The Lady and the Peacock (39 page)

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Suu's old boss at the UN had retired as Secretary General in 1971, not long before she herself left the organization. Already unwell, he told the General Assembly that he felt “a great sense of relief, bordering on liberation” at relinquishing “the burdens of office”: His last years in the job had been particularly testing. He died of lung cancer less than three years later, in November 1974. His daughter and son-in-law and their young son accompanied his coffin on the then long and tedious air journey back to Rangoon for burial.

It is not clear what sort of reception the family expected to receive in Burma, or if they were fully aware of the depth of the rift that had opened up between U Thant and Ne Win. But when their charter plane taxied to a halt at Mingaladon Airport, no government officials were on hand to welcome them, nor was there a government hearse or limousine to collect the coffin and the mourners.

The deputy education secretary, U Aung Tin, turned up—but only because he had been a pupil of U Thant's when the great man was a provincial headmaster and he could not bear to be part of the systematic snubbing that was under way. When, at a cabinet meeting, he proposed that the day of the funeral be declared a national holiday in the dead man's honor, he was sacked on the spot.

The coffin was eventually collected from the airport by a beaten-up Red Cross ambulance and taken to an ad hoc wake to the former racetrack, so the ordinary people of the city could pay their respects. A floral wreath placed nearby was signed, eloquently enough, “seventeen necessarily anonymous public servants.”

Enmity between the two most powerful Burmese of their generation had been festering for years, but according to U Thant's grandson Thant Myint-U, who as an eight-year-old boy accompanied U Thant on his last journey home together with his parents, what had tipped Ne Win over the edge was the behavior not of U Thant himself but of the man to whom he had for years been secretary and close adviser, U Nu.

U Thant was exquisitely diplomatic, long before becoming the highest-ranking diplomat in the world; back in the 1950s he had single-handedly rescued a prime ministerial visit by U Nu to Russia from disaster after the Burmese prime minister had unilaterally, and for no reason that had anything to do with Soviet–Burmese relations, taken it into his head to attack Khrushchev for his government's repressive policies towards Soviet Jews. After several outbursts on this theme by U Nu, followed by private Soviet complaints, U Thant had managed to make his boss see sense, rewriting all his pending speeches to save Burma's relations with the second superpower from hitting the rocks.

Given the loose-cannon propensities of the former Burmese prime minister, it was unfortunate that U Thant should have been away in Africa in early 1969 when both U Nu and Ne Win, already settled enemies, visited New York at the same time. U Nu was in the early stages of trying to rebuild his political career, and he took advantage of his old friend's absence from town to call a press conference inside UN headquarters at which he fiercely denounced the Ne Win regime and all its works, and called for a revolution.

“Never before,” wrote Thant Myint-U, “had a call for the overthrow of a UN member state government been made from inside the UN.”
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U Thant called U Nu, rebuked him, and extracted an apology, but it was too late to salvage the
amour propre of
the paranoid and irascible dictator. “General Ne Win was upset,” Thant Myint-U wrote, “and became sure that U Thant was now conniving with U Nu. He told his men to consider Thant an enemy of the state.” When the Secretary General went home
on a private visit the following year, Ne Win refused to see him; when he needed to renew his passport, the regime made it insultingly difficult. But Ne Win's best opportunity for revenge came when U Thant was dead.

The coffin lay where it had been placed on the uncut grass in the middle of the disused racetrack. More and more people thronged to the site to say goodbye to the dead man, but the next day the state media claimed that the family had broken Burmese law by bringing the body home without permission and could face legal action. Eventually—U Thant had been dead a full week by now—permission came for a funeral, but the burial ground for Burma's greatest statesman was to be a small private cemetery.

The family, their grief now exacerbated by fear, anger and stress, would have swallowed this final humiliation for the sake of getting the great man into the ground and the whole miserable business concluded. But it was not to be.

It so happened that 1974 was a watershed year for the Ne Win regime. Tin Pe, the so-called “Red Brigadier,” had for years been the most powerful figure in the Revolutionary Council (which was replaced in 1972 by a pseudo-civilian government with the same cast of characters). Advocating a rapid conversion of the economy to Marxist orthodoxy, he oversaw the nationalization of practically everything, including, crucially, the purchase and distribution of rice. The destruction of the market and its replacement by a command system had the same effect in Burma as everywhere else: Productivity plummeted, and the black market boomed. In British days Burma had been known as Asia's rice basket, but now productivity was falling year by year. As early as 1965 Ne Win, in one of his moments of startling frankness, admitted that Burma's economy was “a mess” and that everyone would be starving if the country were not so naturally fertile.

By 1970 the Red Brigadier's luck had run out and he was forced to retire, but the evil effects of his reforms continued to be felt. The price the state paid for rice was so low that farmers either hoarded it or sold it on the flourishing black market. This forced the government to reduce the ration of low-priced rice, forcing consumers to supplement it by buying more on the black market—for twice the price. It was a vicious circle.

The result was unprecedented social unrest, which began with strikes in the state railway corporation in May and spread rapidly to other industries.
Massive demonstrations were brutally suppressed by the army. In August the whole situation became very much worse when widespread monsoon flooding led to an outbreak of cholera.

And then the corpse of U Thant came home—and its treatment by Ne Win gave the students, who were as usual at the sharp end of the protests, the symbol they sought. Here was a man regarded by millions of Burmese as a national hero being dealt with like a pariah by the man who was dragging the whole nation into poverty and enslavement. It was intolerable.

