Aung San Suu Kyi (31 page)

The noose had once again been tightened, and this time it would be over four years before the population in Burma would catch a glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi.

A 1947 black DeSoto picked me up from outside the hotel. The car was in perfect condition, with shiny chrome work on the instrument panel.

“It's my father's,” said the chauffeur, a young man who, to judge by his appearance, could have found a place in any reggae band. “He has always taken good care of this car, as though it was a child. Mostly so as not to have to buy a new one. We could never have afforded that.”

It was January 2010, and I had traveled to Burma to interview some of Aung San Suu Kyi's colleagues. Darkness was about to fall as we slowly glided along the road. There was a scent of incense and spicy food from the outdoor food stalls in the streets. Rangoon is and as far as I know has always been full of street trade. People sit on blankets and cheap mats and sell everything from dried fish to two-month-old issues of magazines like
Time
or
New Statesman
. There are crowds everywhere. Children playing or working in their parents' street stall, women in their eighties with their two or three remaining teeth red from betel nut juice.

Central Rangoon has not changed much since the 1950s. The blocks in the harbor district consist of long, narrow lanes lined with turquoise, white, and blue three-story houses that could just as well have been taken out of an early novel by Graham Greene. The style is colonial and decadent. The façades are stained by soot and damp. The plaster has fallen off and the
windows are so shabby that one wonders how the panes can remain in the frames. It is as though somebody had moved one of the most charming suburbs of Paris to the tropics and then allowed it to rot for half a century.

We passed some young men who wanted to exchange dollars on the black market.

“Change money? Good rate for you!”

Nobody in Burma believes any longer in the domestic economy, and the inflation is brutal, so dollars have become the most desirable currency. When I first traveled to Burma in the mid-1990s, one received 250 kyat for a dollar on the black market. Nowadays it's four times that amount.

We are on our way to a teahouse to meet Zaw Zaw, a former member of the NLD who now calls himself an activist.

A meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi was out of the question. She had not been allowed to meet any journalists since May 2003. The fact is that she had not met many people at all during the most recent, long period of isolation. She had been visited by her doctor, her two housekeepers, on a few occasions one of her party comrades, and on even fewer occasions by UN representatives.

Razali Ismail was given permission to meet her a few times during the autumn and winter of 2003–2004. On the first occasion, Suu Kyi had written down a list of names of the young NLD activists who had been at Depayin. She wanted Razali to check that they were safe or—if they had been arrested—that they were being treated well by the authorities.

“It was tragic,” says Debbie Stothard, who later received the list from Razali. “Who was going to tell her that several of the young people had been killed at Depayin?”

Beginning in the spring of 2004, no further visits were permitted. Razali was blocked from entering the country, and in January 2006 he resigned from the post of the United Nations special envoy in protest against the junta's unwillingness to cooperate. He was replaced by Ibrahim Gambari, a Nigerian politician who did not have any particular previous knowledge about Burma and who, up until his resignation in 2009, did not succeed in finding any cracks in the junta's façade.

For Gen. Khin Nyunt, the third party in what could have been a meaningful dialogue, the period after Depayin was a political roller coaster with
regard to power. Khin Nyunt has always been a survivor, and despite the obvious conflicts with Than Shwe, he was appointed prime minister in August 2004. By then he had continued to be in favor of talks with Suu Kyi, though he didn't take part in them himself. After her release in 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi mentioned that there had also been a short period of dialogue following the Depayin massacre.

“I can say that real discussions took place when I met with Col. Tin Hlaing, Maj. Gen. Kyaw Win, and Brig. Gen. Than Htun after the Depayin incident,” she said in an interview with the magazine
The Irrawaddy
. “I think they did the best they could. Whenever I spoke with them, I always noticed that they raised good points. That's why I never thought that I was always right. I always felt friendly toward them. Perhaps they felt the same about me. However, what we discussed has never actually been implemented.”

Khin Nyunt's first measure as new prime minister was to launch a “roadmap to democracy.” In practice, it would be a rehash of the plan he had already launched in the 1990s. First he reconvened the national convention, whose assignment was still to draw up a new constitution. After that the junta promised yet again that elections would be held.

Parallel to this, the economic liberalization would continue, but now more and more members of the junta began to question the deep dependence on China that had developed during the 1990s. India and other countries in Asia were competing to capture market shares for themselves, not least in the growing oil and gas industry. Than Shwe and the junta's second-in-command, Maung Aye, considered that Khin Nyunt, who himself came from a Chinese background, was far too concerned about having good relations with the rulers in Beijing.

It is impossible to know whether it was his desire to open the economy for Chinese businessmen, his contacts with Razali, or perhaps his willingness to compromise in the relations with Suu Kyi that was the decisive factor, but in the middle of October 2004, Khin Nyunt was dismissed as prime minister. The coup was made public in a press release that announced that Khin Nyunt had resigned “for health reasons.” He disappeared without a trace, and several months later information leaked out that he had been taken to a top-security prison in the Coco Islands in the Indian Ocean. Over
two thousand of his most loyal colleagues in the military security service were simultaneously sacked or imprisoned.

When I traveled to Burma in 2005 to do research for my book
Granatklockorna i Myitkyina
(“The Grenade Bells in Myitkyina”), I met several political activists who pointed out with grim humor that the security apparatus since Khin Nyunt's fall from power had become “harder but more stupid.”

“That is still true, but only partly,” Zaw Zaw pointed out, when we had seated ourselves on the small plastic chairs and each ordered a cup of green China tea. “Than Shwe has intensified surveillance, so people are more frightened nowadays. The organization USDA has started to function more and more as a security service and the control has become extra hard after the great protests in 2007. The people from USDA are also being made into village chiefs and the organization is to be provided with offices in all towns and villages. USDA is on its way to becoming the new totalitarian power center in Burma.”

