The Lady and the Peacock (9 page)

The journalist, poet and political activist Maung Thaw Ka, standing to Suu's left.

*

And there was to be no respite. Within days of “Butcher” Sein Lwin taking over the top job, he made his intentions clear. Aung Gyi, the ex-general who had shattered the taboo against criticizing Ne Win with his hostile open letters, was arrested, as was Sein Win, one of the country's most respected journalists. But the resistance, too, was organizing, its efforts given new focus and urgency by the formerly unimaginable hope of returning to multiparty democracy.

A BBC journalist called Christopher Gunness had flown into Rangoon to cover the ruling party's extraordinary congress in July and stayed on to try to find out what was stirring behind the city's shabby walls—because it was already clear that Ne Win's declaration was not the end of something but only the beginning. “My impression when I arrived was that the situation was extremely tense,” he said later. “People were frustrated and angry and there was a feeling of unfinished business; it was easy to sense that something big was about to happen. But there was a feeling of doom as well. I was enormously depressed by what I heard and what I saw.”
⁹

Gunness became the first foreign correspondent to give the world details of the beatings, tortures and rapes that arrested students had suffered in custody, as well as the medical disasters and the plummeting morale among Burmese troops fighting Karen rebels near the Thai border. But his most vital news was not about the past but the future: The students, he reported, were calling for a nationwide general strike on the auspicious date of August 8, 1988—8/8/88 as the date has been known in Burma ever since: exactly fifty years after a general strike led by militant students, including Aung San, against the British in August 1938. The BBC's Burmese language service had millions of regular listeners in Burma, who depended on it to learn facts the regime preferred to hide. Gunness's report ensured that on 8/8/88 there would be a good turnout.

But the students were not sitting around waiting for the big event: The uprising was already under way. “The first serious demonstration actually occurred on the afternoon of August 3,” wrote Dominic Faulder, one of the few undercover foreign journalists to witness it.
¹⁰
“It took me completely by surprise as it swept down Shwedagon Pagoda Road towards the city center then turned east going past Sule Pagoda and City Hall, before sweeping round to roar back past the Indian and US Embassies . . . As a display of raw courage it was spine-tingling . . . There were no
security forces in sight and no attempt was made to stop the demonstration, which faded into the wet afternoon with astonishing speed.”

That same day, the junta clamped martial law on Rangoon. But the next day and the day after thousands of demonstrators ignored the restrictions, marching through downtown, while further north in the capital students began digging themselves in close to the Shwedagon pagoda, the nation's Holy of Holies which had been the rallying-point for anti-regime protests since British days. Demonstrations were now breaking out, not merely in the capital and Mandalay but across the country. And everywhere the protesters' indignation and hunger for change were met by casual, murderous violence.

A fifteen-year-old schoolboy called Ko Ko took to the streets of central Rangoon on August 6th along with thousands of others. He recalled many years later:

Before 1988 I loved the army. My grandfather and grandmother came from the same part of the country as Ne Win. So when I saw what they did to us protesters I was shocked. At the time we were not demanding democracy. We just wanted our friends to be released from prison.

As I joined the demonstration I was afraid, but I thought they could not shoot me if I was carrying a picture of General Aung San. So I went into a cinema in the city center and asked them to give me the large framed photo of Aung San that was hanging on the wall. With thousands of others I walked along the road towards Sule Pagoda in the center of Rangoon holding the portrait in front of me. We were all shouting slogans, walking along in the rain.

We were hoarse from shouting so much and a girl came up offering wedges of lemon for our sore throats. I was holding the photograph so she put the lemon directly in my mouth. Then I said to her, please hold the photograph, I have to re-tie my longyi, so she took the photograph and gave me the bag of lemons to hold. And after I had re-tied my longyi she kept holding on to the photograph while I held the lemons. Then I heard the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire and she was lying on the ground dead and the photograph was full of bullet holes.

I was so upset by this event that I ran away from the capital and joined the Kachin rebels on the border in the north of the country.
¹¹

*

The 8/8/88 general strike would have been a big event anyway, given the incendiary state of the nation. But now it had been trailed on the BBC, no one could doubt that it would be the cue for a mass, nationwide uprising.

The protest that day began when dockworkers in Rangoon port marched off the job at precisely eight minutes past eight. The movement that had begun with a student fracas in a tea shop had now spiraled out to include the most vital workers in the economy. Hundreds of thousands marched on City Hall in defiance of martial law.

Throughout the hours of daylight the soldiers and riot police stayed in the background. “Despite its overwhelming superiority of force, the regime is today under siege by its people,” Seth Mydans wrote in the
New York Times
, reporting on the cataclysmic day. “The protests . . . have spread to every major city . . . led by students and joined by large numbers of workers and Buddhist monks, as well as by a cross-section of citizens, including government employees.”
¹²

“No one likes this brutal government,” Mydans reported the owner of a curry shop saying. “It has no respect for the people, no respect for human rights. All the people are angry now. All the people support the students.”

