The Lady and the Peacock (12 page)

The second reform changed Burma's political matrix forever, even though, more than two decades later, it has yet to produce any of the benefits for which it was promoted: the regime's commitment, not to the referendum advocated by Dr. Maung Maung but to general elections leading to multiparty democracy.

The third was hardly less momentous: the disestablishment of the BSPP, effectively bringing down the curtain on twenty-six years of one-party rule. Burma would never be the same again. And it was Aung San Suu Kyi—the “governess” as she has been labeled, the Burmese “Mary Poppins,” the “Oxford housewife,” the political ingénue—who brought them about.
¹

*

The effect of the lifting of martial law was immediate. Troops and riot police disappeared from the streets. All over the country people could
suddenly do and say exactly what they pleased. Strikers surged through towns and cities throughout the country, no longer defiant, merely euphoric. Twenty-six years before, in the interest of order and discipline, General Ne Win had fastened a straitjacket on the nation. Now it was flung off, and the urges that had been building since March—to laugh, to swear, to scandalize, to join hands, to dream and plan for a future dramatically different from the past—burst forth in all their jubilant diversity.

The regime's indigestible daily rag, the
Working People's Daily
, until the day before full of articles about ambassadors presenting their credentials and generals opening sewage plants, was suddenly publishing daring political comment pieces and pages of photographs of the demonstrations. An unruly crowd of new papers sprang up to offer competition:
Scoop
,
Liberation Daily
,
New Victory
,
Light of Dawn
—their titles alone told of the mood of wild optimism sweeping the country.

Not all the news they published could be relied on: One paper called
Phone Maw Journal
, named after the student whose killing by the army in March had ignited the revolution, informed its readers that a cemetery in a Rangoon suburb where the bodies of many of the victims of army shootings had been unceremoniously buried was now noisily haunted—and that the ghosts were chanting pro-democracy slogans!
²
The spirits had also formed a closed shop, barring entry to the mortal remains of members of the ruling party: Anyone brave enough to go close could hear them wailing, “Corpses of BSPP members not to be buried in our cemetery! Stay out! Stay out!”

The movement, which at the start had been the monopoly of students, now drew recruits from every part of society. Martin Morland, British ambassador in Burma at the time, remembered the euphoric mood.

“The Rangoon Bar Association took its courage in both hands and issued a signed protest calling for change,” he recalled.
³
“The Medical Association followed suit. The street marches multiplied, with banners identifying the state organization marching. By early September every ministry had joined in. Even the beggars had their march. On the last Sunday before the army struck back even the police band went over to the side of the people and played outside City Hall.”

It was the same all over the country. In the little town of Phekhon, in the Shan States in Burma's disputed northeast, a student recently returned
from Rangoon called Pascal Khoo Thwe was caught up in the excitement; like many others, it was to determine the course of the rest of his life.
⁴
He wrote many years later:

When Aung San Suu Kyi made her great speech . . . on August 26th, she instantly became our leader and inspiration. In the evenings we would listen to the BBC and hope for guidance from our goddess. We formed committees for security, for the food supply, for information, for connecting the different ethnic and religious groups.

Although I busied myself with all this, I knew there was a pompous and officious aspect to it. It also had a dreamlike quality. Only weeks before, to speak in open opposition to the regime would have been unthinkable. Now the whole of Phekhon was talking about the future, about what sort of constitution Burma should have, about the place of the minority peoples. People who had been silent for twenty-six years now wanted to shout, or at least endlessly to debate.

Burma was approaching a state of anarchy, but for a while it worked the way anarchists have always claimed society should naturally work once the state's machinery of repression is sent to the scrapyard, in messy but euphoric harmony. The army had pulled back to barracks and was nowhere to be seen. The feared and hated riot police, the Lon Htein, was likewise invisible. Ministries and government offices had simply closed; the Burmese state had shut down. And the vacuum filled up with people doing their own thing. A young woman called Hmwe Hmwe who had joined the democracy movement in Rangoon traveled to Mandalay to help coordinate strike centers there, traveling by van and pickup truck.
⁵
“Since everybody was on strike, there was no train service or other regular transport and it was difficult to buy petrol as well,” she said. “But spirits were high and we attended meetings all along the way. We slept in the strike centers and there was one in every town we passed through. The people had taken over the local BSPP offices and government premises and managed their own administration . . . There was feverish activity everywhere: people printing leaflets, making posters, publishing their own local newspapers and preparing meetings, rallies and demonstrations.”

Older systems of authority re-emerged to fill the place of those that had vanished. Bertil Lintner wrote:

In Mandalay, the young monks' organization . . . had resurfaced.
⁶
The monks organized day-to-day affairs like rubbish collection, made sure the water supply was working and, according to some reports, even acted as traffic policemen. The maintenance of law and order was also in the hands of the monks—and the criminals who had been caught were often given rather unorthodox sentences. One visitor to Mandalay in August saw a man chained to a lamp post outside the railway station who shouted all day, “I'm a thief! I'm a thief! . . .”

Yet the appearance of a vacuum of power was itself illusory. The military regime was rocking, it is true; its pseudo-civilian governing apparatus was crumbling. But in the months and years to come, proof emerged of a controlling mind behind what was going on during the weeks of freedom—the same cynical and ruthless military mind that had ruled the country for the past generation.

On the same day that Aung San Suu Kyi gave her maiden speech at the Shwedagon, truckloads of troops poured into central Rangoon and removed 600 million kyats from the Myanma Foreign Trade Bank: to pay the army for the coming six months and ensure its continuing loyalty.

