The Lady and the Peacock (51 page)

His words cast us back to the moment described by Ma Thanegi when Suu returned to the tiny cabin the two women shared on a riverboat in the midst of one campaign trip, and Suu, patching the tattered shirts of her student bodyguards, said how at home in Oxford, in another life, she had sewn name tags on her sons' school shirts—and then her eyes filled with tears.

Bertil Lintner was in the audience to see the prize awarded. “Alexander was extraordinary,” he said. “The whole audience was spellbound. There was a standing ovation afterwards which never seemed to end. And everyone was looking at each other and saying, who is this kid? And I asked Michael afterwards, ‘Did you write that speech for him?' And he said, ‘Yes, I wrote something but he changed all of it.' And he was very impressive. People on the Nobel Prize committee said they had never heard a speech like that.”
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If it was indeed the Nobel Committee's choice that pushed Saw Maung over the edge into insanity, Oslo can claim the credit for the most significant development in Burmese politics since the birth of SLORC—though sadly not one that has helped turn Burma into a more civilized country.

In the short term, however, the ascent of General Than Shwe to the chairmanship of SLORC in Saw Maung's place was a boon for Suu and her family.
⁷
Than Shwe's career is an object lesson in how, in paranoid military dictatorships, it is often the most mediocre and unpromising candidates who get to the top.

General Than Shwe, who ruled Burma for eighteen years.

Born in 1933 in the central Burmese town of Kyaukse, which was for months the bloody front line between Allied and Japanese forces in the last months of the war, Than Shwe quietly rose through the ranks despite laying claim to no striking military successes, until he was appointed Deputy Defense Minister in July 1988, at the party congress where Ne Win dangled the promise of multiparty democracy before his people. After Saw Maung had put himself out of contention, the role of
generalissimo
became a contest between Than Shwe and military intelligence chief Khin Nyunt.

The latter, he of the seven-hour press conferences, the movie star manqué who led the regime's chorus of slander and abuse against Suu Kyi, was the most articulate, wily and ambitious of Burma's top generals. He had been very close to Ne Win, and was friendly and approachable with foreign diplomats. His English was weak—at the end of one of his interminable harangues to the press he barked, “Any answers?” when he meant, “Any questions?”—but that didn't stop him trying to speak it. But despite all these attributes, Khin Nyunt had two handicaps: As head of Military Intelligence he knew where all the bodies were buried—an asset in turf wars against his peers until it became a dreadful liability; and he had no battlefield experience from fighting insurgencies on the country's borders, which put him at a grave disadvantage compared with those who did have it. Even those as unappetizing as General Than Shwe.

Than Shwe's rise is also another proof of Suu's insight that fear corrupts those who wield power quite as much as those who are subject to it. Only in a system dominated by fear could a man like Than Shwe rise to the top and stay there: Throughout his career he gave the impression of being so unimpeachably mediocre as to be without ambition or hope of success. He was a man incapable of provoking fear—until suddenly he was at the top of the tree.

The comments of those who had dealings with him are uniformly unflattering. “Short and fat with not a strong voice,” says one. “Relatively boring,” says another. “No evident personality.” “Our leader is a very uneducated man.” “There were many intelligent soldiers but he was not one of them . . . a bit of a thug.” “You feel that he's got there by accident . . .” The closest Than Shwe gets to being complimented is in the description of a former World Bank official. “He is such an old fox,” he said.
⁸

Burma was now ruled by a military triumvirate consisting of Than Shwe, Khin Nyunt and General Maung Aye, this last another “obdurate and unimaginative” soldier according to a retired British diplomat, who “kept on making the most idiotic decisions about export licenses and the like—he really didn't understand economics.”
⁹
The aging Ne Win remained a shadowy figure in the background, and in the absence of any kiss-and-tell military memoirs or top-level defectors it is impossible to say
how far he influenced events. But between them, the new rulers clearly felt it was necessary to turn over a new leaf.

General Maung Aye, who shared power with Than Shwe after Khin Nyunt was purged.

Accordingly, once Than Shwe was in office he agreed to the repatriation of 250,000 Muslim Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh, whence they had fled to escape waves of brutal sectarian persecution by the Burmese Army;
¹⁰
and he released hundreds of political prisoners, including former prime minister U Nu. He ordered a cosmetic relaunch of the
Working
People's
Daily, which was now titled the
New Light of Myanmar
, though the contents remained as turgid and one-sided as before.

Most significantly of all, in 1993 he set up an organization called the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA). Although not a political party, the USDA was a bid to claw back the civilian support that the regime had ceded so disastrously to the NLD. In form it was a sort of giant social organization. State employees were required to join it or lose their jobs; once they were inside it offered everything from courses in computers, sports, art, music and Buddhism to subsidies for farmers. It worked to wean members away from the NLD, exerted close control over all other social organizations in the country and incubated a militia force that the army was to use repeatedly to do its dirty work.

