Incendiary Circumstances (24 page)

University Avenue is a curving, tree-shaded street that skirts the picturesque Inya Lake. Suu Kyi's house, screened by a mass of unkempt greenery, is not visible from the street. When I later walked through the house's blue gates to meet her, I was surprised by how modest and dilapidated the building was: a plain but solid two-story bungalow, with a portico and veranda overlooking a garden and the lake.

I was shown to a large room on the ground floor. A portrait of her father hung on a flaking, mildewed wall, slightly askew. Close by was an orange banner bearing the symbol of the National League for Democracy, a fighting peacock. Through a barred window I caught a glimpse of the lake, its sunbathed surface speckled with lotus pads.

When Suu Kyi entered the room, dressed, as usual, in a Burmese sarong, I knew why she had made such an impression on me when I first met her. It is not her beauty, although her beauty is considerable. It is that she emanates an almost mystical quality of solitude—not solemnity, for she is always animated, either laughing or driving a point home with an upraised finger, but a sovereign, inviolate aloneness.

I had prepared a long list of questions, but now, in her presence, I didn't know where to begin. The unexpectedly complicated business of entering her house had unsettled me: the taxi driver who dropped me at a distance and sped away; the camera-wielding intelligence agents who loitered by her gate; the smiling policeman who inquired politely after the name of my hotel. After these sinister preliminaries, the normalcy of her house and the calm authority of her presence came almost as a jolt.

I glanced at my notes. Most of my questions were about her party's policies, SLORC's machinations, and so on. I knew now
what her answers would be. She meets with foreign reporters almost daily, and her answers are unvarying; they could hardly be otherwise, considering how often the questions are repeated.

She never leaves any doubt about her opposition to foreign investment in Burma under the current regime, although at the time we spoke she stopped short of calling for economic sanctions. Also by implication she is critical of attempts to lure tourists to Burma. She is unequivocal in her criticism of a so-called constitutional convention that was called by SLORC three years ago; the constitution that was proposed, she points out, would effectively institutionalize military rule, since it reserves a large proportion of seats for military appointees. At the same time, she is generally nonconfrontational in her references to the current regime; she rarely even uses the term "SLORC," preferring to use the phrase "the authorities."

As I listened to these answers, I knew what I really wanted to ask: I wanted to know what it was like to be under house arrest for six years; what it meant to be separated from one's spouse and one's children, to be offered the option of leaving and turning it down. I thought of my own family, thousands of miles away, and the pain of even a brief separation; of the times I'd found myself looking at my watch and wondering whether my children were asleep or at play.

Her gateside meetings, I'd noticed, were attended by dozens of foreigners. Only a few were reporters and journalists; most were tourists and travelers. They were people like me, members of the world's vast, newspaper-reading middle class, people who took it for granted that there are no heroes among us. But Suu Kyi had proved us wrong. She lived the same kind of life, attended the same classes, read the same books and magazines, got into the same arguments. And she had shown us that the apparently soft and yielding world of books and words could sometimes forge a very fine kind of steel.

I too had come on a pilgrimage of sorts. What I really wanted to know was, "Where did you find the courage to do what you have done? What gave you the strength?" And what could one possibly learn of this in an hour—or two hours, or even a hundred? It would take a poet or a novelist years of labor to find a way of understanding what she had done.

The futility of my prepared questions made them inevitable. "So many people around the world marvel at how you survived those years of house arrest," I said. "In a way, house arrest must be worse than prison—"

She interrupted me with a laugh. "Sometimes I thought it would be better in prison," she said, "because I wouldn't have to cope with keeping the house clean."

Every time it rained, she said, the roof sprang new leaks, and she had to run up and down the stairs positioning buckets. "It was a great nuisance. Sometimes I thought, I wonder if it leaks at Insein jail? Whether the prisoners have to run around with buckets to catch the leaks?"

"Did Buddhism help?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "Buddhist meditation helped because it created a sense of awareness and a sense of calm."

