Aung San Suu Kyi (23 page)

After that she spent some time exercising, eventually on a simple Nordic Track she had succeeded in getting into the house. She had breakfast, listened again to the radio, and then read books and played the piano.

“I tried to keep the same routines during my latest house arrest,” she told me when I interviewed her in February 2011. “But I wasn't as strict as I had
been before. This time I had two companions in the house, and it would have been dreadful for them to follow my schedule.”

This time she also found herself preferring to read poetry rather than prose.

“Maybe it's something to do with age,” she said in an interview with
Financial Times
. “I have discovered some rather beautiful bits by Tennyson. I used to think he was an old fuddy-duddy, but it's not quite like that. Some of the poems from
The Princess
are quite beautiful.”

Most things during house arrests were the same, though, for example the fact that she was denied access to the telephone. At the beginning of the first arrest back in 1989, a soldier had marched into the house, cut the telephone line, and carried off the telephone, so she was unable to talk to her friends or family. However, Michael Aris had obtained the right to send her parcels and was able to supply her with a steady stream of books. She read political books in the mornings and fiction in the afternoons. After a number of years, she acquired a copy of Nelson Mandela's recently published autobiography,
Long Walk to Freedom
. Mandela's story about life under apartheid and his prison years on Robben Island inspired her and helped her keep up her courage. She was able to link together her knowledge about the resistance to apartheid in Great Britain in the 1960s with her own highly concrete experiences of imprisonment and oppression.

During the initial period of her isolation, she often worked in the garden, particularly in the mornings before the sun became too sweltering. She took care of the lawns, the garden beds down by the lake, and the lilies growing along the walls of the house. However, after a while she no longer had the strength. The grounds surrounding the house are extensive. They accommodate a small woody area and two buildings apart from the main house, and the climate in Burma assists nature in its conquest within a few months. Soon a joke began to circulate in Rangoon: the junta is trying to silence Suu Kyi by allowing the jungle to grow so thick around her house that no human being could possibly either enter or leave. A kind of Sleeping Beauty legend, though without a prince coming to break the enchantment.

Michael and her sons had returned to Oxford at the end of August, just before term began. Several days later they received a message that the boys'
Burmese passports had been retracted. In contrast to Suu Kyi, both Kim and Alexander had had dual citizenship, which made it possible for them to travel to Burma without special visas. Now they would be denied the right to return to their mother in Rangoon. The junta counted coldly on the fact that if Aung San Suu Kyi did not want to accompany her family to Oxford, and if they were not allowed to visit her, her longing for the boys would in the end become so strong that she, too, would choose to leave.

However, the travel ban only concerned Kim and Alexander to start with. Michael was permitted to return to Rangoon late in the autumn. “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 in
Freedom from Fear
. They carried on long conversations with each other and celebrated Christmas together. “It was wonderfully peaceful. Suu had established a strict regime of exercise, study, and piano which I managed to disrupt.”

In the meanwhile, the junta rejected Suu Kyi's candidacy to the election in 1990. They had made an addendum to the constitution that forbade a person who was married to a foreigner to run as a candidate in a general election. The NLD thus had to enter the election without its most important leader, and the junta assumed that this would take the sting out of the democratic movement. But once again they made a gross mistake about the strength of the popular dissatisfaction.

The election was to be held on May 27, 1990. Before the election day, the SLORC displayed a striking openness. For months they had done all they could to crush the opposition. They had stopped people from attending political meetings, threatened and imprisoned activists, and carried out hardasnails propaganda in the state-owned mass media. The university and the higher secondary schools had been closed so that the students would not be able to assemble and organize oppositional meetings. Yet the NLD and almost ninety other parties, several of them from the ethnic minorities, were still permitted to act freely for a few days before the election. International media and observers were allowed into the country, and to judge by reports, there was not much to indicate that the SLORC was considering manipulation of the election results. Hopes had increased in January the same year, when Gen. Saw Maung had said that Tatmadaw and the junta were not thinking
of nominating the next government—that would be the task of the people via their newly elected parliament. Despite the obvious suppression of freedom to hold meetings and the violations during the election campaign, his statement had given the voters the impression that their votes could make a difference. As many as 73 percent went out and voted on election day, an unusually high rate of electoral participation in a country that had not carried out an election since 1960. And despite the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi's candidacy constituted a block, the NLD won an overwhelming victory. The party received 80 percent of the seats in parliament. The parties of the ethnic minorities, all allies of the NLD, took home 14 percent. The junta's party, the National Unity Party (NUP), received almost 20 percent of the votes, but since they applied the British election system with majority elections in one-person constituencies, this only gave them a few seats in parliament.

The people had made a monumental statement against the military junta. Aung San Suu Kyi had not only succeeded with her election campaign during the months she was free to act politically, she had also received broad support for her nonviolent perspective. On the day of the election only a few outbreaks of violence were reported from the thousands of polling stations around the country. A closer analysis of the results showed that the NLD had won in regions where the military and their families were in great majority. Only a small number of them had given her their support publicly, but protected by electoral anonymity they had voted for the NLD anyway. Even the soldiers and their officers wanted a new regime in Burma.

During the days following May 27, people celebrated all over Burma, and everyone was counting on the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. The paradox was that the junta had created just the kind of personal cult around her, by imprisoning her, that they had wished to avoid. They had made her into a martyr and a symbol for the opposition. Zin Linn was one of those who took part in the organization of the election campaign in one of the constituencies in Rangoon.

“My candidate himself had a military background,” he recounted when I met him twenty years later at a café in Bangkok. “That made people skeptical, but they chose to vote for him anyway since he was Aung San Suu Kyi's candidate. One voter told me that he would even vote for a dog if it was backed up by Aung San Suu Kyi.”

