The Lady and the Peacock (56 page)

He may also have had an unrealiztic view of Suu's hopes of coming to power. Soon after her release from detention in the summer of 1995, he and Kim were granted visas—he could not have known that it was the last Burma visa he would receive in his life—and flew to Rangoon. Ma Thanegi said that when she met him there she felt he had convinced himself that power was about to drop into his wife's hands:

Once in late June or early July 1995, Dr. Aris and I sat on the stairs in the NLD office—there were too many people downstairs and no chairs left—talking about the situation. He was very excited and sure that NLD would soon be in power. He kept saying, the regime
must
learn to change, they
must
learn to change. I said, they're not going to, they're not going to. We went around in circles like this for about five minutes. I could not penetrate his wild expectations.

Another old friend, Bertil Lintner, found a different flaw in him: excess of prudence:

He was overly cautious. When he and the boys flew from Rangoon to Bangkok in late August 1989, everybody knew they were coming but nobody knew what they looked like: Very few people in Bangkok had met Michael and the kids. And we Bangkok-based reporters were there to meet them and it was sort of agreed that I would identify Michael as I was the only one who knew him. So when he and the boys came out I said, “Hello, Michael!” and he said, “Not you!” So I said all right, and stepped aside.

In the evening he rang me and said, “I'm sorry about that, let's get together tonight”—he had brought out a load of stuff he wanted me to have. But he didn't want people to know I even recognized him. It was silly.
²⁶

Yet Michael had excellent reason to be very careful: The regime saw Suu's marriage to him as one of the main chinks in her armor, and never missed an opportunity to insult her for her supposed “treachery” to Burma in marrying a foreigner. Michael was a treasure for her, but in her dealings with her co-nationals he was always a liability.

“The
Bogadaw
[a term for the wife of a European] has lost her right to inherit her father's name, Aung San,” the
New Light of Myanmar
declared in a typically venomous piece on May 9, 1997. “She should be called Daw Michael Aris or Mrs. Michael Aris . . .” Why had she lost the right? Because the English, the writer claimed (in defiance of the historical record) had been behind Aung San's assassination, and because she had failed to “safeguard [her] own race,” sullying her blood by mixing it with a foreigner's. For the regime's propagandists, her marriage to Michael was all the proof they needed that Suu was an agent of foreign powers.

As a result Michael was discreet to the point of invisibility in supporting Suu, and demanded that Alexander and Kim behave likewise. Yet although he continued to work in his beloved Tibetan studies, publishing several specialist books and finally succeeding, with the warm encouragement of the Prince of Wales and the generous support of the Rausing family, of Tetrapak fame, in setting up Britain's first Tibetan and Himalayan Studies Center at Oxford, no one close to him doubted that it was around Suu and her struggle that his life revolved.
²⁷

His sister Lucinda estimates that he spent at least half his time working on Suu's behalf, and says he had a secretary who worked exclusively on Burmese matters. “I don't think Suu ever realized how much he did,” she said.
²⁸
But as the years passed and every visa application after 1995 was turned down, the strain began to tell. Lintner recalled:

He was offered this teaching fellowship in Sanskrit at Harvard. It suited him perfectly well and Suu was happy with it too. He had this small studio flat in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I visited him there, I went to see him in his room. He was still afraid of Burmese spies: He didn't want to meet in public.

It was tragic to see that room. There were pictures of Suu on all the walls. And ashtrays with cigarette butts towering up . . .
²⁹

The strain of the years of enforced separation was now telling on him fatally. In the summer of 1998 he suffered appalling backache, which is often associated with some forms of cancer. Tests that he took in September proved negative, but in January 1999 he sent Suu a letter via the daughter of a Rangoon-based friend with the news that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Soon it became clear that his condition was deteriorating quickly, and his attempts to persuade the Burmese regime to give him a visa took on a sudden urgency. All his eminent connections and those of his family were pressed into service: Prince Charles and Countess Mountbatten were only two of the great and good who sent letters to Senior General Than Shwe, pleading with him to issue the dying man a visa so that he and Suu could meet one more time before he died.

It was perhaps inevitable, given the extremely narrow view the regime has always taken of its interests, that they would interpret Suu's emotional emergency in the cruelest and most stupidly calculating way conceivable: as the best opportunity yet to get her to leave the country.

A Western diplomat who was close to Suu remembers this harrowing period vividly. “They not only said no to these appeals—in fact they never replied—but they cynically used it in psychological warfare,” he recalled. “Towards the very end they started printing stuff saying, of course any time Suu Kyi wants to leave she can go to her dying husband, it's the duty of every proper wife to go and be at the bed of the dying husband rather than the other way around, etcetera, etcetera. I was so sickened by the way they dealt with this thing that I refused to shake the foreign minister's hand any more. I thought he was very, very craven in going along with this despicable tactic.”
³⁰

Michael was failing fast, and friends of the couple in Rangoon witnessed their tragedy at close quarters. One of them recalled:

Towards the very end Michael was extremely, falsely optimistic—about the visa, about himself: Sure, he said, I shall be getting better soon, the visa will be coming through soon. He may genuinely not have realized how quickly this disease was going to carry him off. It was one of the most ghastly trials that Suu has ever had to face, and she did it with enormous dignity and courage.

Another friend added:

Her bravery in such an appallingly difficult time was testimony to her being an exceptional person. Ultimately I think her strong Buddhist faith sustained her.

