The Lady and the Peacock (16 page)

As time went on, more and more shops and offices were shut down by strike action. In the absence of public transport the city became harder to negotiate, with the result that 54 University Avenue at times became a sort of island. “Sometimes tensions would run high in the city and none of us would be able to leave the house for days on end,” Ma Thanegi recalled.

We heard stories about the beheadings, and people brought us newspapers with gory photos of heads displayed on spikes.

One time, when every shop in the city was closed, Suu remarked that she was getting tired of seeing the long hair on everyone. I knew how to cut hair, so I was delegated to be in-house barber. Ko Aung refused to let me touch his shoulder length hair, but the others, including Dr. Aris and Ko Myint Swe, had to suffer the indignity of hair shorn so short that, as Suu remarked afterwards, they looked like convicts.

Ma Thanegi was in the house on the Sunday when military rule announced its return with a bloodbath.

Late in the morning of September 18th, Ko Maw came into the house looking worried. It was a Sunday, so there were no meetings or visitors. “Something's going on,” he said. “They are broadcasting military songs nonstop on the radio.”

Ko Aung went to fetch a radio which he placed on Ma Suu's round table—the one with the Lazy Susan in the middle—and left it turned on. I made several calls but could not confirm anything, but we all suspected the army was moving in. Sure enough, at 4
PM
we heard the announcement that the army was taking over to control the anarchy and that no one was to march in the streets. A curfew was imposed from 8
PM
to 4
am
. Government employees were told to report back to work or face dismissal.

Despite the ban on marching, some groups marched out the next day; many were shot and killed. The corpses were quickly taken away and the streets washed of blood.

Ma Thanegi stayed home during the days of shooting and bloodshed when University Avenue was under siege. When calm returned to the streets and she went back to work she found the house in an uproar over how to react to General Saw Maung's promise of multiparty elections.

“There was great excitement in the office over whether we should form a political party. One evening, when there were no other visitors in the house and we were alone, Suu came to me as I was bent over my work to ask if I would want to be involved in party politics. She said she was thinking of getting young people like Ko Myint Swe more involved, by bringing them onto the Central Committee.”

Ma Thanegi treated Suu's approach warily: She had played no part in the democracy movement before, and was temperamentally averse to joining organizations. In the end she chose to remain at arm's length from the party, but she was to become intimately involved with Suu as her personal assistant over the coming months as the party came from nowhere to become the most significant political force in the country.

Suu on August 17, 1995, with her friend and assistant, Ma Thanegi. Despite the broad smiles, the friendship would soon end in bitterness.

After many meetings and much discussion, the founding triumvirate, Aung Gyi, Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo—Aung-Suu-Tin as they were known for short—announced the creation of the National United Front
for Democracy, changed soon afterwards to the National League for Democracy (NLD), the name it retains today. The name change became necessary in late September when the former ruling party, the Burma Socialist Program Party, re-branded itself the National Unity Party—a name too similar for comfort. “All effort is now being put to establish the National League for Democracy, of which Suu is Secretary General,” Michael wrote home on September 30th. “There are still troops and checkpoints in all the streets, but they have stopped indiscriminate shooting it seems. Not a word about negotiations with the opposition . . . After the Malaysian [ambassador] had left, Suu went out to register her party with the Election Commission.”
²

The party's flag was red, with a white star and a stylized golden peacock, head lowered and fan spread—the “fighting peacock.” Burmese armies had fought under a flag showing a peacock with a fully opened fan throughout the Konbaung Dynasty, which began in 1700. In the days of the monarchy, “the throne was painted over with representations of the peacock and the hare,” according to George Scott, writing under the nom de plume Shway Yoe in his book
The Burman, His Life and Notions
, first published in 1882, “typifying the descent of the king from the solar and lunar races.”
³
In the 1930s the peacock also became the emblem of Burma's militant students, who included Suu's father Aung San: He was editor of the student magazine
Oway
, which is the Burmese word for the peacock's harsh cry. Rejecting the bellicose suggestion of the name, Suu preferred the party's emblematic bird to be known as “the dancing peacock.”

Suu became general secretary of the new party, Aung Gyi, the retired general, was chairman and Tin Oo vice-chairman. Members of the Central Executive Committee included Win Tin, the turbulent journalist, Kyi Maung, the chubby ex-army officer, and Daw Myint Myint Khin, a woman barrister who was head of the Rangoon Bar Association.

“In addition to Suu, three of them were civilians,” Ma Thanegi recalled. “The others were ex-military men, derisively known to the intelligentsia in the party as
baung-bi chut
or ‘men-out-of-trousers,' referring to the fact that they had switched back from army uniform trousers to longyis.

“There was mistrust between the two sides from the beginning,” she went on. Yet in those grim days of late September there was also great determination and great hope: hope founded on the promise of
democratic elections held out by the new generalissimo, and on the “magic name” of Aung San Suu Kyi. Within less than a year almost all those men and women would be silenced, either under house arrest or in jail.

*

What did the very different people now banded together under Suu's name hope to achieve?

Announcing the formation of the party, Aung-Suu-Tin stated that “the basic objective of this organization is to achieve a genuinely democratic government” for which purpose the party was prepared to take part in the elections announced by Saw Maung. A few days earlier, in an article published in the
Independent
, Suu had written, “I am working . . . to achieve the kind of democratic system under which the people of Burma can enjoy human rights to the full. . . . Every country and people must search for a political and economic solution tailored to their unique situation.”
⁴

So what was Burma's “unique situation,” and how might democracy, a concept invented and refined in the West, be tailored to fit it?

