Aung San Suu Kyi (7 page)

“He understood Burma's problem,” said the man quietly. “He would have been able to stop the disruption.”

This comment is typical. One hears it all the time.

Despite the passing of over sixty years since he was murdered, Aung San is still one of the most significant figures in Burma. Independence has been ascribed to him, and both the military and the democratic movement use the political heritage from him to legitimate their own politics. To put it simply, one could say that he is Burma's equivalent of George Washington, or perhaps the Swedish king Gustav Vasa. A man who chucked out the colonial rulers and established a nation.

Aung San was born in 1915 in Natmauk, a sleepy town in the dry central regions of Burma. He was the youngest of nine children. They and their parents belonged to the lower middle class—to the extent that one can speak of a middle class in the Burma of those days. Their father, U Pha, had grown up in a farming family but left the country and was educated as a lawyer. During Aung San's youth, U Pha ran a small legal office, but in a town like Natmauk the client base was limited and the firm earned just enough to pay its costs. It seems to have been their mother, Daw Suu, who stood for economic stability instead. She had inherited some land outside the town, and at the same time as she brought up the children and took care of the household, she also saw to it that the yield from the fields was sufficient for the family to get by on.

During the last years of the Bamar Kingdom in the nineteenth century, her family had belonged to the Bamar gentry. Her mother's cousin, U Min Yaung, had been one of the most stubborn guerrilla leaders during the first years of the British occupation in the 1880s. Aung San grew up with the stories about his famous relative, and he dreamed even as a child of standing at the head of a large army against the British colonial power.

The British had occupied Burma in three stages during the nineteenth century. In the 1820s they had taken the provinces Arakan and Tenasserim
on the coast. On that occasion the aim had really been only to push back the Bamar Kingdom, which had its own plans of becoming a major power. During the rule of King Bodawpaya the Bamar had invaded Arakan in 1784 and in principle made slaves out of the population. The effect was that a wave of refugees fled over the border to India, where the British had already taken power. In 1817 the Bamar invaded Assam in northeastern India, and two years later they made a violent raid into Manipur and later also into Cachar, where the previous rulers sought support from the British against the Bamar attack. However, it was not until 1823, when the Bamar attacked the British outpost on the island of Shapura, that the conflict with the British led to a full-scale war. The British sent in an enormous armed force that almost perished from disease when it was confronted by the Burmese rainy season. Fifteen thousand soldiers died and the war cost the British five million pounds.

However, the British won the war, and thanks to this, they were able to take power over some of the most strategically important sections along Burma's coast. One of the deciding battles took place at Danubyu, roughly fifteen miles northwest of Rangoon. Up until then the Bamar had been the most victorious army, but at Danubyu the British succeeded in killing the Bamar supreme commander, General Bandula, a military genius who had personally drawn up the strategy during the war.

The Bamar court signed a peace treaty with the British (the Treaty of Yandabo) that provided advantageous trading terms for the British East India Company. Some years later, the British merchants started yet another war, and in just a few days Rangoon was also occupied, along with parts of the Irrawaddy Delta.

Now the British were in control of the entire coast and the fertile farming country in the south, and for all intents and purposes the power lay in the hands of the British East India Company. A trading company had been accorded the status of a colonial power—even though it had a symbiotic relationship with the English government.

What was left of the Bamar Kingdom became totally dependent on the goodwill of the British for its survival. However, the merchants of the British East India Company were still not satisfied. They wanted to construct a trade route between the Indian Ocean and China, and they were of the opinion
that the mountains of northern Burma provided the best alternative. The French were simultaneously expanding their sphere of interest in IndoChina, and the British grew nervous about the competition. In a letter to the governor-general of India in 1867, England's foreign minister, Lord Cranborne, wrote,

It is of primary importance to allow no other European power to insert itself between British Burmah and China. Our influence in that country must be paramount. The country itself is of no great importance. But an easy communication with the multitudes who inhabit Western China is an object of national importance.

In the Bamar capital of Mandalay, King Thibaw later came to power via a complicated web of intrigues. In order to get rid of all conceivable competitors to the throne, he had had more than eighty of his closest relatives executed. Men, women, and children had been stuffed into white sacks and carted out to the palace courtyard where they all were clubbed to death by Thibaw's bodyguards. The British had been looking for a good moral excuse to occupy the northern parts of the country as well, and when this brutality continued they were provided with one. When they actually attacked in the autumn of 1885, the Bamar army had no means of defending itself against the well-armed, disciplined English troops, and the war was over in two weeks. Mandalay was captured and plundered and Thibaw was sent into exile on the eastern coast of India.

Just before the British attack, Thibaw had made Aung San's relative U Min Yaung commander of the town of Myolulin, situated near Natmauk, Aung San's own birthplace. When the British had overthrown Thibaw, they immediately destroyed the entire Bamar system of nobility and all the local rulers were ordered to swear loyalty to the occupying powers. U Min Yaung refused, however. He declared that he would rather die than give way to the British, and he gathered together a guerrilla army under his command. The British knew that he was a popular leader in central Burma, and they did all they could to get him on their side. When they did not succeed, they started a military operation to crush the opposition. After a time of playing cat and mouse with each other, U Min Yaung was captured and beheaded.

Even so, in practice it took over ten years for the colonial powers to gain control over Burma. The red-clad soldiers met resistance everywhere, partly from exofficers in the Bamar army and partly from the ethnic minorities.

The Bamar are the largest group of people in Burma. They constitute around 60 percent of the total population and they live mainly in the central parts of the country, in the vicinity of the Irrawaddy River with its six hundred miles. When using the word “Bamar,” one thus means the majority group. The word “Burmese” is used to describe all the ethnic groups living within the mapped-out borders that constitute Burma.