The following day, in a cynical coda to the lifting of martial law, Insein Jail, the Victorian panopticon in a leafy Rangoon suburb that is the nation's most infamous prison, evacuated its inmates on what the authorities called “parole,” sending them out into the lawless capital with neither money nor food. They were released from the jail after inmates threw in their lot with the strikers outside the walls and attacked the prison guards. The guards replied by shooting the protesters, a fire broke out and it was claimed that 1,000 died and 500 were wounded. Whatever the truth about the riot and its suppression, the mass release of prisoners added a new element of peril and anarchy to the dangerously combustible elements outside. The pattern was repeated around the country, leading to the sudden discharge into the community of more than 10,000 footloose criminals.

The result was predictable—and almost certainly anticipated and indeed plotted by the regime. As Martin Morland put it, “The army evidently hoped that things would get so out of hand that the people would have had enough and beg the old regime to come back.”
⁷
Certainly the sudden appearance en masse of the most desperate people in society
added an extra element of terror to the unstable situation, an element to which some of the protesters responded brutally. Lintner wrote:

On September 5th, four men and one woman were caught outside a children's hospital [in Rangoon].
⁸
After a rough interrogation, two of them confessed that the gang had tried to poison the water tank outside the hospital, and they were released. But the remaining three refused to say anything and an angry crowd beat them in the street. A man came forward with a sword, decapitated the three and held up their blood-dripping severed heads to the applause of the mob. Public executions—mostly beheadings—of suspected DDSI [i.e. Military Intelligence] agents became an almost daily occurrence in Rangoon. What had started as a carnival-like, Philippine-style “people's power uprising” was . . . coming more and more to resemble the hunt for the
tonton macoutes
in Haiti after the fall of “Baby Doc” Duvalier . . .

But the descent into savagery was strictly localized and, when reported in time, it was strongly opposed. Suu took no immediate steps to capitalize on the success of her performance at the Shwedagon; on the contrary, in her first-ever interviews she expressed reluctance about getting involved in politics. But her home was ever more of a hurly-burly, with throngs of strikers besieging the gates asking to talk to her and think tanks in permanent session in her downstairs dining room-cum-office. Many of the students who had been her escort on August 26th were now camping out in the garden. And when Suu learned of lynch parties at large she repeatedly sent the students to try to restore sanity and calm. Often they succeeded.

The BSPP government was still notionally in power, but the central strike committee in Rangoon called for it to resign and for a neutral interim government to take its place, capable of supervising the free, multiparty democratic elections that were now the goal everyone had in mind. The call was taken up across the country. But President Maung Maung refused to take this step, instead announcing a second emergency conference of the ruling party for September 12th.

The outbreaks of lynching underlined the fact that, if the military had pulled in its claws and the BSPP was on the point of collapse, the democracy movement had yet to take a definite shape or coalesce around
particular leaders. The movement's challenge was to prove that the military dictatorship was not merely enfeebled but that it could be superseded. But it was a challenge that it was slow to meet.

The students were the first to make a stab at it. A charismatic biology student called Baw Oo Tun had become their
de facto
leader in many protests, taking the
nom de guerre
of Min Ko Naing—“Conqueror of Kings.” In late August they set up the All-Burma Students' Union under his leadership—an initiative weakened by the fact that a quite separate organization with the same name already existed.

Next to throw his hat in the ring was the great veteran of Burmese democratic politics, the first and indeed only prime minister elected under the old multiparty system, eighty-two-year-old U Nu, who had held office until the coup of 1962. At the end of August he defied the constitution by announcing the establishment of Burma's first independent political party in twenty-six years, the League for Democracy and Peace (Provisional). But on September 9th, he critically overplayed his hand, telling the world that he had now formed a parallel government, and calling for general elections. In a press conference to relaunch a career that he had renounced years before in favor of religious devotion, he claimed that Burma's only legal constitution was the one passed in 1947, according to which he was still in charge. “I'm still the legitimate prime minister,” he insisted.

If anything was designed to give the democracy movement a bad name, this was it. The announcement stunned U Nu's political friends and enemies alike. “Preposterous” was the verdict of Aung Gyi, the general who had written dissenting letters to Ne Win earlier in the year, while at a press conference in University Road Suu rejected it just as firmly. She was “astonished” by U Nu's claim, she said, adding “the future of the people will be decided by the masses of the people.”
⁹

This was the theme she had hammered home at the Shwedagon: Burma's future lay in a multiparty democracy; the only way for the country to emerge from the nightmare of military tyranny was for the people to have the opportunity to choose their rulers. And the very next day, in the second important victory she won before even declaring her intention of entering politics, her wish was granted.

The occasion was a second extraordinary congress of the still-just-about ruling BSPP, following the one in July when Ne Win had spoken of his
intention to step down. President Maung Maung's offer of a referendum on single- or multiparty systems was still on the table, but as tens of thousands of protesters chanted outside, the congress threw it out, opting instead for “free, fair, multiparty elections.” Under Suu's urging and that of millions of other Burmese, the party that had ruled the country very badly for a generation had now written its suicide note.

But it was jam tomorrow, not jam today. The regime, however battered and bruised, clung to what little remained of its authority. There was to be no interim government to see the election process through.

*

The history of Burma is littered with “ifs,” and one of the biggest of them looms over the events of the subsequent week.

The democracy movement that had begun obscurely in March—that had been hardened under army fire in which thousands died and that was now groping towards the attainment of some clear political shape—was continuing to grow. With army and police still absent from the streets, the strikers' demonstrations grew larger, more vocal, more militant, more ambitious. So much had already been wrung from the tyrants: One more heave, it seemed, and the rotten superstructure of army rule would come crashing down. What was needed now was for the army itself, or significant portions of it, to switch sides. And with the daughter of the army's founder ever more prominent in the revolt, that was no longer a pipe dream.