The Lady and the Peacock (65 page)

What else has the Burmese regime done, either before or after its civilian makeover, to persuade the world that it is interested in going down “a path of greater openness and reform”? Have they released any political prisoners? Done anything to bring a just peace to borders ravaged by war for half a century? Taken a single step to reforming a judiciary which has for half a century merely done the military's bidding? Done anything about investing in health and education, where Burma has long been close to the lowest levels in the world? They have done none of these things. They have fixed a referendum, fixed an election, and set up an impotent, purely decorative parliament—because that's the way, they have been told, to make the West believe they are moving in the right direction.

*

Aung San Suu Kyi's great gift to her country was that she threw open the windows to the outside world. At the same time she also opened the windows of the world to Burma. And more than twenty years after her return home, the message with which she galvanized her people is still reverberating, far from Burma's shores.

When Suu disappeared into detention in July 1989, it seemed that Burma's democracy struggle had run its course. Thousands had died, thousands more had been driven into exile, thousands were in jail; tens
of millions, the mass of the Burmese, returned to their former lives of poverty and fear. There were to be no more mass protests for nearly twenty years.

Yet the seeds that Suu had planted on August 26, 1988, at the Shwedagon, the seeds she had scattered far and wide in the first six months of 1989, were not all strangled by thorns. Actions, Buddhists believe, have consequences: That is the meaning of the word “karma.” “My actions,” says the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, “are my only true belongings.” By insisting that the Burmese could shake off their fear and lead lives of dignity, and that immoral power, incarnated in the army, could be defeated by nonviolent resistance, and by persuading tens of millions of Burmese to vote for her party, she changed something profoundly. She did not lead her revolution to triumph, but she changed the world.

Aung San Suu Kyi's life tends to be described in a one-dimensional manner, as the story of a courageous woman who challenged a military junta and lost. It has been my intention in this book to show that the real story is much more complex and interesting than that. Suu's ambition went far beyond the narrowly political, and despite the failure and marginalization of her and her party on the political plane, her impact on her society has been enormously rich and important. Whatever happens or does not happen between now and her death, Burma will never be the same again.

That is a story that I believe has been missed by her previous biographers, perhaps blinded by the million-watt glare of her fame. But there is another story which is even more extraordinary, and that has never previously been told. Suu changed Burma by throwing open the windows of her stale and stagnant homeland and letting the winds of the world blow in. What is not appreciated is how, in the process, she also changed the world.

The key element was her insistence, from the first days of her involvement in the uprising of 1988, on nonviolence. Without her insisting on it, it is probable that the Burmese revolution would have taken a very different course. Already when she stood up at the Shwedagon in August 1988, students were counterattacking the riot police and the army with Molotov cocktails and other crude weapons, as they had done during the U Thant funeral riots in 1974, and suspected spies were being lynched in the streets. But Suu was adamant from the start that all that had to stop. And she
got her way. The NLD's rallies, wherever they were held, were uniformly peaceable. Her colleagues and escorts were uniformly self-disciplined in the face of great provocation, from Danubyu to Depayin.

Many in the democracy movement in 1988 saw her insistence on nonviolence as a grave handicap, ensuring their defeat. After she was put in detention in July 1989, thousands of activists fled to the borders to train with the ethnic armies, so that instead of meeting the Burmese Army's aggression with nonviolence they would, next time around, be better equipped to fight back.

But those who fled to Manerplaw, the Karen Independence Army's camp on the Thai border, to train with the Karen guerrillas, were in for a surprise. When they got there they came face to face with foreign experts telling them that, far from being a fatal weakness, Suu's insistence on nonviolence, developed with sufficient creativity, could be the key to victory.

*

It was in the early 1980s that Burma and its problems got under the skin of a US Army officer called Robert Helvey, the United States military attaché from 1983 to 1985. He saw how the Ne Win tyranny held the people in its grip. “Burma has a special place in my heart,” he said.

