The Lady and the Peacock (55 page)

However this does not mean the floodgates are about to open: Lonely Planet will continue to enjoy a near-monopoly of the market for guidebooks. Rough Guides' publishing director Clare Currie said she hoped that Suu's release “will ultimately help open Burma to travelers. However, we think it is too soon for a complete change of mind. We are not currently planning to publish a guidebook to Burma—such a guide would really depend upon sustained improvements in the political situation as well as on a proven and robust travel infrastructure.”
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Suu's declarations on trade and tourism were her response to the regime's failure to make good on their promise of talks. She had tried being accommodating; now she tried exerting a little pressure. But that did not work any better: The regime quickly gave notice that the change in leadership four years before had not made it any more yielding. In May 1996, when the NLD summoned party members to the capital to attend a National Convention, SLORC struck preemptively, arresting 258 party members, 238 of them elected MPs. Suu and her colleagues went ahead with the conference anyway, attended by fourteen delegates. Its final communiqué warned that if the regime did not release all political prisoners and convene the parliament elected in 1990, the party would go ahead and draft a constitution itself.

Suu now found herself in a war of attrition with the regime. SLORC responded to the party's constitution initiative by issuing a new law, threatening anyone who spoke or acted against the (so-far undrafted) constitution with long prison terms. The crowds attending her weekend talks continued to swell, even when SLORC threatened those who attended with twenty years' jail. To close them down, in September they put a barricade across the road—so Suu and her colleagues went out to nearby street corners and held the meetings there. SLORC reacted to that by rolling out their thuggish new weapon, the delinquent fringe of the Union Solidarity and Defense Association (USDA), the mass, regime-sponsored organization launched in 1993 by SLORC's chairman, Senior General Than Shwe; in a nasty incident in November 1996, a 200-strong mob of USDA thugs attacked the cars of Suu and her
colleagues when they drove from her house, smashing the windows of one with a bar.

Suu's reply to the intimidation was one of those statements that have helped turn her into a legend. “If the army really wants to kill me, they can do it without any problems at all, so there is no point in making elaborate security arrangements,” she told the
Times
of London. “It is not bravado or anything like that. I suppose I am just rather down to earth and I just don't see the point to this worry.”
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Remarks like this make it more rather than less difficult for non-Burmese to appreciate the climate of fear that passes for normality in Burma. If Suu can be so nonchalant about her personal safety, people think, how bad can things really be? An Australian social anthropologist called Monique Skidmore, who was doing research in Rangoon during those months of late 1996, provided a corrective: “The refusal to allow Aung San Suu Kyi to hold roadside talks . . . meant that a great tension settled upon Rangoon in the latter part of 1996,” she wrote. “Young people, especially students, festered with impotence.”
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She related the story of a diplomatic friend who drove to University Avenue to photograph the road blocks around Suu's house. When he returned home later that night he found his dog lying dead in front of the house, with its eyes burned out. “It took several weeks to become caught up in the fear that engulfed the city,” she wrote. “I began unconsciously to stay indoors, seeking refuge from the military gaze.”
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But the safety of interiors was illusory. She wrote:

The Generals are not content to control only the flow of information in the public domain, they seek to dominate, reconstruct and regulate urban space in a ceaseless breaking down of barriers that previously signaled sanctuary. The experience of fear occurs in these “open” and regulated spaces as people . . . shuffle from one sanctuary to another . . . When terror becomes a means to enforce domination, violence becomes the primary force that maps social space . . .
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Suu defied the terror and shrugged off the threats of violence; if she was traumatized by the way the regime had violated her domestic space during the previous six years, she took care never to show it or talk about it. But the regime had not given up its quest for ways to hurt her.

One of her family's oldest friends in Rangoon was an aging businessman called Leo Nichols, part-Scottish, part-Greek, part-Armenian, part-Burmese, “Uncle Leo” to his many friends, and perhaps the only expatriate businessman to have survived the Ice Age of capitalism ushered in by Ne Win. It was Uncle Leo who had phoned Suu in Oxford at the end of March 1988 to inform her of her mother's illness.