"What was it like," I asked, "the first time you saw your children after those years of house arrest?"

She paused to reflect. "I didn't see them together," she said. "My elder son came first, you see. He was fifteen when I last saw him, and he had already taken on his adolescent shape. But my younger son was eleven, and he was still a little boy. When I saw him again, he had changed completely. He had changed physically. If I had seen him out on the street, I would not have known he was my son. I was very happy that nothing had happened—that nothing had really affected the closeness between us."

She stopped. She evidently found it difficult, possibly distasteful, to talk about her family to a stranger. I felt that I had trespassed, in a small way. Like Suu Kyi, I was brought up to believe in the appropriateness of a strict separation between the public and the private, the political and the domestic. In this view, it is wrong as well as unseemly to reduce a vast political movement to the career of a single leader—to identify the aspirations of millions of people with the life of an individual.

The irony is that nothing better illustrates the passing of these values than Suu Kyi's predicament. In the postmodern world, politics is everywhere a matter of symbols, and the truth is that Suu Kyi is her own greatest political asset. It is only because Burma's 1988 democracy movement had a symbol, personified in Suu Kyi, that the world remembers it and continues to exert pressure on the current regime. Otherwise, the world would almost certainly have forgotten Burma's slain and dispersed democrats just as quickly as it has forgotten many others like them in the past.

The golf-playing generals who run Burma are, of course, well aware of this situation. If it were not for Suu Kyi and the increasingly vocal support for her abroad, SLORC's leaders would have scarcely a worry as they tee off on the links. Under house arrest, Suu Kyi was a living reproach to the regime and a bar to many foreign investors. By releasing her, the junta achieved a minor propaganda coup.

SLORC is headed by four of the Burmese Army's senior generals. The man who is widely believed to be the brains behind the regime's adroit maneuverings over the past several years is Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt, the longtime chief of Burma's intelligence apparatus and a political operator of formidable skill. After the events of 1988, SLORC moved quickly to "liberalize" the economy and invite foreign investment. No one knows exactly how much money the regime has attracted (the government claims to have got $3 billion), but the single largest investment is a billion-dollar gas pipeline financed by the French company Total and the American energy conglomerate Unocal.

SLORC takes particular pride in what it has done to end the forty-eight-year-old civil war with the country's ethnic insurgents. Again through shrewd political maneuvering, SLORC has forced many of the country's insurgents to negotiate. Fifteen groups have concluded ceasefire agreements with Rangoon, and the official press frequently claims that these agreements show that the insurgents have entered "the legal fold."

When I mentioned the ceasefires, Suu Kyi said, "There were reports in the Thai papers a couple of weeks ago that there is a constant flow of arms across the border, which indicates that the insurgents are continuing to accumulate arms. That does not sound very much as though they were preparing for permanent peace." I had already decided that I wanted to investigate the government's claims for myself.

In SLORC's official usage, Burma is now Myanmar, Rangoon is now Yangon, Karenni is now Kayah, and so on. But most of the people I spoke to used the old forms. As I was rising to leave, I asked Suu Kyi to resolve the dilemma; since she is effectively the country's elected leader, she had as good a right as anyone to decide what it should be called.

"I think it's very foolish," she said. "The excuse [that the authorities] gave was that Burma was a colonial name and referred only to the Burmese people, and Myanmar included all the other ethnic groups. This is just not true. Myanmar is a literary form of
Bama,
which means Burmese. So what it is all about I do not know. Some people say it is
yedea
—a propitiatory rite, something to prevent bad fortune. The authorities believe a lot in astrology."

"Would you rather I used the old names?" I asked.

She laughed. "Yes, please use the old forms," she said. "As support for a sensible way of looking at things. I do not like narrow-mindedness. Even if these names were given by the British colonialists, so what? After all, India is called India and not Bharat, and China is China. I think if you have enough confidence in yourself, you should not worry about what you are called."

