The Lady and the Peacock (3 page)

It is this decision—a moral much more than a political decision, and one from which she has not deviated in more than twenty years, despite every attempt to blackmail her emotionally—which has earned her an unwavering place in the hearts of tens of millions of Burmese. She could have flown away, and she never did. That has created an unbreakable bond.

But there is far more to Suu's career than simple commitment, however vital that element is. Suu had been thinking hard for many years about what it meant to be the daughter of the man who negotiated Burma's independence. She had a profound desire to be a daughter worthy of him, to do something for her nation of which both she and he could be proud. The tragic first decades of Burma's history as an independent nation, its fragile democracy snuffed out by the army, brought home to her how hard it would be to bring her nation into the modern world without doing violence to its innermost values. In the years before 1988 she had devoted
much time and research to that question. Suddenly, against all odds, she had the opportunity, and the duty, to resolve it. She has not yet succeeded. But that is not the same as to say that she has failed.

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Aung San Suu Kyi was born on June 19, 1945, in the Irrawaddy Delta, the third of three children, during the most tumultuous years in Burma's history. Her father, Aung San, was at the heart of the tumult. Rangoon, the capital, had just fallen to the Allies, and her pregnant mother had sought refuge from the fighting in the countryside.

Aung San was a boy from the provinces, shy, a poor speaker, with abrupt manners, and prone to long unexplained silences.
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Short and wiry, with the sort of blankness of expression that leads Westerners to describe people from the East as inscrutable, he also had something special about him, a charisma. With a fiery temper and an iron will, he emerged at Rangoon University in the 1930s as one of the most ambitious and determined of the students dedicated to freeing Burma from the British.

Burma was an imperial afterthought for Britain, annexed in three stages during the nineteenth century after one of the last Burmese kings had infuriated them by launching attacks on Bengal, the oldest and at the time the richest and most important part of the Indian empire. Annexing Burma was also an effective way to erect a bulwark against further French expansion in Indochina. But it was never central to British designs in the way that India had become: It was ruled from India as an appendix, and few British administrators took the trouble to try to make sense of Burmese history, philosophy or psychology in the way generations of Bengal-based East India Company officers had done with India. The British simply brought the country to heel, in the most brutally straightforward manner they could, by abolishing the monarchy and sending the last king and his queen into exile. They opened up to foreign enterprises opportunities to extract timber, to mine gems and silver and to drill for oil, and allowed Indian and Chinese businessmen and laborers to flood in.

The process of being annexed and digested by a colonial power was acutely humiliating for every country that experienced it. Nonetheless,
in many parts of the British Empire, as the foreigners introduced systems and ideas that improved living standards for many, more and more middle-class and ruling-class subjects would become, to a greater or lesser degree, complicit with the rulers. The pain of subjugation softened with the passing of generations, as the native elite was absorbed into the “steel frame” of the empire, the bureaucratic superstructure that kept the whole enterprise ticking over. That helps to explain why, in some quarters, one can still find nostalgia for the Raj, right across the subcontinent.

But the Burmese experience was very different.
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It started very late: Lower Burma, centered on Rangoon, was seized during the first Anglo-Burmese War in 1824, and was rapidly denatured as the British threw open the gates. Within a couple of decades Burmese residents found themselves a minority in their own city, bystanders to its transformation. In the north, Burmese kings still ruled: a tradition sanctified, guided and held in check by the
sangha
, the organization of Buddhist monks which had underpinned the nation's spiritual and political life since the eleventh century, retaining that role through innumerable wars and several changes of dynasty.

But in 1885 the British finished the job, storming Mandalay, the last seat of the kings, sacking the palace, burning much of the ancient library and sending King Thibaw and his queen Supayalat into exile in western India. They brought the whole kingdom into the Indian system, governing it from the Viceroy's palace in Calcutta, and supplementing or replacing the local rulers who had been the king's allies with British administrators. They brought in tens of thousands of troops to suppress the rebellions that kept breaking out, until the Pax Britannica prevailed across the country.

