The Lady and the Peacock (43 page)

He was fearless in defying the authorities. He ran a little photocopy shop in downtown Rangoon, and when
Outrage
was published, Bertil Lintner's blow-by-blow documentary account of the 1988 events, he obtained a copy and kept it in the shop, allowing customers he trusted to make Xeroxes but not to take it away.

But he was suffering from a muscle-wasting disease, and when SLORC came to get him he was already a sick man. He was sentenced to twenty years' jail for trying to foment an insurrection in the armed forces. “At the time he entered Insein Jail he was already suffering from a chronic disease that was laying his muscles to waste,” Suu wrote later. “His movements were stiff and jerky, and everyday matters, such as bathing, dressing or eating, involved a series of maneuvers that could barely be completed without assistance.”
⁹
Like Win Tin, he was locked up quite alone. For a man with an advanced degenerative disease, that was a way to torture him to death without the trouble of laying hands on him.

“He was thrown on a concrete floor,” Lintner told me. “They didn't give him any medical treatment. It was punishment—because he was the one who dragged Suu Kyi onto the public stage.” He subsequently died in hospital. Until then he kept writing in the cell. He had nothing, he wrote in one of his last poems, “Just One Matchstick.” But one matchstick could change the world.

When a little spark turns into a big flame, it will burn away

all the dirt that exists in this world,

together with the worthless, unprincipled people.

In twenty years the ashes produced by the fire started from Maung Thaw Ka's one matchstick

will build a historical cenotaph for the future.
¹⁰

He died in June 1991, aged sixty-five.

*

As the arrests, tortures and deaths mounted up—by November 1989 a hundred activists had been sentenced to death by the new tribunals—everyone who had ever waved a placard or shouted a slogan lived in fear that their turn could be next. Suu had spent more than half her life in Britain, in a society where people might fear poverty or crime or old age, but where fear—mortal fear—was rarely employed as an instrument of government policy. In Burma she discovered it was the fundamental agent of coercion. As she saw it, the fear with which Burma was saturated explained why its development was so stunted.

“It is not power that corrupts but fear,” she wrote in the months before her detention, in an essay entitled “Freedom from Fear” that was published around the world in 1990. “Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”

Fear,
bhaya
in Burmese, “destroys all sense of right and wrong,” she went on, which is why it is at the root of corruption. “With so close a relationship between fear and corruption it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife corruption in all forms becomes deeply entrenched.”

It was not only economic distress that ignited the revolt of 1988, she wrote, but the disgust of young people at the way their lives were poisoned and deformed by fear. In Burma, the only relationship to authority that was permitted was one of complete passivity, where the people were no more self-assertive than “water in the cupped hands” of the rulers. “Law and order,” a relatively neutral phrase in English, translates into Burmese as
nyein-wut-pi-pyar
; literally, “silent-crouched-crushed-flattened.”
¹¹
That was the attitude SLORC required of the Burmese, and that was what they rose up against.

The insurrectionists proposed a different model:

Emerald cool we may be

As water in cupped hands,

Suu wrote in that essay,

But oh that we might be

As splinters of glass

In cupped hands.

“Glass splinters,” Suu wrote, “the smallest with its sharp, glinting power to defend itself against hands that try to crush, could be seen as a vivid symbol of the spark of courage that is an essential attribute of those who would free themselves from the grip of oppression.”
¹²

But where and how to find courage, when the rulers have become accustomed to drinking up their people like water, and the people have grown used to being swallowed? International gestures such as the UN's Declaration of Human Rights were fine and important, as were the efforts by people like her old boss U Thant and his successors to give the UN a role in policing the behavior of states that flouted it. But so far such powers were painfully limited: The fact that Sadako Ogata was in the country and investigating human rights' abuses for the UN Human Rights Commission on the day that U Maung Ko, General Secretary of the Dockworkers' Union, became the first NLD activist to die in jail said plenty about the UN's impotence.

So courage, that glass splinter quality, was essential. Suu feared her foreign readers would not grasp the immensity of what she was proposing, because it is hard for anyone brought up in a free society to put themselves in the shoes of the Burmese. “The effort necessary to remain uncorrupted in an environment where fear is an integral part of everyday existence,” she wrote, “is not immediately apparent to those fortunate enough to live in states governed by the rule of law.”
¹³
But if Burma was to be transformed—and that was the task she and her colleagues had taken on—then a major effort would be required. Not an effort directed merely at changing policies and institutions or raising living standards; parroting about freedom, democracy and human rights would not in itself make the
difference. What was needed for society to change was first for the people to change.

This might be difficult, but it was not inconceivable: After all, as she wrote, “It is his capacity for self-improvement and self-redemption which most distinguishes man from the mere brute.” And self-improvement, self-redemption, was needed now. “The quintessential revolution,” she wrote “is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development . . . Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative.”
¹⁴

These are fine words that resonate down the years and have become her clarion call. But they beg the question: In the face of the systematic brutality employed by SLORC, where was this “intellectual conviction” going to come from? And would it be sufficient to do the job? Suu was still at an early stage of her self-interrogation on these questions. “Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying,” she wrote, “so free men are the oppressed who go on trying.” And it was Michael, either prompted by her or on his own initiative, who provided one of the tools she needed in the quest.

While her sons were now barred from Burma indefinitely, her husband was allowed one more visit—presumably in the hope that he would find the words to persuade his wife to go home with him when he left. But if that was the hope, the regime was badly mistaken: “I had not even thought of doing this,” he wrote.
¹⁵
Instead they enjoyed what he insisted, despite the unpromising circumstances, was an idyllic break: They were fully united and agreed in their understanding of what she was doing and why.