Two days after my meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, I heard that fighting had broken out between the Burmese Army and a contingent of Karenni insurgents. The Karenni were supported by a regiment of dissident Burmese students, and the fighting was concentrated in a remote and mountainous border region adjoining northwestern Thailand. The official Burmese media had listed the
Karenni among the groups that had been brought back into the legal fold through SLORC's ceasefire policy. There was no mention of any fighting.

I found myself wondering, What is Burma (or Myanmar, for that matter)? Who are the Karenni insurgents? What has driven them to fight for so long, with such tenacity? Are the two aspects of Burma—the areas under the control of Rangoon and those claimed by the insurgents—really so distant from each other? I recalled an anecdote told to me by a senior diplomat in Bangkok, about Thailand's immensely revered monarch, King Bhumibol, who had personally overseen his country's passage to democracy. The king had remarked that an overhasty transition to democracy in Burma might produce a situation similar to the one in Bosnia, only worse. If this was so, what were the prospects of democracy in any multiethnic society?

When the Burmese offensive was in its second week, I flew to the border town of Mae Hong Son, in northwestern Thailand. It was a clear day, and I watched in awe as the red riverine plains of the south changed into jagged, densely forested mountains, a pristine landscape of misted valleys and towering ridges. I could see no sign of any habitation until Mae Hong Son itself appeared suddenly in my window, a string of teakwood buildings nestled in a deep valley.

At first glance, Mae Hong Son seemed to be a quiet and prosperous frontier town. It was hard to imagine that a war was being fought in the surrounding mountains. I was surprised by the number of hotels on offer. I picked a Holiday Inn. From my room I glimpsed a turquoise swimming pool ringed by European tourists sipping vividly colored drinks in umbrellaed glasses. Within half an hour, my contacts in Mae Hong Son, members of a Burmese student group, sent a guide to take me back across the Burma border into a Karenni-held area that was currently under attack.

We rented a motor scooter and went rattling off down a dirt track that ended at a village near the foot of the mountains. We waded across a stream and started climbing. It was about five in the afternoon, and the sun had already dipped behind a ridge. Following a steeply ascending trail, we stepped from twilight into the darkness of a densely canopied forest. Neither my guide nor I had thought to bring a flashlight; he was wearing rubber sandals and I a pair of thin-soled leather shoes.

I began to regret my precipitate departure from the Holiday Inn. Clawing at the undergrowth to keep from falling, I feared I would end up with a snake in my fist. By the time we stumbled into the students' base camp, hours later, exhaustion had erased every thought from my mind. It was all I could do to stay on my feet.

Half a dozen young guerrillas dressed in camouflage fatigues were squatting around a campfire by a bamboo hut, playing guitars. A heavyset, thickly bearded man detached himself from the group and stepped over to meet me. He introduced himself as the commander of the regiment. He looked me over as I sat panting on a rock. After a moment's hesitation, he asked, a little shyly, "Are you Indian?" I then noticed that his spoken English sounded oddly like my own. I nodded and, through a veil of exhaustion, took another look at him. Suddenly I sat up. "And you?" I asked.

"My parents were Indian," he said with a smile. "But I'm Burmese."

After my ordeal in the jungle, I was not quite prepared for such an eminently postmodern encounter. My astonishment must have been evident in my face, for the commander began to laugh.

He was called Ko Sonny, but his given name, I learned, was Mahinder Singh. He was in his early thirties and had been "in the jungle" almost eight years. His family had been settled in Burma for three generations. His parents were born there; his father was Sikh and his mother Hindu, both from families of well-to-do Indian businessmen.

I was disconcerted listening to Sonny in the flickering firelight. I was sure that our relatives had known one another once in Burma; his had chosen to stay and mine hadn't. Except for a few years and a couple of turns of fate, each of us could have been in the other's place.

I spent the night on a bamboo pallet in Sonny's hut. The next
day I was jolted awake before dawn by the sound of a Burmese Army artillery barrage. After groping for a match, I stepped outside to find Sonny talking into a walkie-talkie. The Burmese Army had launched an assault on a Karenni position in an adjoining valley.