The Lady and the Peacock (53 page)

Landscape of lakes and hills in Karen state, near Thamanya, the town visited by Suu in 1995 and 2002.

If that was the plan, it came to nothing—on her return from the visit she invited Ne Win to a ceremony to mark the end of “Buddhist Lent” but he did not show up. But in any case there were other good reasons to pay respects to the aged monk who lived in a hut in the monastery at the top of the hill.

The hill of Thamanya, as Suu wrote in the first of her “Letters from Burma,” published in Tokyo's
Mainichi Daily News
, “is known throughout Burma as a famous place of pilgrimage, a sanctuary ruled by the metta of the Hsayadaw, the holy teacher, U Vinaya.”

An image of Thamanya Sayadaw, the revered Buddhist teacher whom Suu visited soon after her release from detention in 1995 and again in 2002. His embalmed body near the Thamanya temple was an important pilgrimage site until his corpse was mysteriously stolen by men in military uniforms in 2008, six months after the Saffron Revolution.

In Burmese Buddhism, metta is one of the “Brahmavihara,” the “Divine Abidings,” along with compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—one of the divine qualities which the cultivation of the mind through meditation brings to fruition. “In contrast to the aggressive, destructive quality of hatred,” wrote Sayadaw U Pandita, “metta, loving-kindness,
wishes the welfare and happiness of others. When one has tasted the flavor of the Dhamma . . . you want others to have the same experience.”
¹⁶

As Suu's Buddhist studies progressed in the solitude of house arrest, metta became for her the most important of the attributes which she felt must be encouraged for Burma to “be built up on the old foundations” (as J.P. Furnivall had put it in 1916 in the
Journal of the Burma Research
Society
). Her stress on the concept gives insight into the way her political thought was developing—how she was knitting together ancient spiritual virtues with ideas about the way people must learn to behave at the social and political level.

What is the NLD's founding principle? she asked delegates to the party conference held in May 1996.

It is metta. Rest assured that if we should lose this metta, the whole democratic party would disintegrate. Metta is not only to be applied to those that are connected with you. It should also be applied to those who are against you. Metta means sympathy for others. Not doing unto others what one does not want done to oneself . . . So our League does not wish to harm anyone. Let me be frank: We don't even want to harm SLORC.

. . . Power comes with responsibility and I believe that anyone who understands that cannot be power-crazy. I know how much responsibility goes with a democracy. That is why we are not power-crazy people. We are only an organization that wants to do its utmost for the people and the country. We are an organization that is free from grudge and puts metta to the fore.
¹⁷

Pie in the sky, you might say: the sort of talk that only an enthusiastic ingénue could come out with, still enthusiastic after all these years alone. But in her reflections on her visit to Thamanya, Suu offered an example of how metta was to be applied in the political life of the country.

On October 4, 1995, Suu, along with three cars full of party colleagues, made one of those predawn starts so familiar from her campaigning period and set off towards the Hill of Thamanya—to visit a corner of Burma where metta ruled.

“There is a special charm to journeys undertaken before daybreak in hot lands,” she wrote. “The air is soft and cool and the coming of dawn reveals a landscape fresh from the night dew.” Then dawn broke. “In the
distance could be seen the white triangle of a stupa wreathed in morning mist, tipped with a metal ‘umbrella' that glinted reddish gold in the glow of the morning sun.”
¹⁸

Suu's joy at finally breaking free from the city after so many years cooped up illuminates the piece—but countering that is the dire condition of the roads. “The road had become worse as we traveled further and further away from Rangoon,” she wrote. “In compensation the landscape became more beautiful. Our eyes rejoiced at rural Burma in all its natural glory even though our bones were jolted as our car struggled to negotiate the dips and craters in the road.”
¹⁹

Towards evening they neared their destination.

As we approached Thamanya, the quiet seemed to deepen . . . Suddenly it occurred to us that the quietness and ease had to do with something more than the beauties of nature or our state of mind. We realized that the road had become less rough. Our vehicle was no longer leaping from crater to rut and we were no longer rolling around the car likes peas in a basin.

As soon as we passed under the archway that marked the beginning of the domain of Thamanya, the road became even better: a smooth, well-kept black ribbon winding into the distance . . . The road had been built and maintained by the Hsayadaw for the convenience of the villagers who lived around the hill and of the pilgrims who came in their tens of thousands each year. It was far superior to many a highway to be found in Rangoon.
²⁰

What is the connection between a modern, well-maintained road and loving-kindness? In the Burmese context the analogy is vivid. Metta permeates both the mentality of the man who plans the road to benefit his visitors, and of those who contribute their labor to build and look after it. The contrast to the rest of the country, where roads are carelessly planned by disaffected engineers, built by villagers forced to leave their fields and work for nothing, then left to fall apart because of the pervasive corruption, could not be more stark. That, for Suu, was the contrast between a country where metta is cultivated and one where it is not.

“No project could be successfully implemented without the willing cooperation of those concerned,” she concluded.

People will contribute hard work and money cheerfully if they are handled with kindness and care and if they are convinced that their contributions will truly benefit the public.

. . . Some have questioned the appropriateness of talking about such matters as metta and thissa (truth) in the political context. But politics is about people and what we have seen in Thamanya proved that love and truth can move people more strongly than any form of coercion.
²¹

But could love and truth move the stony heart of SLORC? Suu, as Gustaaf Houtman sees it, gave the regime two choices. It could continue to play the part of Devadatta, the cousin of the Buddha who became his disciple but was then plagued by feelings of jealousy and ill-will and plotted to kill the Blessed One. Or it could instead take the role of Angulimala, the serial killer who wore a necklace of his victims' fingers around his neck, but who on meeting the Buddha renounced his evil ways and became a monk.
²²

But SLORC's ruling generals showed no sign of being impressed with the analogy. As far as they were concerned, they were the heirs of the kings. And all they required was submission.