A Roman Catholic and the son of the owner of a Rangoon-based shipping company, he had returned to Burma after the Japanese defeat in the Second World War. In 1972, as the prospects for foreigners in the country crumbled, his family emigrated to Australia, but he insisted on staying on in “the only place he could ever regard as home,” as Michael Aris later put it.
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He was appointed honorary consul to the Scandinavian countries, which gave him a degree of diplomatic protection. While he was forced to sell off his treasured collection of vintage cars, he buried his favorite Bugatti at Pagan—or so he claimed.

Nichols had had his run-ins with the regime in the past: During the uprising of 1988 he had frequently offered Suu advice and practical help, for which he was later subjected to a severe interrogation. After she was released from house arrest in 1995 he met her every Friday for breakfast and resumed his role as helper and adviser, finding a gardener to redeem her ruined garden, for example, and workmen to repair her house, while continuing to support her political campaign. One practical way he helped out was by sending her “Letters from Burma” to the
Mainichi Daily News
in Tokyo from his fax machine.

And that was how the regime nailed him. He owned two fax machines, one of them registered but the other one not. Possession of a fax machine without a license is a criminal offence in Burma, carrying a maximum sentence of five years. In April Nichols was arrested, interrogated over many days and sentenced to three years' jail.

Like the sentence given in 1989 to another of Suu's friends and protectors, the writer and war hero Maung Thaw Ka, it was in effect a sentence of death: He was confined to Insein Jail without the medicines for his heart condition and diabetes. Two months later he fell ill and was taken to Rangoon General Hospital where he died soon afterwards, aged sixty-five, perhaps of a heart attack or a stroke.

Nichols' death and the betrayal by Ma Thanegi and other friends and colleagues were the occasion for one of Suu's most painful and strongly felt essays.

In her writing as much as in her interviews, Suu is generally at pains to put on her best, most cheerful face. That is an Asian reflex, encountered everywhere from Rangoon to Tokyo, but in Suu's situation it was also sound tactics: If she had shown any hint of anger or misery, the regime could have congratulated itself that its campaign to damage her morale was working. But in “Letter from Burma No. 33, A Friend in Need,” the mask of equanimity slipped.

It is an essay about how persecution subjects friendship to the toughest test of all, pitilessly exposing one's friends' true qualities. The process yields surprises. Those one might have considered weak reveal their strengths. But others who seemed infinitely dependable give up the struggle with shocking ease.

Thanks to what she calls “the full force of state persuasion,” concepts previously confined to the covers of books—“villainy and honor, cowardice and heroism”—become the stuff of everyday life. “The glaring light of adversity,” she writes, “reveals all the rainbow hues of the human character and brings out the true colors of people, particularly of those who purport to be your friends.”
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Some, like Nichols, emerge from the test with greater stature than before. “The man stripped of all props except that of his spirit is . . . testing the heights that he can scale,” she wrote. But others shrivel and collapse. “The kiss of Judas is no longer just a metaphor, it is the repeated touch of cool perfidy on one's own cheek. Those held in trust and esteem show themselves capable of infinite self-deception as they seek to deceive others. Spines ostensibly made of steel soften and bend like wax . . .”

Suu had been brought up with high moral standards, in emulation of her father. In the England of the Sixties, comfortable and prosperous, that didn't seem to matter very much: Her loud championing of virginity before marriage and her insistence that children strictly obey the rules of party games were regarded as marks of risible eccentricity rather than anything more important.