The huge demonstration, matched by similar shows of popular force all over the country, continued all day in a mood closer to a carnival than a riot. “Happy New Year,” Mydans reported one demonstrator shouting to him. “This is our revolution day!” “The euphoric atmosphere prevailed all day,” wrote Bertil Lintner. “In the evening, thousands of people moved to the Shwedagon, where a meeting was being held. Meanwhile, Bren carriers and trucks full of armed soldiers were parked in the compound of City Hall . . . But nobody really thought that the troops would be called out.”
¹³

Then at 11:30, after the last of many “last warnings” issued to the protesters over loudspeakers, the army suddenly went into action. “The tanks roared at top speed past [Sule] pagoda, followed by armored cars and twenty-four truckloads of soldiers,” Mydans wrote.
¹⁴
“The protesters scattered screaming into alleys and doorways, stumbling over open gutters, crouching by walls and then, in a new wave of panic, running again.” The shooting continued until 3
AM
. No one knows how many died. The Butcher had lived up to his name.

But if the protesters, who remained as amorphous and apparently leaderless as they had been since the upheaval began, had not achieved the revolution which astrologers had promised and which they had been dreaming of, neither had Sein Lwin succeeded in imposing his will, despite all the bloodshed. The strike continued into the next day. By now the hermit state, till weeks before one of the least-known countries on the planet, was splashed all over the world's news bulletins day after day. While the regime claimed that only a hundred people had been killed in Rangoon, diplomats put the figure ten times higher, while hospital workers in the capital, who were closest to the butchery, said the true figure was more than 3,000.
¹⁵
The US Senate, in a shocking blow to Burma's
amour propre
, passed a motion unanimously condemning the regime and the killings for which they were responsible.

Then on August 12th, after less than three weeks in power, the Butcher threw in the towel.

*

Aung San Suu Kyi played no part in the demonstrations.
¹⁶
“It's not my sort of thing,” she replied with a touch of memsahib haughtiness when asked why not. One might say, given her presence in the country all this time, and the power of her name, that her absence from the protests was conspicuous. As Bo Kyi, one of the leaders of the students, put it, “When we staged demonstrations in 1988, in March, April, May, June, July and August, at that time there was no Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. But all the time that we were holding demonstrations, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was in Burma . . .”
¹⁷

But she had not closed her eyes to the sufferings of her people. On the contrary, it is clear that she was thinking very hard about what role she could and ought to play.

Sein Lwin's stunning resignation prompted dancing in the street. He was replaced one week later, on August 19th, by Dr. Maung Maung, a London-trained barrister, a former chief justice, an academic who had done research at Yale, one of the very few civilians of stature in Ne Win's circle. But Maung Maung had lost whatever intellectual respectability he might once have claimed when he wrote the official hagiography of Number
One—which included a sly reworking of the life of Aung San, depicting him as a supporter of Japanese-style fascism and an opponent of democracy.
¹⁸
If Ne Win and his advisers imagined that the appointment of this ex-military pseudo-moderate would buy off the protesters' anger, they were rudely disappointed. It barely bought them twenty-four hours of calm.

What was now plain was that Burma confronted a gaping power vacuum. And it was during these strange days that a young Rangoon University history teacher met Suu for the first time.

Nyo Ohn Myint: as a young history professor at Rangoon University, in August 1988, he was one of the first intellectuals to urge Suu to seize the opportunity to lead the democracy movement. He is now foreign affairs spokesman for the NLD-Liberated Areas, based in Thailand.

“I was twenty-six,” Nyo Ohn Myint remembered.
¹⁹
Today, still looking barely out of his twenties, he is head of the NLD-LA's foreign affairs department and lives in exile in Thailand. “I had been a teacher for three years. My colleagues and I were mulling over what part we should play in the uprising. We produced pamphlets and wall posters, stuff like that. Then finally I met her. There were seven of us around the table.”

So far the only role Suu had conceived for herself was one behind the scenes. For Nyo Ohn Myint that was not enough. “I raised the fact that our movement really needed a leader,” he said. “And she said, no, I have just asked the general secretary of the Burma Socialist Program Party to stop killing the students and other innocent people. That is my role.”

Nyo Ohn Myint did not leave it at that. “I appealed to her to meet the student movement. She said no. Then I explained the nature of Burmese political culture to her, which is that you sacrifice a lot. She seemed quite reluctant to do as we asked. Some of us thought that she was an opportunist. She said she just wanted to mediate between the government and the students and the people.
²⁰

“I said then, ‘Okay, so why have we bothered you to come here and talk?' I was quite fed up: I thought, oh my God, I've wasted my time. Because we believed that she was Aung San's daughter, our hero, our mentor, we grew up with stories of Aung San's morality, Aung San's bravery—everything.”

Now Suu offered a compromise. “She said to us, ‘Why don't you join with me, come and work with me. Come tomorrow, and then every day after that.' She said she would open a small office in her house, in the dining room—the room that became the party's main political office.” The others in the discussion group welcomed her proposal eagerly; walking down the road back to the bus stop, they were “very excited that they were going to
be working with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” Nyo Ohn Myint recalled. But he remained unimpressed. “I told my colleagues, ‘I'm not coming tomorrow.'” For her to say that she wanted to work with them, he told them, was