Back in England, Suu and Michael's old friend Sir Robin Christopher, at the time the British ambassador to Indonesia, visited Michael in hospital. Both Suu and Michael had always been keenly aware that if she ever left Burma that would be the end of the story—her passport would be cancelled and she would never be readmitted. Now, however, they began to discuss the possibility again in earnest. But the conclusion they reached was the same as before.

Michael Aris died on March 27, 1999, his fifty-third birthday, less than three months after learning that he had the disease. Christopher flew to see Suu in Rangoon soon afterwards. “I arrived as a memorial ceremony to Michael was in progress,” he said. “There were probably about 300 people there in the garden, monks chanting, Suu listening to them.” When it was all over he and Suu talked things over at length. Christopher recalled:

At the end it was tragic that he was not allowed to see her. She talked about it a lot, and how they had discussed it. They both understood that there were an awful lot of her followers in Burma whose livelihoods depended on her being there: If she wasn't there they would be rounded up and either killed or imprisoned. And a number of families existed on the meager support that she was able to pull together. Food and freedom were the issues: food for the families of those that were imprisoned, who would have completely gone under without her help, while she felt her closest followers would almost certainly have been arrested once she was out of the way. So in other words an awful lot of lives depended on her staying where she was. Michael was going to die anyway. They shared the decision. It was a very strong relationship.

She was grieving. But fundamentally this had not destroyed her. She had seen it coming, they had communicated a lot, she was wracked by the issue of whether she should go back or whether she shouldn't. But she was consoled by the fact that Michael had said, don't come. Don't come. He entirely understood the situation.
³¹

“I am so fortunate to have had such a wonderful husband who always understood my needs,” Suu wrote on the day of his death. “Nothing can take that away from me.”

The military regime, which in 1997, on the advice of an American public relations consultancy, had changed its name, to the State Peace and Development Council or SPDC, had run out of ideas. They had succeeded in confining Suu to Rangoon: Every time she had tried to travel since 1998 they had blocked her at the capital's outskirts. Her refusal to turn back had led to a series of stand-offs that had their farcical elements, but each time the regime eventually got its way.

But they could not induce her to leave the country. They had tried every trick they could think of, to no avail. Their attempt to exploit her love and grief to get her to fly to Michael's deathbed was the last throw of the dice.

Eighteen months after his death, on September 21, 2000, she made her most determined attempt yet to break out of the army's grip, but again she was stymied on the city's outskirts. For nine days she stayed in her car in the suburb of Dala, to the south of the capital, refusing the regime's demand that she return home. Eventually, on September 2nd, a 200-strong detachment of Lon Htein (riot police) turned up and forced her to go back. On reaching University Avenue she was once again put under house arrest.

O
N
the evening of Tuesday, May 7, 2002, I flew into Rangoon for the second time in my life, the first time in eleven years. That same day Suu had again been released from house arrest. With a tourist visa for Myanmar, obtained the previous week after the usual anxious wait, I left Delhi and flew to Bangkok in the hope of becoming one of the first British reporters to interview her. At Bangkok airport I bought a ticket to Rangoon and boarded the half-empty plane.

You take off from the concrete megalopolis of Bangkok, its Buddhist heart practically entombed in cement, and although you are flying from one Asian capital to another—from the capital of one Asian country to its neighbor which is actually substantially larger, and which once held Siam in thrall—it's like going from a real city to a country town. Bangkok disappears into its own smog. Within half an hour, as you begin to descend, the waters of the delta are grey and turbid under the plane's lights; the few, faint lights of Rangoon and its suburbs wink dimly, a civilization away from the blazing furnace of Thailand. A few vehicles crawl along the narrow roads. There are no traffic jams.

Yet although still the country cousin, it was soon clear that Rangoon was a different city from the one I had visited before. Mingaladon Airport had a new international terminal which looked like an airport terminal in any country in the world, made of concrete, glass and marble, well lit and with none of the dinginess and betel juice-stained corners of the old building. The taxis waiting outside were the same beaten-up 1970s Nissans and Toyotas as before, but the hotel I had been recommended, the Sofitel Plaza, was new: a bland, shiny, gilded multistory palace with uniformed doormen, obsequious reception staff and swift, hissing lifts. It cost $40 a night with breakfast—next to nothing.

Burma had clearly been going through some changes. I had been the South Asia correspondent of the
Independent
for nearly five years but Burma had been so quiet compared with the rest of the region that I had
found no occasion to come before. The last occasion I had written about it was in 2000, during Suu's nine-day stand-off with the army, which culminated in her return to detention.

That story had made it sound as if nothing significant had changed since the last time I was here in 1991; it was still stuck in the mud of confrontation and repression. But all this modernity was something new. And now Suu free again—what was the story? What was going on?

As I did the rounds of Western diplomats, aid agency staff and Burmese insiders willing to talk to me, it became clear that Suu's release this time was different from that of 1995. The first time was a stunt: an attempt to prod the Japanese into resuming aid, perhaps a genuine misunderstanding by the regime of what a “gesture” was, and that a gesture with no substance behind it would yield very limited results. Back then neither Suu nor anyone else had been given advance warning of her release; it was preceded by very little diplomatic activity, and after it happened all Suu's requests for dialogue with the regime were met with stony silence.