The modernization of Burma was a question over which Suu had been wrestling for years, long before she was drawn into the maelstrom in the summer of 1988.

As she told the crowd at the Shwedagon, towards the end of his short life her father made clear that he believed Burma should become a democracy. With the downfall of the Axis powers, fascist dictatorships went out of fashion. The other ideological model, communism, had won a convert in Aung San's uncle Than Tun, who became head of the Burmese Communist Party. But the pitilessly materialistic perspective of Marxism held few charms for the deeply religious Burmese, even after the Chinese over the border turned Maoist. And on attaining independence in 1948, a democracy was what Burma became, and remained until the army takeover.

But what did the word “democracy” mean in the Burmese context?

Inherent in the term as used in the West is the concept of the “loyal opposition.” Political parties compete for the votes of the people, which translates into power. The losers in the election remain loyal to the state
while putting up steadfast but peaceable opposition to the actions of the elected government in parliament.

Readers will excuse this re-statement of the basic principles of parliamentary democracy because in Burma, as in many other countries outside Western Europe, they originally appeared highly exotic.

Until 1948 Burma had had no experience of democracy or anything like it. The highly autocratic and capricious rule of the Burmese monarchy had been replaced by the diktats of the British in Calcutta, enforced by the gun. The British were eventually supplanted by the Japanese who, despite their sweet words about a “co-prosperity sphere,” proved to be every bit as dictatorial as all the others who had ruled the country.

And there was a specific problem with the concept of “opposition.” In 1874, King Thibaw's predecessor, King Mindon, on being informed that William Gladstone's Whigs had lost the general election in Britain, remarked, “Then poor Ga-la-sa-tong [Gladstone] is in prison I suppose. I am sorry for him. I don't think he was a bad fellow.”
⁵
“It never occurred to [Mindon],” wrote Burma scholar Gustaaf Houtman, “that, when a political opposition party loses the elections, it might not end up in prison. Indeed, political opposition, unless it is sufficiently strong to extort respect, would appear to necessarily imply exile, imprisonment or death.”

As Suu herself observed, the fine social achievements of Burmese Buddhism had tended to close the minds of her co-nationals to the possibility that, in the political sphere, the rest of the world might have anything useful to teach them. “A sound social system,” she had written, “can go hand in hand with political immaturity.” Burma owes most features of its social system to its experience, stretching back over a millennium, of Theravada Buddhism. There is no room for a caste system in Buddhism: In striking contrast to Hindu practice, the notion that all men are born equal is not only preached but to a large degree practiced. The Burmese had a monarch who ruled over them more or less capriciously, guided and advised by Brahmin astrologers and Buddhist monks, and a chasm of wealth and privilege separated the palace from the people. But the people were not in a state of misery: All Burman children who were Buddhists—which until the British intrusion meant effectively everybody—went to monastery schools where they learned to read and write, and for many centuries Burma had been one of the most literate countries in the world.

It was also infused with religious teaching to an unusual degree: All Burmese boys were inducted into the sangha in early childhood, and for several weeks or months or longer if they chose they lived as monks alongside the adult ones, setting out each morning to collect food donated by local villagers, learning to meditate and read and recite the sutras and perform the many different complicated ceremonies of the temple.

Traditional Burmese society had plenty of faults and problems: People of non-Burman nationality were discriminated against and even enslaved, banditry was common even in the heartland, and it was rigidly hierarchical. But within those parameters there was, for the Burman majority, a broad measure of equality, and the Five Precepts of Buddhism—not to take life of any sort, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to lie, and not to take intoxicants—were generally observed. And in a country blessed like Burma with fertile soil and plenty of sun and rain, the result for the Burman peasant was simplicity, stability and a general absence of want. George Scott wrote in
The Burman:

The Burman is the most calm and contented of mortals. He does not want to grow rich. When he does make a large sum of money, he spends it all on some pious work, and rejoices in the fact that this will meet with its reward in his next existence . . . If any one has escaped the curse of Adam it is the Burman . . . When his patch of paddy land has been reaped, his only concern is how to pass the time, and that is no very difficult matter, where he has plenty of cheroots and betel-nut . . . And so an uneventful life passes away: the greatest ambition to see the village boat successful at the Thadingyut races, and the village champion cock or buffalo triumphant over all others . . .
⁶

The downside of the Burman's easygoing contentment, as Suu had pointed out, was a pervasive lack of intellectual ambition. “Traditional Burmese education did not encourage speculation,” she wrote, because Burmese were convinced that “Buddhism represents the perfected philosophy. It therefore follows that there was no need either to try to develop it further or to consider other philosophies.”
⁷

Far away from the peasant in the fields, in the almost unimaginable court, beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, ruled the king, the “Lord of the Celestial Elephant,” who if not the son of the previous king—if that king
had died without issue—was identified by soothsayers much in the way that child reincarnations of the great lamas of Tibet are identified. “The king,” Scott tells us, “emphatically rules by what is called in the Western kingdoms the right divine.”
⁸
But to ensure that right was not infringed upon often required drastic measures: Any potential rivals to power—any latent opposition, to use the language of democracy—had to be got rid of in the most decisive manner.