As defense attaché in Rangoon, two years living in Rangoon and getting around the country, I really had an opportunity to see firsthand what happens when a people are oppressed to the point that they are absolutely terrorized. When people would talk to me—and it required a bit of courage to talk to a foreigner—sometimes they would place their hands over their mouths because they were afraid someone was watching and they could read their lips. That's how paranoid they became.
⁹

It wasn't that the dictatorship was not opposed: People on the borders had been resisting the Burmese dictatorship militarily for decades. But as a military man, Helvey saw that their efforts were doomed to fail. He said:

There was a struggle for democracy going on but it was an armed struggle on the periphery of the country, in the border regions. And it was very clear that the armed struggle was never going to succeed.

So when I got back [to the US], I kept Burma in the back of my mind. Here was a people that really wanted democracy, really wanted political reform, but the only option they had was armed struggle. And that was really a non-starter, so there was really a sense of helplessness.

Helvey returned to the United States and was appointed senior fellow at the Harvard Center for International Affairs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was there in 1988 when Burma blew up, and he was watching keenly. And it was around this time, as the revolt was gathering force, that this military man had an encounter with nonviolence that changed his life.

“When I was up at Cambridge one day,” Helvey recalled in an interview, “I saw a little poster saying ‘Program for Nonviolent sanctions.' I didn't have anything to do that afternoon so I went up to the seminar . . . Primarily, I guess, being an army officer, I was going to find out who these people are, you know, these pacifists and things like that—troublemakers. Just trying to get an understanding of it.”
¹⁰

The man giving the seminar was a maverick American academic called Gene Sharp. Helvey recalled, “[Sharp] started out the seminar by saying, ‘Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power. How to seize political power and how to deny it to others.' And I thought, ‘Boy, this guy's talking my language.'”
¹¹

One of the main charges laid against Suu over the years has been futility: Nonviolence, people say, may have worked for Gandhi and the Congress, but they were up against the Raj with its tender conscience, a long way from home. Challenging the Burmese Army was a different matter. “Resorting to nonviolence tactics,” wrote Thant Myint-U, “she tried to provoke the government . . . But she wasn't facing the Raj of the 1930s or the Johnson administration of the 1960s. These were tough men who played a very different game . . . Unlike the British, Burma's generals were never ready to quit Burma.”
¹²

As a career army officer, one would expect Colonel Helvey to feel the same way about Suu's nonviolent approach. But Burma had opened his mind.

Listening to Gene Sharp, Helvey said, “I saw immediately that there may be an opportunity here for the Burmese. You know, if you only have a hammer in your toolbox, every problem looks like a nail. So maybe if they
had another tool in their toolbox, they could at least examine the potential of strategic nonviolent struggle. So that's how I got interested in it.”

It so happened that Dr. Gene Sharp was, and remains, the world's leading authority on nonviolent struggle. His involvement had begun with working with the Norwegian resistance to Nazi/Quisling rule in the Second World War. For more than thirty years he held a research appointment at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. His books include
The Politics of Nonviolent Action
and
Gandhi as a Political Strategist
.

After the seminar, Helvey introduced himself. “We met for coffee and for lunch, and our conversations kept expanding because there's so much overlap. If you think strategically about nonviolent conflict, you use some tools used by the military. You think about the environment in which the conflict is waged. About the rules of engagement. About problem-solving methodologies. About strategic estimates. About operational planning.”

Under Sharp's influence, Helvey set about beating his sword into a ploughshare. “After I retired from the military,” he said, “I continued my interest in nonviolent conflict and began teaching and consulting.” And after the democratic uprising was killed off in September 1988 he went back to Burma to take another look.

Instead of going to Rangoon, though, he went to Manerplaw, the jungle camp on the Thailand–Burma border which I described earlier, where the Karen guerrillas who had been fighting the Burmese since independence had been joined by students, monks and intellectuals fleeing army persecution. And he tried to win over the hard-boiled leader of the Karen Independence Army, General Bo Mya, to his ideas.