On the day of the funeral, Thant Myint-U was left behind at the home of his great uncle: His parents feared that the funeral procession might encounter trouble, and they did not want their son to be exposed to it. So Thant Myint-U was not on hand to witness the extraordinary—and, for the family, deeply upsetting and traumatic—events of that day. He wrote:

The Buddhist funeral service went as planned, but then, as the motorcade began driving towards the cemetery, a big throng of students stopped the hearse carrying the coffin. They had been arriving all day long in the thousands, with thousands more onlookers cheering them on. Through loudspeakers mounted on jeeps they declared, “We are on our way to pay our tribute and accompany our beloved U Thant, architect of peace, on his last journey.” One of my grandfather's younger brothers pleaded with them to let the family bury him quietly and to take up other issues later, but to no avail. The coffin was seized and sped away on a truck to Rangoon University.
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One of the students involved, now a senior editor in Rangoon, said, “We put the coffin on a truck and thousands and thousands of us marched towards Rangoon University campus. First we put it in the Convention Hall—we had no plan—and then we started asking for a burial ground in an honorable place and we said we will bury him, and people started giving us money to make a huge tomb for him . . .”
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So began a stand-off that lasted for days. The coffin was “placed on a dais in the middle of the dilapidated Convention Hall, ceiling fans whirring overhead in the stifling heat,” Thant Myint-U wrote.
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Tens of thousands of people poured into the campus, and the mood of hostility
took on a political complexion as students stood up to condemn not merely the regime's treatment of U Thant but their repression of dissent and their disastrous economic policies as well.

Eventually the regime offered a compromise: There would be a public but not a state funeral, and U Thant would be buried at the foot of the Shwedagon pagoda. But as the coffin was about to be transported for the second attempt at burial, the students hijacked it again. The former activist recalled:

We took it to the site of the Students' Union building, near the gate of the campus, which Ne Win had blown up in 1962 with students inside, a few months after his coup d'état, and we buried it there. We called it the Peace Mausoleum. That infuriated Ne Win, and the thing escalated.

Finally after five days the troops stormed onto the campus in the middle of the night and started shelling us with tear gas. We picked up the shells and threw them back but we were outnumbered, and then they started using guns, shooting live ammunition. So we went deeper into the campus where there were some hostels for students, and we tried to defend ourselves with Molotov cocktails, but they were much cleverer than us. They surrounded the buildings, and when we started throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at them they took the students who had already been arrested and used them as human shields, so we couldn't attack. And then they started shooting at us with real bullets and everything so we surrendered and got arrested.
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At least nine students were killed that night, and the true figure may be much higher; hundreds more were arrested, and many ended up serving long terms in jail. As the coffin was taken under an escort of troops and armored personnel vehicles for its second interment, more riots broke out in various parts of the city, destroying a police station and wrecking a government ministry and several cinemas. Troops again opened fire to quell the protests, and the city's hospitals were inundated with the wounded.

U Thant was finally laid to rest at the Cantonment Garden near the Shwedagon pagoda as the riots and the fiery military backlash continued. “At about six that morning we were woken up at our hotel by a phone call,” Thant Myint-U wrote. “The caller, who identified himself as a government
agent, said that U Thant's body had been retrieved from the university . . . They said there had been no violence and only tear gas had been used. My family was allowed to pay their last respects. We were asked to leave the country and about a week later headed back to New York. Only much later did we realize the full magnitude of what had happened that day.”
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The aftermath of this explosion of student fury was a crackdown by the regime on the entire student and youth population, militant and otherwise. Martial law was declared and Mandalay and Rangoon Universities were shut down and did not reopen for five months. And there was cultural repression, too—Ne Win's Taliban streak coming out again. Trousers of all sorts but particularly jeans were outlawed, along with all other imported western fashions, and all male students with long hair were forced to have it cut short. And this did not mean a trip to the beauty salon. “The abiding image I have of the U Thant riots,” wrote Harriet O'Brien, who was then living in Rangoon with her diplomat parents, “[is] of a student friend with his hair cut off in tufts . . . He had been dragged from the street by soldiers who had forcibly hacked off his hair with their bayonets.”
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Suu and Michael learned to their horror how the last rites for Suu's old boss had given rise to the bloodiest political confrontation since independence. But there was never any question that this scholar's wife with her new baby would make some kind of public declaration about the affair. Indeed she had explicitly promised that she would do nothing of the sort. A few months earlier—after the rice protests but before the floods and U Thant's death—Suu and Michael were visiting Daw Khin Kyi for the second time together, Alexander being at the time a little over one, when officials of the government called Suu in and asked her whether she planned to get involved in “anti-government activities.”
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She told them that she would never get involved in Burmese affairs as long as she continued to live outside the country. She was as good as her word.

But already it seems she was brooding on her duty. On a visit to Rangoon the following year she met retired Brigadier Kyaw Zaw, one of Aung San's Thirty Comrades. “Uncle, I've heard that these days you are
mostly looking after your grandchildren,” she told him chidingly. “Do you think you have completed your responsibilities to your country?” Kyaw Zaw, who recorded the exchange in his memoirs, replied, “Rest assured I will continue to meet my obligations to the nation—but you also need to do your part.”
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As Rangoon was getting its first taste of People Power, Suu, Michael and Alexander were back in England, and in some uncertainty about what to do next. The Brompton flat that had been just adequate for two was impossible when there was a third who was already toddling. Michael was in discussions with the staff at SOAS about his PhD but so far they were inconclusive. So to find the peace and quiet he needed to organize the results of his six-year stay in Bhutan, the family moved in with Michael's father and stepmother, John and Evelyn Aris, in the large home in Grantown-on-Spey, in the Highlands of Scotland, where they had retired. They remained there for several months, and when they went south again it was to settle not in London but Oxford. SOAS had accepted Michael's proposal for a PhD on the historical foundations of Bhutan, and St. John's College Oxford had awarded him a Junior Research Fellowship which would give him a modicum of financial backing.