After the election, two months of confusion followed. The generals seemed almost paralyzed by their total misjudgement of the situation, and out in the streets the first delirium of victory had been replaced by uncertainty. Why was nothing happening? Would the junta acknowledge the election results or were the generals searching for an excuse to declare the whole process null and void?

During this period the NLD had its chance to have assembled parliament on its own. The NLD could have proclaimed a government that other countries would have been able to recognize, in that way increasing the pressure on the junta. But even the NLD did not want to rock the boat. Aung San Suu Kyi was isolated in her home, and others in the party leadership chose to wait and see. Most of them were themselves former generals and officers, and they probably planned on the SLORC getting in touch with them to initiate talks about the way forward. However, that was not what happened. On July 27 the head of the security service, Khin Nyunt, gave a speech in which he declared that the election had not been about voting for a new parliament at all. The election had instead been about choosing a new assembly to formulate a new constitution. The election results were in the process of being declared null and void.

The day after, the NLD gathered in Gandhi Hall in central Rangoon, but its members did not choose to proclaim a new government on that occasion either. Instead they gave the junta another two months in which to recognize the election results, and they demanded an open and unconditional dialogue in order to put a stop to the crisis that the country found itself in. This final wording bears the stamp of Aung San Suu Kyi. Her critics inside and outside the military junta often accuse her of being uncompromising and stubborn to the point of stupidity. However, during the entire election campaign she underlined that she was not demanding any kind of revolution in Burma. It takes time to change a political system, she has said, and it is going to require cooperation from everyone in our society. Even the military.

During this time, Michael, Alexander, and Kim were at home in Oxford. Michael had had certain hopes of traveling there in the summer but had been denied an entry visa. Now they were hoping that Suu Kyi would be freed and that the family could be reunited. But in a letter to Michael dated July 17, 1990, Suu Kyi did not mention any date for her release. Instead
she asked Michael to send her the almost impenetrable Indian epics
Ramayana
and Mahabharata. The rest of the letter was about her longing for the children and practical family matters. Between the lines, Michael understood that she was calculating on a long time under house arrest.

When it began to dawn on the people that the election was going to be declared null and void, their anger intensified once again. On August 8, 1990, on the anniversary of the massacres two years earlier, a large protest action was held in Mandalay, and this time it was the monks from the monastery who took the lead. The action on August 8 had not been advertised in advance. The monks just might have been out on their morning walk to collect donations for the monastery. However, the number of monks and the symbolic significance of the date meant that nobody could avoid being aware of what it was really all about. Tens of thousands of civilians joined them. The students flanked the monks to protect them from attack. The soldiers were called in, and when one of the students unrolled a peacock flag, they got nervous and opened fire. Nine monks were shot to death and an additional fourteen were badly beaten. Several of the injured disappeared without a trace after the military had cleaned up the streets.

The incident was covered up by the state-owned mass media, which asserted that only one monk had been killed and that the violence had been sparked by the students who had attacked the armed guards.

The violence and the attempt to conceal what had really happened triggered a new wave of protests, and all over the country monks assembled to show solidarity with the killed and wounded. When they passed officers and their families during their morning walks, they turned their begging bowls upside down and refused to accept alms from them. Not to be allowed to donate money to the monasteries gives bad karma and is among the worst that can happen to a Buddhist. When the boycott had been going on for some time, the officers became so nervous that they brought in by plane monks from Thailand who had to accept their alms.

This challenge by the monks was one of the greatest threats the junta had encountered, and the generals realized that they would have to act quickly. Gen. Saw Maung gave the command that all the monastery orders that had taken part in the protests were to be dissolved, an utterly exceptional decision given the fact that the worldly powers in Burma had never
had any mandate for direct rule over the monasteries. He proclaimed that those who opposed this decision no longer had the right to be monks. The local commanders were given the authority to tear the orange clothing off the backs of those monks who refused to cooperate. In October the army carried out raids against the monasteries. Thousands of monks were harassed and thrown into prison. Later the traditional religious leadership was dissolved, and the junta appointed on their own initiative a new, more easily controlled and centralized group of monks to lead the sanghan.

The democratic movement's hope of rapid political change had already diminished dramatically in September. At that point a smallish group of parliamentarians from the NLD had assembled in Mandalay to form a shadow government, which the party should already have done in the summer. The SLORC discovered that the meeting was going to be held, and they started a mass hunt-down of all the elected parliamentarians. The entire remaining leadership of the NLD had been taken prisoner, among others U Kyi Maung, the retired general who was acting as chairman during the absence of Aung San Suu Kyi. All remaining hope was crushed when the junta demonstrated that they had no hesitation whatsoever in striking at the monk orders or putting themselves above the religious traditions. The signal could not have been clearer: the junta was intending to remain in power, whatever the price.

The junta had no intention of letting Aung San Suu Kyi go. On the contrary, they readjusted the laws once again so that it would be possible to keep her out of the public eye in the foreseeable future. It had previously been possible for the police to keep somebody under house arrest for one year without a trial. Now the time was prolonged to five years.

Aung San Suu Kyi took this, too, in her usual calm manner, so well known nowadays. In order to tease the guards who visited her now and then, she filled the walls of her house with pasted-up quotations by Gandhi, Nehru, and her own father, Aung San. She had a large portrait of him in her reception room on the ground floor. Sometimes when she was unable to sleep at night, she went downstairs and looked at the picture. She was able—perhaps for the first time—to feel that they were close, that he was present. She looked into his eyes and said to herself, “Okay, now it's you and me against them.”