He flew into Rangoon on December 16, 1989—exactly four years after the family had been united in Japan, on the occasion when Noriko Ohtsu took them to visit the temple with the Burmese Buddha. “The days I spent alone with her that last time, completely isolated from the world, are among my happiest memories of our many years of marriage,” he wrote. “It was wonderfully peaceful. Suu had established a strict regime of exercise, study and piano which I managed to disrupt. She was memorizing a number of Buddhist sutras. I produced Christmas presents I had brought one by one to spread them out over several days. We had all the time in the world to talk about many things. I did not suspect that this would be the last
time we would be together for the foreseeable future.” Like those of their sons, several of Michael's future visa applications would be turned down: Having failed to persuade his wife to leave, he guessed that the regime “realized that I was no longer useful to their purpose.”

Part of Suu's “strict regime” that he disrupted involved meditation: Once her detention began she took to rising at 4:30
AM
and starting the day with an hour of vipassana sitting meditation. But it was not easy. “I did not have a teacher,” she wrote some years later, “and my early attempts were more than a little frustrating. There were days when I found my failure to discipline my mind . . . so infuriating I felt I was doing myself more harm than good.”
¹⁶
But one of the Christmas parcels Michael brought contained a useful surprise: a paperback with on the cover a thorny tree, a rocky peak and an expanse of blue sky into which the morning sun is about to burst. The title was
In This Very Life: The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha
, by a Rangoon-based monk, Sayadaw U Pandita. The book was to open her mind, and provide her with a practical guide to sitting quietly, doing nothing.

Aung San Suu Kyi's generosity of spirit had been remarked on by her Oxford friend Ann Pasternak Slater. “It is Suu's kindness that is most sharply present to me now,” she wrote. “One early morning I came to see my [elderly, ailing] mother, as I did every morning, and found Suu with her. She had discovered my mother wandering, half-dressed and confused, and brought her home. I will not forget the serious gentleness with which Suu talked to her, the grave concern with which she turned to me as she left.”

Now Suu was to learn, or to relearn, that in her native religion, “much value is attached to liberality or generosity,” as she later wrote: It was regarded as the most important of the “Ten Perfections of the Buddha” and the “Ten Duties of Kings.”
¹⁷
But this should not be misunderstood, she warned: It was not to exalt “alms-giving based on canny calculation of possible benefits in the way of worldly prestige or other-worldly rewards.” Rather, “it is a recognition of the crucial importance of the liberal, generous spirit as an effective antidote to greed as well as a fount of virtues which engender happiness and harmony.” Suu already knew, instinctively, that for her morality was inseparable from politics. Now, thanks to Michael's gift, she was beginning to learn how to go deeper.

*

Their idyllic, surreal holiday came to an end. Michael went away. And finally she was almost alone.

Not entirely alone, of course. In the Orient, only the hermit monk in his mountain cave is ever really alone, and perhaps not even he.

There were the soldiers outside the gate of her compound and the others inside, fifteen of them, all armed, day and night. There were her faithful companions-cum-housekeepers Daw Khin Khin Win and her daughter Mee Ma Ma, and her maid Maria, all three sharing the terms of her detention. In the smaller house in the compound lived her aunt Daw Khin Gyi, where she had always lived, and free to come and go.

But that was all. She was more alone than she had ever been since the birth of Alexander, sixteen years before. From being the center of attention for months and months, the center of the Burmese universe and of interest and concern far beyond Burma, now it was as if she had vanished from the world. What was most striking was the contrast: the hubbub then and the silence now.

Eighteen months earlier the old family home had become her mother's sickbay when Suu brought Khin Kyi home from hospital. Silence reigned. Then, after Ne Win announced his resignation, it became almost overnight a teeming political laboratory. Twice during the following year troops had arrived in strength and put the house under siege. The second time, on July 20, 1989, the day after Martyrs' Day, all her party comrades were bundled into army lorries and driven off to prison. She was left there with her two sons and her three companions, guarded by a dozen soldiers, in a bizarre parody of normal home life. Michael flew in to join them in their solitude and the parody was complete.

But now her family had gone, too, back to school, back to work, back to the West. Leaving her—“This ruler of our kingdom, a pretty thing, a pretty little thing,” as the Kachin grandmother had cooed to her babies—the queen of what exactly? The mistress of all she surveyed? Hardly: With fifteen armed soldiers watching her every move there was nothing she could command.

The queen of herself then, if nothing else. The way Daw Khin Kyi had taught her.

*

She had lost. That was the point. She had challenged the Old Man, Number One, General Ne Win, to a duel, cheered on by millions—but he had the gun and she had only flowers to throw and now she had lost the duel and they had locked her up and thrown away the key.

If we look at Aung San Suu Kyi's life as a conventional political narrative that is how it goes—very unsatisfactorily. The sudden challenge, the mass acclaim, the tireless campaigning, the nationwide crescendo of support—then nothing: the nothing of outright defeat. An election landslide win the following year, contemptuously ignored by the men with the guns. Fifteen years of solitary nothing, interspersed with a few years of trying to climb back on the bandwagon before being locked away again; finally released in 2010 because at last the generals have hit on a way to pen her up permanently in the margins, to confine her to a public space as niggardly and narrow as that of her home, thanks to the fake election and the fake parliament.

That, in an ugly nutshell, is how this second phase of Suu's political life looks. Even before her release in November 2010 some correspondents were speculating on her perhaps imminent retirement—she was sixty-five, after all, well into bus pass territory.
¹⁸
A reader's letter published by the
Financial Times
in 2011
¹⁹
wondered sadly if she was now no more than “Burma's Queen Mum,” a rather pointless ornament to a regime that, to quote Burma authority Robert Taylor, could now be “on the cusp of normality.”
²⁰
Tragic is the word that springs to these writers' lips, tragic waste, tragic destiny; a story without the remotest hope of a happy end.