“I went into his office and gave him a short pitch—the sources of power, and how the focus of the strategic nonviolent conflict is to undermine the organizations and institutions that hold up the government . . . I explained how with that theoretical understanding you could purposely undermine these pillars of support and train people to resist and defy.

“There was a big grunt and he just turned around and walked away. No thank you, no nothing.” When Helvey told a friendly Karen in the camp what had happened, he advised him to try again—leaving out the word “nonviolence.”

“So we came up with the term ‘political defiance' instead of ‘nonviolence.' It sounded more courageous.” The word change worked: Bo Mya
ordered Helvey to run introductory courses on “political defiance” for everybody in Manerplaw—Karens, students, monks, everyone.

Helvey persuaded his original mentor, Gene Sharp, to come over and join him. Bo Mya “never converted,” Helvey admitted. “He felt that people who participated in nonviolent actions were probably cowards, but he was pleased that Gene and I were able to provide opportunities for cowards to participate in the struggle . . .”

Helvey and Sharp found themselves face to face with student politicians who, until the army takeover on September 18, 1988, had believed they were on the brink of seizing power; with elected NLD MPs whose only reward for their commitment to democracy was to be hunted down like vermin; with monks deeply estranged from a regime which paid lip service to Buddhism while committing atrocities and practicing black magic. They were all Suu's “sons,” the great new family she had embraced on her return to Burma; but now that she was under indefinite detention they were more like orphans.

All of them confronted the same conundrum. No one doubted the massive support that Suu and her party enjoyed—the support, as the election had proved, of the overwhelming majority of the people. But in the face of the army's refusal to yield an inch, how could you get there—into power—from here?

Helvey and Sharp endorsed Suu's own conviction, the rule she had imposed fiercely on her party, that every temptation to go down the way of violence should be resisted. Equally vital, and umbilically linked to it, was the need to retain the moral high ground.

Nonviolent struggle, Helvey says, “is a form of warfare. And you've got to think of it in terms of a war.” But at the same time the commitment to keeping it nonviolent is vital. Violence, he said:

is a contaminant to a nonviolent struggle . . . the greatest contaminant. I use the example of gasoline. If you get a little bit of moisture in your gas tank, the engine will still run—not real smooth—but it'll still run. But when the moisture level reaches a certain point, the engine doesn't run at all . . . Once violence becomes a policy or accepted, then it becomes a major contaminant—so major that you're going to lose the moral high ground . . . And the other thing is, you are meeting your opponent where he is strongest. And that's dumb. Why would you invite the enemy to fight you on his terms?
¹³

Gene Sharp's involvement in the Burmese struggle did not stop at Manerplaw. At the request of an exiled Burmese dissident journalist based in Bangkok called U Tin Maung Win he wrote a series of articles on the nuts and bolts of nonviolence and how to practice it, which were published in Burmese in the magazine Tin Maung Win edited,
Khit Pyaing
(
New Era Journal
). “I could not write an analysis that had a focus only on Burma,” Sharp later wrote, “as I did not know Burma well. Therefore, I had to write a generic analysis.” Subsequently the articles were gathered together into a booklet and published in both Burmese and English. The English title was
From Dictatorship to Democracy—A Conceptual Framework for Liberation
.

Little known in the United States or Britain, the booklet has been translated into twenty-eight languages. As Sharp himself concedes, his booklet, though less than ninety pages long, “is a heavy analysis and is not easy reading.” It concerns a subject, nonviolent resistance, that is still widely written off by mainstream opinion as something that only works for a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, Jr., when you are pushing at an open door; the choice of cowards, in General Bo Mya's robust view, of
bien pensant
liberals too delicate to face up to life's ugly realities. But very quietly and surreptitiously, unnoticed by most of the media, nonviolent resistance has been changing the face of the world.