The Lady and the Peacock (7 page)

The impudent lies in the report provoked an old critic of the regime, silent for many years, to return to the offensive. U Aung Gyi, aged
sixty-seven, a senior brigadier who had been sacked from the army back in the early 1960s for publicly attacking the regime's policies—he had spent two terms in jail, though he still seemed to be on affable terms with Ne Win—suddenly piped up again, sending his old boss a blistering open letter condemning the Inquiry Commission's report and estimating that 282 people had been killed in March. In his conclusion he attempted to draw the sting, exculpating his former boss from direct responsibility—“Sir, may I request you . . . not to get involved or you will regret it,” he wrote fawningly.
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“These violations of human rights will be infamous. You actually were not involved.” But even so, his condemnation of the report gave new heart to the growing resistance movement.

At the end of May the silence of the streets persuaded the regime to allow schools and colleges to reopen. This was its final act of folly: Back on their campuses again the students could for the first time see who and how many of them were missing, could hear from the injured the stories of who had died and how, and could once again stoke the fires of anger that had been stifled since the second week of March. Within two weeks the streets again exploded, with demonstrations and running battles which pitched the protesters, who now included textile workers and Buddhist monks as well as students, against the hated riot police.

After almost a week of clashes, the government again slammed down the shutters, ordering classes on all four of Rangoon University's campuses closed—but neglecting to do the same for the two campuses of the Institute of Medicine, one of which was just across the road from the hospital where Suu had for ten weeks been nursing her mother. Without skipping a beat the protests shifted there, taking in also the Institute of Dental Medicine which was next door.

“We held a big meeting on the Prome Road campus [north of the city center] on June 21st,” remembered Soe Win, a medical student.
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“Thousands of people were there and suddenly someone got the idea that we should march down town to the main Institute of Medicine in central Rangoon, where another meeting was being held. We marched off at 1 pm, a solid column of several thousand students. We took our peacock and student union flags and someone went inside the teachers' office [and] brought out Aung San's portrait to be carried in front of the demonstration.”

But before the marchers could get close to the city center, they found themselves hemmed in by riot police with rifles and batons and by soldiers with machine guns. Remembering the massacre in March, when the students had been trapped and shot dead by troops, the demonstrators scattered into the lanes and nearby houses before the soldiers could open fire. Most of them survived—but on the same day elsewhere in the city many died.

Word of the new clashes flashed across the city. Down at the Institute of Medicine the student meeting was still in progress, and a witness of the violence further north burst in with the news. Suspected spies inside the hall were pointed out by angry students, and grabbed and hauled to the front of the meeting for summary justice; one of them narrowly escaped being lynched. A hundred or more people died in the clashes that day, according to diplomats' estimates, and many dozens were wounded, and now they streamed into the hospital in ambulances and cars and rickshaws and carried on the shoulders of friends. These were the first protests to erupt since Suu's arrival in the country at the beginning of April, and at the hospital she found herself with a ringside seat. Burma's bloody tragedy was unfolding before her eyes.

The regime acted fast to end the protests, shutting the medical and dental campuses, making hundreds more arrests, and for the first time clamping a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the city. This brought mayhem to markets whose stallholders were accustomed to setting up their stalls and laying out their wares in the early hours of the morning. Forced to start work later, they raised their prices to make up for the loss of trade, adding another new element to the cocktail of misery and fury that was steadily rendering Burma ungovernable.

*

And then the rains came, and Suu and her mother went home.

The month of July has a special meaning in Suu's story, and that of her family: It is the month when her father was killed, the event commemorated every year on Burma's Martyrs' Day. It is when the monsoon, which normally starts in June, increases to its greatest intensity, coinciding with the Burmese lunar months of Wahso and Wagaung. “The word ‘monsoon'
has always sounded beautiful to me,” she wrote eight years later, “possibly because we Burmese, who are rather inclined to indulge in nostalgia, think of the rainy season as most romantic. As a child I would stand on the veranda of the house where I was born and watch the sky darken and listen to the grown-ups wax sentimental over smoky banks of massed rain clouds . . . When bathing in the rain was no longer one of the great pleasures of my existence, I knew I had left my childhood behind me. . . .”
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It is the season when Burma is most quintessentially Burmese—hot and sultry and shriekingly green and fertile, when the rain comes down like a waterfall every morning and evening, and sometimes in the middle of the day as well. It is the season in which ecstasy, melancholy and tragedy seem inextricably mixed—for her nation as a whole, and for Suu and her family in particular.

