Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (15 page)

Win Tin and twenty-four other inmates from Block 3 were sent to the Dog House as punishment. This was not a metaphorical designation; this was where the prison’s Alsatian guard dogs were housed. ‘Day and night we would listen to their barks and growls. It is a painful noise. When it’s all you hear, it is a kind of a torture.’
He could also hear the dogs being set on other prisoners. ‘The dogs would be sent into the cell and the door locked. We could hear the growls of the dogs and the human screams.’ This horror Win Tin was spared. But the months in the Dog House were punctuated by interrogations and beatings, and his isolation was strictly enforced. One of the worst experiences of his prison life came one December evening, on one of those rare nights in the year when it actually gets cold in Rangoon. A prison officer came to his cell and said he was to be taken for interrogation. He was hooded and handcuffed and led out into the chilly air. The interrogation room was occupied, and Win Tin was left outside, and then apparently forgotten. ‘I was left there for the whole night, my hands behind my back. I was freezing and shivering. The hood was thick and soon I could hardly breathe, it was the same air inside. I was suffocating, I was freezing. I thought I was to die.’

After several dark months in the Dog House, Win Tin was returned to a normal wing. He and his co-conspirators in Block 3 had been handed fresh sentences totalling 177 years. The interrogations continued sporadically, depending on political events beyond the prison walls. What new information the solitary Win Tin could have been harbouring was not clear. But his main enemy throughout his remaining years in jail was tedium. The loneliness, the long silent days. ‘Most of the time I had nothing to do. We were not allowed to read or write,’ he said. ‘I was in a small room, about ten feet by twelve. I remembered I read in a Van Gogh biography that while he was in an asylum he walked round and round. So I laid out my sleeping mat in the centre and would walk round and round. I would recite poems and religious texts. Day after day I did it. I never became depressed, because there was always tomorrow and tomorrow would be a new day.’

Small details became important. He would observe colonies of ants, their behaviour. He would leave out a small cube of sugar, and watch its discovery by an ant on reconnaissance. The ant would return to the group and inform them of his discovery. The ant army would then march back across the bare concrete floor, only to discover that Win Tin had removed the sugar. ‘They would not find any sugar at all. Then they would punish the ant. That was my small revenge against intelligence agents.’ His cell had a metal gate opening to the outside, and he would spend hours observing the clouds, taking note of their changing patterns day by day, season by season. ‘Watching the clouds, the beauty of the world, these things made me feel proud, and happy to be alive. I did not feel sorry for myself or sorry for the other prisoners like me. On the contrary, I felt we were living an exalted life.’

When in the yard for exercise, or on his way to see a fortnightly visitor, Win Tin would surreptitiously pick up a red brick, or piece of brick, and hide it in the folds of his
longyi
. On the floor of his cell he would start to grind it up. The task required patience. ‘It was tedious work. I had to rub it hundreds of thousands of times over many days to grind it up.’ He would put the powder in his tin cup, add a little water and then strain the reddish brown mixture through the cotton of his
longyi
. He was left with a fine paste, which he would leave in the hot sun to harden into a kind of a chalk. With this he could write. ‘I would write poems. I wrote so many poems. When they were still fresh in my mind, I would recite some of them to my friends who visited me. They would memorise them and write them down. That way some of my poems survived.’ Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Win Tin was also fascinated by the passage of time. He used his chalk to mark up calendars on his walls and would set himself challenges to calculate the day of the week on a date years ago. He would use his grasp of time to butter up the prison guards, most of whom had little education and
only knew their date of birth in the Burmese calendar, but were supposed to know the equivalent date in the Western calendar for official forms and the like. He would help them out in the hope of a small favour in return.