T
HE
generals dismissed Aung San Suu Kyi as an alien and an agent of the West: The Nobel Peace Prize Committee had made the award to “a follower they [i.e. the West] had raised,” they said, but SLORC would “never accept the leadership of a person under foreign influence who will dance to the tune of a foreign power.”
¹

In one sense they were perhaps right. Suu was a believer in progress. She wanted to see her society improve, with better education, better standards of living, better roads, happier people, and she did not see such improvements as inconsistent with their Buddhist faith. They were perhaps right in seeing themselves as faithful to Myanmar tradition, where a king's duty was to win wars, build pagodas, feed monks and bask in glory; where it was accepted by the people that rulers were one of the “five evils” and if the rains came on time and the king's tax farmers left one with enough to eat, that was about the best one could hope for. “Stagnation” is a term of criticism when applied to governments in the West; in Burma it means business as usual.

The seven years between 1995 and 2002 were for Burma in general and Suu in particular a long lacuna, a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” during which the brave but vague promise of her release was followed by nothing but disappointment, exploitation, abuse, persecution and loss.
²
The junta shelved attempts to write a new constitution, changed its name, cut ceasefire deals with most of the ethnic groups on its borders, conducted a fire sale of teak, jade, oil and gas, joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and played sad, absurdist games of cat and mouse with Aung San Suu Kyi. The brave hopes that had brought Suu worldwide fame and the Nobel Peace Prize threatened to curdle completely.

*

When Suu and her colleagues in the NLD announced in November 1995 that they were pulling their handful of MPs-elect out of the National
Convention, the structure set up to draft a new constitution for Burma, it soon became clear that they had crossed an invisible line. Whatever SLORC had expected from Suu when they released her, it wasn't that. Perhaps they imagined that she and her colleagues had been so cowed by their years in prison, or so grateful for their release, or both, that they would now be prepared to toe the line. But by ordering a walkout from the Convention, Suu gave them clear warning that she was going to be just as difficult to manage this time around as last.

The junta retorted that, on the contrary, it was the NLD that had been expelled. The departure from the Convention of much the most important political party in the country gave them the excuse to put the process on ice, and the Convention remained in suspension for most of the following eight years. And in the meantime SLORC again took up the task of limiting the damage “that woman” could do.

Khin Nyunt is often seen—partly on account of that grinning front page he shared with Suu after their “dialogue” in 1994—as the relatively tender face of SLORC, but while she was in detention he had warned of the danger she posed because (according to a fifteenth-century treatise from which he quoted) if a female were to take power “the country will be in ruins.”
³
And now it was clear that Suu and her party's brief and unconsummated honeymoon with SLORC was over.

In November Alan Clements, a former Buddhist monk hoping to conduct a series of interviews with Suu, was in Rangoon, waiting for an appointment. “For six weeks I had been holed up in a hotel room in Rangoon waiting for a telephone call from Aung San Suu Kyi's office,” he wrote.
⁴
At their preliminary meeting, Suu had told him, “Our situation is unpredictable under the SLORC, so please be patient . . . My father used to say, ‘Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.' I think this is always the best approach.”

Towards the end of that month it began to look as if the interviews would never happen because Suu would be back under lock and key. By late November, Clements went on, Suu and her party colleagues “came under increasing attack in . . . the
New Light of Myanmar
. . . Almost daily half-page editorials denounced Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues in violent terms. The military promised to ‘annihilate' those ‘destructionists' who disrupted the ‘tranquility of the nation.'”

On November 30th, Clements went to visit U Tin Oo, the party's chairman, whom he had known when they were both monks in the same Burmese monastery. But when he rang the bell, the former general's wife came to the door with a grim look on her face and told him, “He's upstairs gathering medicines and a few belongings. I'll get him for you.”
⁵

Tin Oo was getting ready for the authorities to come and take him off to jail again. When he came down, he said to the American, “Don't worry. You shouldn't be here. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is preparing to be re-arrested too . . .”

In the event it was a false alarm. But it marked the beginning of an ugly new phase.

*

Months before Suu's release, the junta had begun touting 1995 as “Visit Myanmar Year”: Khin Nyunt's favorite theme was attracting foreign investment, and he alone of the top three generals dreamed of emulating Thailand's success as a tourist destination. It was a proposal that went against the grain of a regime always tempted to withdraw into its shell at the first sign of foreign trouble; the Ne Win approach, marshalling tourists in groups and flying them around the more famous sights then showing them the door, was much more their way of doing things. But the promise of tourist dollars got the better of their prudence.

By releasing Suu, Khin Nyunt cleared away the most glaring obstacle to a successful tourist drive, which was postponed for a year and renamed “Visit Myanmar Year 1996.” But of course Suu free meant Suu at liberty to talk to her foreign friends. And in March 1996 she told the world exactly what she thought of Khin Nyunt's stunt. Suu, reported Harriet O'Brien in the
Independent
on March 17, 1996, “had previously taken the attitude that some foreign investment and tourism would help to ease the military's grip on the country, but she has changed her mind. [She said,] ‘Make 1996 a year for
not
visiting Burma.'”