But in the testing fire of Burma, those standards were the difference between honor and shame, between hope and despair. To be Suu's
friend and supporter in London or Oxford or Washington, DC, is easy. To be her friend in Rangoon or Mandalay is one of the toughest decisions you can ake. True friendship, as she pointed out in the same essay, demands the highest moral qualities: “According to the teachings of Buddhism, a good friend is one who gives things hard to give, does what is hard, bears hard words, tells you his secrets, guards your secrets assiduously, does not forsake you in times of want and does not condemn you when you are ruined. With such friends, one can travel the roughest road.”
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Suu did not want for such friends: It is one of the paradoxes of brutal societies that they inculcate great virtue in those who defy their brutality. But by turning Ma Thanegi and others, and killing Nichols, the Burmese regime discovered in what way and to what extent Suu was vulnerable. And they had an even crueler trick up their sleeve.

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Throughout the 1990s, Michael Aris plays a shadowy but at the same time a central role in Suu's story. If ever there was a case of true friendship being tried in the fire of adversity it was their marriage. During their decades as man and wife there were the frictions and irritations that come up in all marriages: Suu disliked his smoking and nagged him to stop, complained to her friends that he was too easygoing to fulfill his potential at university and too tolerant of English social hypocrisy. In family snaps from those years she frequently looks as if she would rather be anywhere on the planet than north Oxford.

Family life certainly had its trials, yet when the real tests came Michael was magnificent. If Suu was born to do what she found herself doing in Burma, Michael was born to be her perfect foil, her perfect other half.

That statement requires immediate qualification: For their sons he could never replace their mother, nor even be a very satisfactory substitute. He knew how to cook an omelette, but it was a great relief for the whole family when he found a pair of Burmese Christian nuns to come and live with them in Oxford and take care of the housekeeping. (SLORC eventually found a way to terminate that arrangement, forcing the nuns to return to Burma.) Nor could he begin to compensate emotionally for Suu's absence. That was an unfillable void.

But from the start Michael understood the path she had gone down, understood why it was for her an unavoidable decision, and realized that as a result the family's life had entered an utterly new phase. Never did he show any hint of bafflement, resentment, doubt or hostility, emotions that would be quite understandable for an ambitious man whose career and indeed whose whole life had been thrown out of kilter by his partner flying off at a dangerous, extraordinary tangent.

Instead, without a blip, he became her other half in the world outside: marshalling support, passing on news, giving interviews and then, as Suu's defiance became a global phenomenon, traveling tirelessly as her personal envoy to collect awards and pass on messages. He was “her knight in shining armor,” said one friend, “the one who was defending and fighting for her and trying to slay the dragon for her.”
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It was at Michael's suggestion that Ma Thanegi kept her campaign trail diary in 1989; it was Michael who, seven years later, wrote to Ma Thanegi terminating the relationship after she began launching public attacks on Suu and the NLD.

Peter Carey commented:

In the first twenty years of their marriage [Suu] was the north Oxford housewife, but after 1988 that completely turned on its axis and it was not Michael who was the focus any longer, it was Suu, and Michael was there to provide the support, to bring up the children, to drive them to school, to make the meals.

In the 1990s the reality began to dawn: He was a single father in Park Town . . . looking after his children, being as good a father as possible, the tides of Burma lapping to the door—faxes and messages and requests for interviews, press releases.
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Carey quotes a Javanese saying about the qualities required to be a good wife: “‘To follow behind and serve as a good woman should'—I think that was the role that Michael adopted, he was following behind and serving but in an incredibly discreet and subtle and effective fashion.”

In photographs and videos Michael always looks much the same: tall, gentle, reflective, a little untidy; perhaps somewhat stern and sad but always calm and composed. But there was a more volatile side to his character that the camera did not see. “Michael stayed with me once in
Bangkok after the house arrest started,” said Terry McCarthy, who at the time was the
Independent
's correspondent in Bangkok.

We were friends, we got along very well, and I remember him shouting down the phone to the people in the Burma immigration office, his eyebrows going mad . . . He looks very affable and calm in the photographs but he had a fiery side too, and he found the behavior of the generals so irrational that it drove him mad. Suu on the other hand knew where they were coming from, she knew why she had infuriated them so . . . Although he supported her fully, it was very tough for him. That's why he was so angry with the generals: He blamed them for taking his wife away from him.
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