*

Shortly after daybreak on Tuesday 23 September 2008, a prison warden came to Win Tin’s cell. In the preceding few months, the prisoners had been allowed a new morning privilege – coffee mix, a three-in-one sachet containing coffee, milk powder and sugar which is Burma’s favourite hot beverage. The warden handed over a tin kettle of hot water for the coffee, and told Win Tin to pack his things; he would be released that day. With defences built up from previous disappointments, Win Tin refused to believe it. There had been false dawns before. He didn’t have much to pack, just a couple of books on Buddhism and a clean shirt and
longyi
, all in prison blue. But he left his belongings where they were, sat on the floor in the middle of his cell and refused to move. There had been many times over the previous nineteen years when Win Tin could have secured his release. Insein’s director general had offered him freedom on several occasions, but always with conditions. First, he would have to sign a 401 Form, in which the prisoner must promise not to undertake any political activities after release. If the bond was broken, the prisoner would have to serve the entire sentence again. ‘I was first given the option to do this in 1991, and I said no,’ said Win Tin. ‘And from time to time after that they would ask me.’ Many other political detainees signed that bond and were freed. Was that cowardly? ‘Not really,’ said Win Tin, with his consistent generosity. ‘Some of them believed that prison life was useless, they wanted to be out to do work from the outside. So they did it not out of cowardice but out of their own reasoning. But I couldn’t do it. I was a politician, a
founder of the NLD and secretary of the party. If I did it then the government would make a big thing of it, publish it as propaganda. I could not let that happen.’

Throughout the day, official after official came to Win Tin’s cell to try to persuade him to pack his things and prepare to leave. The elderly prisoner remained where he was, sitting cross-legged in the centre of the cell, refusing to move. The protest was a form of self-protection. Two years earlier, the release process had gone as far as a special ceremony in front of the director general in the prison’s main hall. Win Tin was told he had been granted immediate, unconditional release. An hour later, without explanation, he was taken to his cell and locked up again. Nothing more was said. So on that Tuesday, Win Tin stayed put for the entire day, ignoring the increasingly frantic pleas of wardens to change into his clean set of clothes and prepare for release. At 4.30 p.m., the director general himself appeared. ‘The DG came in and sat beside me. He assured me there would be no 401, I would be released without condition, and he had come to take me in his car to the main gate.’ Win Tin relented, almost, agreeing to go with the director but refusing to change out of his dirty prison uniform. ‘They told me if I did not get changed I would be charged with stealing state property. I think they were ashamed that people would see me like that. I said fine, you can charge me, because either I am leaving in these clothes or I will go out naked.’ In the end it was the director who relented.

Win Tin sat next to the director general in the back of his black, chauffeur-driven SUV. They drove slowly along the elevated internal road that cut across the prison, looped round the central tower and led onwards to the main north gate. In two decades, this was the first time that Win Tin had seen these parts of the prison; when he had been moved around before, or taken to see visitors, he had always been hooded. They got out of the car and stepped into the director’s office. Win Tin was
served a glass of orange juice and the director assured him, once again, that there would be no 401 and no change of clothes. They agreed he would be taken to a friend’s house, quite close to Insein. Win Tin breathed deeply, sipped his juice and began to believe it was actually happening.

They stepped out of the office to the car that would drive Win Tin to freedom. As he approached the car door someone took a photograph with a flash. Win Tin swung around, surprised: photography was banned inside the prison grounds. ‘I looked and saw it was a girl. She took some more pictures and then started to ask questions: “How do you feel about being released? Do you feel happy?” The questions were impertinent. I was so disturbed and annoyed I said many harsh words about the government. I said prison life was hell, and the whole of Burma was a prison, so I had no reason to be joyful about being released.’ If Win Tin had allowed himself a few brief moments of happy anticipation, they were quickly over. He was back on message. The young female journalist, brought into the prison to prepare a special puff piece in the
Myanmar Times
, slunk away, ashamed. The next day her father came to the house where Win Tin was staying to apologise. ‘I told him I didn’t like those questions, so impertinent, as if I had something to celebrate.’ The father had bowed his head. ‘I know, I know,’ he said.

