the rejection of names associated with the imperialists: Ceylon became Sri Lanka, “Holy Lanka,” Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, Calcutta Kolkata and so on. Often these changes were promoted by populist tub-thumpers, but the governments that enacted them were democratic ones, and the decision followed a period of study and debate.

Not so in Burma: There was no consultation, no attempt to test the people's mood on the subject—and precious little time for the commission to do its work. Less than three weeks after it was set up, the “Adaption of Expressions Law” came into force, changing Burma to Myanmar, Rangoon to Yangon and so on for every town and village in the country.

The change made very little difference to Burmese people themselves: The words “Bama” and “Myanma” have both been used by Burmans for their country for centuries. The change was intended for international
consumption: It was a way of saying that, far from being a transitional set-up as originally conceived, SLORC planned to stay in power and had every right to do so because it was rooted in the ancient past, in the proud era of kings, long before the land was contaminated by the colonialists. It was a way to insist on international respect and recognition—and five days later, despite the rushed process, the UN (and the
New York Times
) duly recognized it.

*

All the while the repression of the democracy movement continued as hundreds more activists and protesters were locked away. By the end of June the number was said to be 2,000—by the end of July it had escalated to 6,000. The mood of confrontation was building rapidly.

The question for Suu was, how to combat it? How to oblige the regime to stick to its promise of elections, ensure that they were free and fair, and then guarantee a handover of power?

Yet in the increasingly frenzied atmosphere, that goal—which would have required the regime and the party to be on speaking terms—was lost sight of. Perhaps it was taken for granted that the elections would be a farce. Perhaps it was merely that the rapidly increasing rate of arrests, and the growing mood of mutual recrimination, made talks of any sort between the two sides out of the question.

And so rather than moderating her side's expectations, Suu chose this moment to up the ante further.

As dialogue was impossible, this was a war in which slogans had become the ammunition. All over the country SLORC began erecting huge signs with Orwellian calls to discipline and patriotism; they dot Burma's towns and cities to this day. The NLD retaliated during the water festival with their competition to produce the most pungent anti-regime slogans anyone could think up. Now, Suu announced, her party's defiance of the regime would be enshrined in all its literature, in a permanent call to nonviolent resistance.
¹¹
Speaking on June 5th, she inaugurated what she called her party's campaign of civil disobedience. The campaign's slogan, exhorting the Burmese public to “defy as of duty every order and authority not agreed by the majority”
would be printed in all the party's literature starting the next day, June 6th. The right of the regime to command obedience would be denied at every turn.

It was a move that some of her colleagues had resisted. The campaign, originally suggested by U Win Tin, the veteran anti-regime journalist on the party's Central Executive Committee, was under discussion, Ma Thanegi remembers, but notes in her diary that “before it was decided on another CEC member called U Chan Aye presented a paper saying the NLD should instead try to work with SLORC. I heard that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was thinking about it. But then some of the students in the party asked her if she was afraid—and she discarded the idea of dialogue at once. It is very easy to push her buttons.”