Zaw Zaw was earlier active in the youth section of the NLD. When Aung San Suu Kyi was freed at the end of the 1990s, he lived in one of her houses on University Avenue, along with a group of other young people from the NLD. To stop the young people from organizing themselves politically, the junta had closed all the universities in 1996, and they were not reopened until four years later. The idea was to avoid a new student revolt, but the effect was partly the direct opposite. A whole generation of academics became unemployed and now had more time to get involved in the democratic movement. Later on Zaw Zaw continued with his involvement and was a driving force in building up new NLD sections during Aung San Suu Kyi's tours in the countryside in 2002 and 2003.

Zaw Zaw now told me that he was tired of it all. Not of Aung San Suu Kyi—she still has strong support (and since her release I'm pretty sure Zaw Zaw and his friends have even greater confidence in her work)—but of the others in the NLD leadership.

“They are old and afraid and don't dare to do anything,” he says while taking a gulp of tea. “When the monks' protests started in September 2007, everyone was waiting for the NLD to take the lead. But it didn't happen. Instead they encouraged people to take things easy and not to demonstrate.

The uprising therefore lacked political leadership, and it became easier for the junta to quell the demonstrations.”

Zaw Zaw had an intense gaze and an ironic smile, and during our conversation I caught myself thinking about Aung San. This must have been how the young nationalists worked during the 1930s. One hundred percent focused on the task at hand. Tired of the “oldies” in the movement.

For those who have been following the developments in Burma through the years, the demonstrations in 2007 came partly as a surprise. It was obvious that the population in Burma hated the regime and that poverty had increased the dissatisfaction. But there was not much to indicate that so many people were ready once again to confront the junta openly. Nineteen years had passed since the gigantic protests in 1988, and Aung San Suu Kyi had effectively been kept out of the public eye since 2003.

This in turn meant that the international interest in Burma had faded. A rapid review of the international English-language newspapers shows that the number of news articles about Burma decreased dramatically during the years 2003–2007. The ethnic cleansing and the assaults along the borders of Burma are not newsworthy enough for the Western press.

It was as though the human rights campaign that had started with such intensity in the 1990s had lost its thunder at the same time. Burma showed in a brutal and concrete way that the promises of a perpetually expanding democratic world did not necessarily have to be kept. The optimism among Burma's exile groups also diminished in the 2000s. Many activists had spent almost twenty years away from their home country, without meeting their families or their childhood friends, without seeing any clear result of the campaign for democracy at home. When I traveled along the border between Thailand and Burma in 1998, most of the people I met believed that the junta would fall within a year or two. “Next year in Rangoon,” said one student who had fled after the elections in 1990, when we said good-bye to each other in the border town of Mae Sot. But the following year, everything was just as usual in Burma. The oppression just as severe. The poverty just as immense. This does not mean that the work of the exile groups had been in vain all these years. Quite the opposite. By educating young people along the border, establishing a dialogue between the ethnic groups, developing medical care, and discussing basic political issues, they are creating a popular
base that will increase the chances of success for democracy in Burma when the day arrives for developments to take such a turn.

However, the junta did not fall. Burma did not become a new South Africa, at least not with the aid of some “quick fix.” Perhaps it was a result of the restlessness of our times and our demands for rapid results. When the Burma campaigns did not achieve any results, many young Western activists moved onto the next thing.

The decrease in interest resulted most of all from the attack against the United States on September 11, 2001, and on the ensuing war on terrorism. For a number of years, the international discourse was almost entirely about fundamentalist Islam, the brutal methods used in the war on terrorism, and the West's own violations of human rights. The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, just two months before the junta in Burma decided once again to strangle the democratic movement.

The junta did all they could to link their own fight to stay in power to the war on terrorism. The members of the democratic movement were more and more often called terrorists, and the state-owned newspapers carried continual reminders about the groups that were still at war with the junta. In particular, the population in the Muslim-dominated regions in the Arakan states to the west of Rangoon was badly affected. The Burmese government army commenced harsh attacks against the guerrillas from the Muslim Rohyinga people, who were fighting against Tatmadaw. The Rohyinga people, who had been living in the Arakan state for hundreds of years, were called Muslim extremists and “infiltrators from Bangladesh.” The populations of hundreds of villages were driven away with violence and were replaced by Bamar who were forcibly moved from other parts of the country.

On a few occasions, smallish explosive charges were detonated in Rangoon, but they were probably primed by Christian Karen groups that had tired of jungle warfare and chosen terrorism as a method. At the end of the 1990s, a Karen group calling itself God's Army had occupied Burma's embassy in Bangkok for a few days, and on another occasion its members held several hundred patients hostage in a hospital in the town of Ratchanaburi. These incidents received tremendous international attention when it turned out that God's Army was led by Jonny and Luther Hto, twins
who were then only eleven years old. Their followers believed that they had magic powers, among other invulnerabilities, and in all of the photos that were published of them each had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

However, God's Army was crushed within a few months and there was no more “terrorism” in Burma.

The junta did not receive any support either from the United States or the European Union when it came to their purported problems. Yet the junta was able to benefit from the change in the international climate that the war on terrorism brought with it. The world was once more deeply affected by the logic of the Cold War. This meant partly that Burma fell off the world's radar since there was no way of linking the “little” conflict in Burma to the “big” conflict against radical Islamism. Countries like Russia and China could furthermore use the terrorism card when they argued for Burma's case in the United Nations or other international contexts.