At 5.50 p.m., just minutes before it grew dark, seventy-eight-year-old Win Tin was released from Insein Prison. They had planned to drive him out of the main gate, but so many journalists had gathered that they changed plan at the last minute and drove him out along a side route through the dingy houses and washing lines of the prison guards’ family quarters. He was dropped at the house of his friend and immediately mobbed by the waiting media and many of his old friends from journalism and politics. He did a string of interviews, for the Democratic Voice of
Burma, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and the BBC Burmese Service. He was amazed to see himself beamed back on satellite television, and to hear his voice on the Burmese radio broadcasts throughout the evening. His release, part of an amnesty of prisoners on that day, also merited a few paragraphs in the international media. ‘Although exiled dissidents welcomed the release of Win Tin and the others, they dismissed it as a cynical ploy by the junta to defuse tensions as world leaders gather for the UN summit in New York amid calls for even tougher sanctions,’ read a piece in the
Guardian
. Win Tin also played down the significance of his release when more than two thousand other Burmese prisoners of conscience remained behind bars: ‘I could not be happy when my colleagues were still in jail and the rest of the country was one big, open-air prison.’ But while the strength of his convictions had always overpowered his worldly needs, he could not help but surrender to the enjoyment of his first evening with friends for two decades. ‘On a personal level, I was happy to be surrounded by friends, especially because my friends are really my family. In prison I could only talk to visitors by telephone, through a thick window. Now I could reach out and touch them,’ he smiled gently. One of his best friends, Ludu Sein Win, a well-known journalist and writer who had been sent to prison on the Coco Islands and tortured many times, was carried into the living room, his oxygen tank in tow. After a blink of shock at how the other had aged, the two men fell deep into conversation. The women had prepared a special dish of
ohn no kauk swe
, coconut chicken noodles, but Win Tin barely touched them.

Food would become the abiding reminder of the privations of prison. ‘I cannot digest, I will never be able to. Even now, I can only eat very little,’ Win Tin told me. After a few years to reflect on his long incarceration, had he forgiven his captors? I tossed out the question casually as we neared the end of our interviews, almost as an
afterthought, imagining I knew well what the answer would be. This kind, radiant old man, Burma’s longest serving political prisoner, so similar in his manner to Nelson Mandela, sharing a life story of resistance and endurance – surely he would smile serenely, tell me he bore no grudge. His watery eyes held mine. ‘I cannot forgive,’ he said firmly. ‘Although I am not a vengeful person I cannot clean the slate completely. I cannot do it. But I do not think or dream about it. I have left it. I am not going back to the past.’

NINE

The Lady

We could look across Inya Lake to Aung San Suu Kyi’s house from J’s Bistro, popular with expatriates for coffee or Sunday brunch with its cooling fans, rattan furniture and cushions covered in Burmese cotton. There were little brass bells on the tables to summon the waiters, a table stacked with old copies of
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
as well as colouring books and jars of felt tips for the children. The large French windows opened on to a wooden deck on the north side of the lake, lined with plants in terracotta pots. It was a good place to take visitors, for whom catching a glimpse of ‘The Lady’s’ house, and even snatching a zoomed-in, blurry photograph was an essential component of their Rangoon itinerary. Waiting for our coffees, we would saunter out on to the deck, feigning an interest in the cormorants and herons that swooped low over the silvery water. There, on the far side of the lake, was the once grand but now mouldering white-painted house, with a sloping lawn running down to the water’s edge. Sometimes I took some pocket-sized binoculars to sneak a closer look, but only once saw any activity in Suu Kyi’s back garden – two workmen had shinned up a coconut tree to cut back its upper fronds, supervised, I guessed, by one of Suu Kyi’s two housemaids, who looked up from the grass but was not the slender figure that I knew Suu Kyi to be. I never once saw any sign of
her
, by then the world’s most famous political prisoner, a woman admired the world over for her self-sacrificing, principled resistance to Burma’s military regime. She was so near (her house was just half a mile from ours) but so far away, under house arrest for the best part of two decades in what had been her mother’s home on University Avenue.
Armed police manned roadblocks on the street in front of the house, while at the back, the lake had an unmarked but well-observed ‘exclusion zone’, across which rowers and canoeists were warned not to cross.