But by the time Burma had been subdued, the Indians across the border were themselves becoming restless. The Indian National Congress had been founded in 1885, the year the Burmese monarchy was abolished, and rapidly became the focus for Indian hopes of self-government. The First World War weakened the empire dramatically. The arrival of Mohandas Gandhi from South Africa gave Congress a leader of unique charisma and creativity, and the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in 1919 brought home the fact that British rule was a confidence trick, with hundreds of millions of Indians kept in check by a threat of force that the few thousand British in residence could never carry out effectively.

Across the Naga Hills, the Burmese drank the fresh ignominy of being
colonial subjects to colonial subjects. Peasants tilling the paddy fields were trapped into debt by the Indian moneylenders who fanned out across the country. In Rangoon, foreign shopkeepers and businessmen grew rich exploiting the naïve natives. With the abolition of the monarchy, things fell apart. In lower Burma the British had refused to accept the authority of the
thathanabaing
, the senior monk authorized by the king to maintain the discipline and guide the teachings of the country's hundreds of thousands of monks, and in his absence local Buddhist sanghas lost their direction.
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Then, sixty years later, King Thibaw was exiled and the monarchy destroyed. It was the coup de grâce.

The first nationalist stirrings in Burma came out of Buddhism and the Buddhist clergy. Traditionally, soon after dawn each morning, in every town and village in the land, monks in their maroon robes would tramp in file through the lanes, their big lacquer bowls extended for alms. They were the potent local symbols of a moral, theological and political system that had governed people's lives throughout Burmese history and which, according to their belief system, gave them their best hope of nirvana. The monks enshrined and sanctified the authority of the Buddhist king, and the people, by giving the monks alms, and by inscribing their own sons in the monastery when they were “big enough to scare away the crows,” gained spiritual merit which was obtainable in no other way.
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Now all this was smashed and ruined. It was worse than mere humiliation: The nation had lost its compass. In response, the Young Men's Buddhist Association, or YMBA, in imitation of the YMCA, was established. It was a critical first step, less in defying the British than in asserting or reinventing an order that resonated with traditional Burmese beliefs. The most significant figure to emerge from this, in the feverish years after the First World War, was U Ottama: a learned Buddhist monk, who had also traveled around Asia and come back with the news that faraway Japan, another Buddhist country and one that had succeeded in repelling invaders and remaining independent, had actually beaten the Russians, a full-fledged European power, in war.

By the 1920s, under huge pressure from Gandhi and the Congress, Britain had conceded to India important measures of self-government, and the nationalist agitators in Rangoon, advised and cajoled by Indian
radicals who had slipped over from Bengal, found that, although their movement was young and raw compared to India's, they had the wind in their sails. By the time Aung San arrived at Rangoon University from his home in the little central Burmese town of Natmauk in 1932, independence no longer seemed an impossible dream. But the more the British conceded, the more impatient the nationalists both of India and Burma became to win full independence.

With his gauche manner, his up-country origins and his clumsy English, Aung San struggled to make an impact among the metropolitan elite of the capital's university. But those who jeered at his contributions to the Students' Union debates and implored him to stop trying to speak English and stick to Burmese, soon learned that this difficult, angular young man had formidable determination. He wouldn't give up a challenge—trying to speak English, for example—until he had actually mastered it. Gradually he emerged as one of the leaders of a group of revolutionary nationalists at the university. Their ideology was hazy, leaning towards socialism and communism but with a deep commitment to Buddhism as well.

They took to calling themselves the “Thakins”: The word means lord and master, roughly equivalent to “Sahib” in India. After conquering Burma the arrogant British had appropriated the title. Now these Burmese upstarts were demanding it back. They “proclaimed the birthright of the Burmese to be their own masters,” as Suu wrote in a sketch of her father's life; the title “gave their names a touch of pugnacious nationalism.”
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Aung San and his friends were developing the courage to claw back what the invaders had stolen, beginning with pride and self-respect. He was in Rangoon for the momentous events of 1938 (year 1300 in the Burmese calendar, so known subsequently as the “Revolution of 1300”). Despite the fact that the British had already conceded a great deal, separating Burma from India and allowing the country, like India itself, to be ruled by an elected governing council under the supervision of the British governor, agitation for full independence reached its peak in that year, with peasants and oil industry workers striking and joining the students in demonstrations in Rangoon. During one baton charge to disperse the protesters, a student demonstrator was killed.