At Rangoon General Hospital, her doctors discharged Daw Khin Kyi: There was nothing more they could do for her. Suu converted one of the large downstairs rooms at 54 University Avenue into a sickbay and on July 8th, she took her home. Mother and daughter were back together in the villa on the shore of Inya Lake, in the north of Rangoon, where they had moved with Suu's brother Aung San Oo when she was eight.

54 University Avenue, Rangoon, the family home where Suu was detained for more than fifteen years.

However gloomy the prognosis, it must have been a relief to be back in familiar surroundings. And on July 22nd, to Suu's joy, the family was reunited when Michael, Alexander and Kim flew out to join them. In a letter to her parents-in-law in June, she had revealed how much she missed them.
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Prior to this, her longest separation from all of them had been a month, and she was looking forward to having them with her again. The house, Michael wrote, was “an island of peace and order under Suu's firm, loving control. The study downstairs had been transformed into a hospital ward and the old lady's spirits rallied when she knew her grandsons had arrived.”
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But the preparations had worn Suu out: “When we first arrived,” Michael wrote in a letter to his twin brother Anthony in August, “the boys said that Suu looked as if she had just been released from a concentration camp! She had really exhausted herself trying to renovate the house before her mother's return. She has put on some weight and is looking much better.”
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The future, though bleak, was now attaining a visible form: Suu would wait out the inevitable, making her mother's last weeks and months as
comfortable as possible. Her family would keep her company until the boys had to go back to school. What were their plans once her mother had passed away? Would Suu shut up the house, perhaps sell it, and close that chapter in her life forever, severing her closest ties to her homeland? With the boys still at school in Oxford and both Michael and Suu committed to their academic work in England, that would have been the logical, almost inevitable course.

But then something happened which stunned the nation.

After the last bout of bloodletting, it seems finally to have dawned on General Ne Win that things could not go on as they were. So on July 23rd—one day after the arrival of Michael and the boys—he convened an extraordinary congress of the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP), the monopolistic political party he had created and through which he ruled the country. Standing on the podium before the thousand delegates, the blubbery-lipped, muscle-bound, imposing but now fading tyrant made the most remarkable speech of his career, transmitted live on state television.

“Dear delegates,” he told the hall, “I believe that the bloody events of March and June show a lack of trust in the government and the party that guides it.”
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People all over the country watched mesmerized as the man with the power of life and death announced that he was rewriting the rules.

“It is necessary,” Ne Win went on, “to find out whether it is the majority or the minority that support the people showing the lack of trust . . . The current congress is requested to approve a national referendum . . . If the choice is for a multiparty system, we must hold elections for a new parliament.”

Burma had been awash with rumors about the state of Ne Win's mental health ever since the death of his favorite wife some years before. But now this turkey was apparently voting for Christmas: Had he finally cracked?

The general now handed the microphone to an underling called Htwe Han—who continued to read his boss's speech, still in the first person. And now came the real bombshell. “As I consider that I am not totally free from responsibility, even if indirectly, for the sad events that took place in March and June,” Htwe Han read out, “and because I am advancing in age, I would like to request party members to allow me to relinquish the duty of party chairman and party member.” As if that was not enough, he
added that five other top office-holders, his entire inner circle, the gang who had run Burma for years, would do likewise. “The atmosphere,” Michael wrote, “was electric with hope.”
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Yet anybody who interpreted the speech to mean that the protesters would now have free rein were disabused by his final words—Ne Win had taken the microphone back now—which epitomized the crude menace of his style. “In continuing to maintain control,” he said, “I want the entire nation, the people, to know that if in future there are mob disturbances, if the army shoots, it hits—there is no firing in the air to scare.”

Nonetheless, the simple message was: All change! “The nation,” wrote Bertil Lintner, “and possibly even more so the diplomatic community in Rangoon, was flabbergasted. International wire service reports were euphoric. Public outrage in Burma had forced an end to twenty-six years of one-party rule and one of Asia's most rigid socialist systems . . . Or had it?”
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Bertil Lintner, the veteran Swedish Burma-watcher based in Thailand, photographed in November 2010 in Chiangmai. Lintner's book
Outrage
documented the uprising of 1988 and its bloody repression in great detail.

*

As Lintner indicated, things were not as straightforward as they seemed. By the time the congress ended two days later, it had rejected the idea of a referendum on a multiparty system that Ne Win himself had proposed. The Old Man was probably responsible for that, tugging the strings behind the scenes. It had also turned down four of the six resignations he had offered. Ne Win himself was allowed to bow out—but only to be replaced as president and chairman of the party by the most brutal of his underlings, Sein Lwin, the man who had ordered the killings back in March and who had since been known as “the Butcher” to the protesters.