The USDA was to prove the regime's most effective tool for combating its massive post-election unpopularity: By a mixture of bribery and coercion, millions of Burmese were induced to come over to the army's side, at least superficially, providing the regime with the legitimacy—“opinion of interest,” in Hume's terms, but also to an extent “opinion of right”—that it so painfully lacked in the aftermath of the election. Its patronage by the army was so generous that within fifteen years it had swelled to embrace more than half the population.

Aung San Suu Kyi was also on Than Shwe's “to do” list, but not because he had any interest in opening a dialogue with the hated NLD. In 1992, Japan, Burma's biggest donor of foreign aid and its closest ally ever since bailing out its stricken economy with war reparations in 1955, had, under American pressure, signed the official Development Assistance Charter, which required donors to pay attention to the state of human rights and democracy in the countries they helped. Japan was now the world's second largest economy after its hectic years of growth in the 1980s, but it remained susceptible to moral pressure from the United States, and had
shocked the junta by suspending all aid to Burma in January 1989. Japan had, however, also been one of the first to recognize SLORC as legitimate, just the next month; both Burma and Japan were keen to do business together again, and now Japan impressed on the generals the need to overcome this human rights hurdle.

The obvious way was to do as the whole Western world demanded and let that woman out. But the regime's stinging humiliation in the elections was still too fresh in their minds. So Than Shwe temporized. He announced that he would hold talks with the NLD, but took no steps towards doing so. And in the meantime, for the first time in more than two years, he granted Suu's family permission to visit.

Michael came first, in May 1992. He stayed for two weeks, banned as before from having contact with anyone outside her house—essentially sharing her conditions of detention. On his return to Bangkok he told a press conference that Suu was “in good health, but not particularly robust” and committed to staying in Burma. “Things have not been easy for her,” he went on, “but in the days we spent together she repeatedly pointed out to me that others have suffered much more than she has.”

It was an acutely political statement: giving little hint of the health scares, the weight loss and hair loss, the outright poverty of her solitary life once she had resolved to refuse all offers of help from the regime, but at the same time underscoring that she was far from the pampered poster child of the West depicted in the state's propaganda. “Hers is an austere and disciplined life,” he said. Under house arrest Suu spent her time “reading politics, philosophy, literature, Buddhist writings and listening to the radio.” She had also “with her own hands” sewn curtains for every room in the house. Regarding the government's intentions, he said, she had “an open mind.”

Of course the mind of the government itself was anything but open: The only satisfactory solution for the generals was for Suu to disappear—without leaving any blood on their hands. In March 1991, while General Saw Maung was still in charge, the Burmese Embassy in London had called Michael in and proposed that he write to her and ask her to come home. He turned them down flat, saying he knew well what her response would be.

SLORC did not give up there. They had clearly learned from their numerous in situ spies that Suu had taken up meditation, and was in
general showing more signs of Buddhist piety than in the past. So in the same year they prevailed on a senior Buddhist monk called U Rewata Dhamma to visit Suu and request her on the regime's behalf to leave the country.

The choice of this divine was not random: The connections between U Rewata Dhamma and Suu's family went back decades. They had first got to know him in Rangoon, then when they moved to Delhi the acquaintance was renewed: The monk had gone to India's Varanasi University to study Sanskrit and Hindi, as well as to learn more about Mahayana Buddhism. And when Suu settled down in Oxford with Michael and their first child, it so happened that Rewata Dhamma moved to England to set up the Birmingham Buddhist Vihara. The strong karmic connection was revived.

Apart from her husband, therefore, the regime could not have picked a more influential person to try to persuade Suu to leave. And it is a reflection of the great respect in which Suu held the monk that she did not turn him down flat. Instead she agreed that she would indeed do as he proposed and leave Burma—on four conditions: the transfer of power to civilians; the release of all political prisoners; fifty minutes of broadcast time on government-run TV and radio stations; and, finally, to be allowed to walk to the airport, a distance of more than ten miles.
¹¹

In the depths of the toughest period of her detention, with a regime billboard outside her house that screamed, in Burmese and English,
CRUSH EVERY DISRUPTIVE ELEMENT
, Suu had not lost her sense of humor.

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U Rewata Dhamma did not give up there. He realized the futility of trying to get her to depart, but understood the urgent need to get Suu and the regime talking. And it was thanks to pressure from him, as well as pressure from Japan and the world at large, that the two sides finally met, for the first time since the funeral of Suu's mother in January 1989.

There were two encounters, the first on September 20, 1994, with both Than Shwe and Khin Nyunt present, the second with Khin Nyunt and two other generals. This second meeting, on October 28th, was splashed
across the front page of the following day's
New Light of Myanmar
. Senior General Than Shwe got the top spot in that day's paper, with a short piece in which it was reported that he had sent “felicitations to the Republic of Turkey” on its national day. Other senior junta figures also made it onto the front page: We learn of deputy-prime minister Vice Admiral Maung Maung Khin meeting Japanese businessmen to discuss investment, the American chargé d'affaires calling on the Minister for Forestry, and the Minister of Transport receiving the Ambassador of Pakistan.