Schools across the country struck in protest, communal riots broke out
between Burmans and Indian Muslims, seventeen protesters died under police fire during protests in Mandalay and the government of Prime Minister Ba Maw collapsed.
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Then the Second World War broke out in Europe, and while Gandhi in India launched his “Quit India Movement,” demanding that the British leave at once, and Subhas Chandra Bose in Calcutta began secretly training his Indian National Army, Aung San and the other Thakins decided to look east.

Ever since U Ottama had returned from his wanderings, spreading the word about the achievements of the Japanese against the Russians, the Burmese nationalists had been open to the possibility that liberation might come from that direction. Aung San was no Gandhian: He accepted that Burma would be unlikely to gain its freedom without fighting for it. And in August 1940 he and one other Thakin comrade took the boldest step of their lives when they secretly flew out of the country, to Amoy in China, now Xiamen, in Fujian province.

Their apparent intention was to make contact with Chinese insurgents, either Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang or Mao Zedong's Communists—anyone with the wherewithal to help them evict the British. But Fujian was already in the hands of the expanding Japanese. And when a Japanese secret agent based in Rangoon, Keiji Suzuki, learned of the two Burmese Thakins roaming the city's streets, he arranged for them to be befriended by his co-nationals. In November 1940 they were flown to Tokyo, where Suzuki himself took them in hand.

It was Aung San's first experience of the world beyond Burma's borders, and he was impressed. Despite misgivings about the authoritarian brutality of Japanese militarism—and his prudish horror when Suzuki offered to provide him with a woman—he was awed by the industrial achievements of his hosts, and pragmatic enough, and politically immature enough, to have no inhibitions about being enlisted by Japanese fascists in their plans for the domination of Asia. After three months in Japan he flew back to Rangoon disguised as a Chinese sailor and set about recruiting the core of what was to become the Burma Independence Army (BIA). Much of 1941 was taken up with the rigorous, secret training of that tiny army, later to be immortalized as the “Thirty Comrades,” on the island of Hainan, with Suzuki as commanding officer and general and
Aung San as his chief of staff.

So when Japan launched its air attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and immediately afterwards began its invasion of Southeast Asia, Aung San and his comrades were ready to play their part. Rangoon was shattered by a Japanese bombing raid in the same month, and soon afterwards the Japanese and the BIA entered the country together, streaming up from the “tail of the Burmese kite,” the long thin peninsula of Tenasserim that stretches south and east from the Irrawaddy Delta. As they marched, tens of thousands of Burmese joined the new national army until they were 50,000-strong, almost as large a force as the Japanese. The hopelessly unprepared British, routed by the Japanese all over Southeast Asia, fled for the safety of India. Thousands who failed to make it were taken prisoner and forced to build the notorious “death railway” linking Burma and Thailand.

But Burmese misgivings about the Japanese, which had already begun gnawing at Aung San during his first months of exposure to the fascist regime in Tokyo, grew exponentially in 1942, once the Japanese had taken control of the country. They talked a good talk about how the Japanese and Burmese, being brother Asiatics and sharing the same religion, must move together, but the Burmese, Aung San included, were quickly learning that Japanese rhetoric and Japanese intentions were two different things. The Japanese
tatemae
, what appeared on the surface, might speak of Burmese independence, but the
honne
, the unspoken reality, would be that “mighty Nippon” remained firmly in charge behind the scenes.
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Burma's true destiny, in the Japanese scheme, was to form one of the many obedient and industrious Asian races near the base of the Japanese pyramid, with the Japanese emperor at its apex. Aung San and the other founding members of the Burma Independence Army gradually discovered to their horror that they had swapped one form of enslavement for another. Quietly they began to prepare to fight for their freedom all over again.