Apart from the Bamar, there are several dozen ethnic minorities, of which the smallest consists of not more than a couple thousand people. The larger of these groups, however, are easy to distinguish as distinct and separate. They have had control over their own territory for a long time and built up their own social and political structures. They have their own languages, their own culture, and their own stories about their people's history. The largest groups are the Karen, Karenni, Mon, Chin, Shan, Kachin, and Rakhine. They live mainly in the mountainous, jungle-clad border regions of the country, and historically they have actually never been subjugated to the Bamar central rule. The country that is today called Burma/Myanmar and that nowadays is to be seen on the maps of the world has, in other words, never existed. The various groups of people have lived in their own societies, and the mountains have protected them from occupation and given them a certain degree of independence.

The border peoples have often been in conflict with the Bamar kings, and when the British attacked they did not intend to defend the Bamar monarchy. However, they also feared that the British would be more effective in their ambition to conquer the mountainous regions, and therefore several of the ethnic groups went out into battle to fight against the occupation.

In the end, the British chose to exploit the ethnic conflict for their own ends. In central Burma, among the Bamar, they established a regime that was as hard as nails and must be described for all intents and purposes as a military dictatorship. In the mountainous regions the ethnic minorities were given the formal self-government that they had always striven for. The British called these regions the Border Areas. The Kachin, Shan, Karen, and other groups were thus able to use the colonial period as a lever in their
efforts to build their own nations. Men from the ethnic minorities, not least the Karen and the Karenni, were given posts in the army, police, and administration. Cheap labor was imported from India, and at the beginning of the twentieth century there were more Indians than Bamar living in the capital, Rangoon.

For the Bamar this development meant cultural, political, and economic degradation. They had been at the top of the social hierarchy and now they had suddenly ended up at the bottom.

Aung San grew up in a society that had left behind the old days. The kingdom no longer existed. The country was run by a brutal British regime that exploited the natural resources and let a large portion of the population remain in a state of poverty. A well-developed network of informers and a feared security police saw to it that the population was kept in check, and every attempt at armed resistance was beaten down with brutal violence. However, the new rulers had also developed the infrastructure, constructing railways lines from north to south and building bridges and roads. Industries had also grown up around the big cities. A system of education was introduced, partly to modernize the country and partly to compete with the Buddhist monastery schools, which were understood as being pockets of anticolonial resistance.

The final revolt, characterized by a conservative longing for the past and the old kingdom, was the so-called Saya San revolt at the beginning of the 1930s. Saya San had been a monk but left his monastery and joined the nationalist movement. In protest against the poverty in the rural areas, he gathered together a rebel army of peasants to confront the well-trained British forces with sticks and bows and arrows as their only weapons. The troops that the British put in the field to meet the rebels consisted to a great extent of soldiers from the Karen people in eastern Burma. Over three thousand rebels were slaughtered by the British; many killed had marched straight toward the British fire in the belief that the amulets they were wearing would make them immune to the bullets. Saya San was captured and executed in November 1931.

At that time the nationalist movement mainly thought of itself as anti-colonial, and there were in reality no significant divisions or ideological differences between the different sections of the movement. However, at the
beginning of the 1930s a breach occurred. The movement now came to be dominated by young men who had been educated at schools introduced by the British. They were nationalists to their fingertips, but they did not want to re-create the old monarchy. Instead they were influenced by Plato, Mill, Marx, and Lenin, but also by the new fascist ideas from Germany, Italy, and Japan.

On the other hand, they were still part of the Buddhist tradition. Burma was and is one of the countries most influenced by Buddhism. About 80 percent of the population are faithful Buddhists. The rest are Christian or Muslim, and the absolute majority, irrespective of belief, combine these religions with an ancient belief in so-called
nats
, a kind of mixture of pixies and spirits.

Buddhism became the dominant religion as early as a thousand years ago, when the first Bamar Kingdom was established. It is said that Anawratha, the first king, was visited by a monk immediately after he had taken power, and that the monk convinced him that it would be simpler to keep a kingdom together if there were a religion to link the people.

Most Bamar are active believers who spend some part of their lives in monasteries, as novices for a brief period during their teens or later in life in order to meditate and retire from the world. It is estimated that there are about 400,000 monks in Burma today. The monasteries offer an opportunity for children from poor homes to gain a basic education, since the state schools charge high fees. Thanks to its strong position among the population, the
sanghan
, or monk order, has always been a dominant power in civil society. The monasteries have offered an arena for debate and political action that no ruler has dared to set himself over. They have stood outside the jurisdiction of the state, even when the state has been at its most totalitarian. They have carried on social enterprises, giving support to the most vulnerable and formulating political, almost revolutionary theories when the men in power have gone too far. In other words, it was not just a matter of chance that the monasteries were a center of nationalism and resistance against the British colonial power.

Aung San was both a Marxist and a socialist, but he was also influenced by the Buddhist monk Thakin Kodaw Hmaing. As a child in the 1880s, Kodaw Hmaing had seen with his own eyes how the British invaded Mandalay and
sent King Thibaw into exile in India. He is often viewed as the most tangible link between the precolonial Burma and the revolution that took place during the years at the time of the Second World War. Kodaw Hmaing blended socialist ideological goods with Buddhist beliefs. He wrote about an imaginary prehistoric era, a kind of nirvana, in which people lived in freedom and harmony with one another. But like all gardens of paradise, it was lost on account of greed and worldly desires and required a Buddha to lead the people lost in the perdition of reality. Similarities with the stories about Jesus in the Bible are obvious, but Kodaw Hmaing's mythological world was also well suited to the socialist ideology concerning common ownership and criticism of the class differences in a capitalist economy.