The Lady and the Peacock (46 page)

But that was then. Once the NLD had flattened all contenders, it was plain to see that two and two made five.

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The claim that on May 27, 1990, Burma voted not for a government but for a constitutional convention became the junta's mantra for the next eighteen years, its perennial alibi for hanging on to power, justifying endless procrastination on the road to democracy. Today the claim has attained the status of holy writ among apologists for the regime. In February 2011, Burma scholar Michael Aung-Thwin, professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii, wrote in a newspaper article, “Virtually every credible scholar of Burma has demonstrated that both the
NLD and Suu Kyi knew at the time that these were constituent assembly elections, not national elections.”
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The claim was certainly helpful in justifying SLORC's hanging on to power. But as veteran Burma-watcher Lintner pointed out, it makes no sense. “The election was held to elect the Pyitthu Hluttaw, the national assembly,” said Lintner, who at the time of the election was Burma correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review:

The new Pyitthu Hluttaw was to have the same number of MPs as the Pyitthu Hluttaw in the old one-party BSPP set-up, but with more parties represented. No one suggested before polling day that, of those 485 MPs-elect, 100 would be selected to sit with 600 other people selected by the military to draft a new constitution. That announcement came two months after the election, in July. It was clear that there would have to be a new constitution but that would be up to the parliament to decide, not the military. What's the point in electing 485 people if you are then going to hand-pick 100 of them? It didn't make sense at all.

In 1990 the wrong party won. If in 1990 the National Unity Party had won, would they have been arrested and forced into exile? Of course not: There would have been a new government within weeks. They would have been in parliament right away, the military would have said okay, now you can write the constitution! The wrong party won and that's the bottom line. The military didn't expect it.
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Aung San Suu Kyi's own thoughts about the election and its strange aftermath were a matter for conjecture. Although she was able to follow events on radio and television, she was forbidden to make any public comments.

And her isolation was about to become even more drastic. Up until July 1990 she had received letters from her family, sent to the British Embassy in Rangoon and brought to her door by SLORC. In fact Khin Nyunt boasted about the fact. At a news conference on July 13th, he said:

We have been very lenient [towards her] . . . [She] is permitted to move about freely . . . We assisted in repairs to her compound and her residence and have been providing weekly medical care and treatment. We even
provided orthodontic care at her request to correct her uneven teeth. Her spouse, Dr. Michael Aris, and her sons have been sending her letters, foodstuffs, goods, books and documents from Britain through the British Embassy in Rangoon. We accept responsibility of delivering these letters, goods and foodstuffs to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi without exception . . .
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But when she heard of Khin Nyunt's boast, she decided to accept none of these “favors” any more: If she could not, as she had demanded, go to Insein Jail with her colleagues, she would certainly not allow herself, locked up in her home, to be portrayed as a pampered beneficiary of army rule. She said later:

[SLORC] seemed to think they were doing me a tremendous favor by letting me communicate with my family. It was in fact my right. I've never accepted anything as a favor. So I would not accept any favors from them. Also, I did not think that they had a right to keep me under house arrest for longer than a year. In fact they had no right to arrest all those NLD [members] who had been successful in the elections. So it was a form of protest against injustices they were perpetrating as well as an indication that I would accept no favors from them.
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The flow of letters, goods and services into her home abruptly ceased. And her solitary life became very much harder.

The regime refused to give any estimation of when she might be let out—let alone entertain the idea that she should play a role in the new government. In the same speech in which he vaunted SLORC's provision of dental care, etcetera, Khin Nyunt addressed that question.

The NLD openly declared that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi must play a leading role in establishing a new democratic state and that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi must lead in the talks with the SLORC . . . Which is more important: obtaining power and the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, or the long-term interests of the country and the people? . . . I believe this is not the time for an individual approach or for a personality cult in insisting that a specific person be included in working for the long-term interests of the state.

Meanwhile, a new phase in Burma's political game was about to begin: the manhunt for the winning candidates.

J
UST
as it is untrue that Burma has never enjoyed an era of freedom—it lasted twenty-six days in August and September 1988—neither is it true that the elections of May 1990 did not produce a government. But instead of being sworn in at Rangoon with all the dignity at the Burmese state's disposal, it was formed in a malarial camp in the jungle close to the border with Thailand, under constant threat of bombardment by the Burmese Army.

In her short but seminal essay on the role played by fear in authoritarian societies, “Freedom from Fear,” Suu was careful to point out how the behavior of the oppressors as well as the oppressed is twisted by fear. “Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it,” she wrote. “. . . fear of being surpassed, humiliated or injured in some way can provide the impetus for ill will.” She wrote the essay before being put in detention; but now that her party and its allies had won the election, the fear of those who had terrorized their nation for decades—the fear of confronting the vengeful fury of their victims—undermined any hope of power changing hands. “The army leaders are paralyzed by fear,” said a Western diplomat in Rangoon, “fear of the revenge of the people. It's the Nuremberg syndrome which held up political reform in Argentina and Chile for so long.”

First SLORC spent six weeks issuing the election results in dribs and drabs. Then, when the NLD's landslide victory was beyond dispute, they announced a two-month moratorium to allow claims of abuse and misconduct by defeated candidates to be investigated. The NLD's acting leader Kyi Maung, the most senior of those who remained at liberty, judging that it would be a mistake to pile on pressure, allowed the junta to play for time, but finally summoned the party's winning candidates—its MPs-elect—to a mass meeting at the Gandhi Hall in central Rangoon on July 28th and 29th.

At the meeting's conclusion they issued a statement, the “Gandhi Declaration,” condemning the continuing delays as “shameful,” and
rejecting SLORC's plans for a constitutional convention as irrelevant. “It is against political nature,” they declared, “that the League, which has overwhelmingly won enough seats in parliament to form a government, has been prohibited from minimum democratic rights.” They gave the junta a deadline of September 30th to transfer power.

But the endgame was approaching. Even before the MPs could meet, SLORC announced a decree, number 1/90, refusing in advance any demands they might come up with. The MPs might have been elected to the
Pyitthu Hluttaw
, but now nobody inside the regime was talking about convening it. Before that happened, they said, a National Convention would have to be set up—it was the first anyone had heard of such a body—to draw up the guidelines for the new constitution; only after that could the Assembly convene to write its own draft constitution, which would then have to be approved by SLORC—and so on indefinitely into the future. No time frame was proposed, and participation in the Convention was not the right of the new MPs: Instead SLORC would pick the delegates it fancied. And just to make sure they stuck to this agreement, MPs-elect were obliged to sign a “1/90 declaration,” renouncing any right to form a government.

But all these pseudo-judicial measures were not sufficient to staunch the fears of the junta's leaders, of whom it appeared that Ne Win was still the unchallenged boss. There was no real substitute for the medieval measures employed by the kings of old (and indeed the British colonialists)—to feel really secure you needed bodies in firmly locked cells.

Thus on September 6th, three weeks before the NLD's deadline to the junta, SLORC targeted the last vestiges of robust NLD leadership, arresting Kyi Maung and his deputy and sentencing them to ten years' jail for treason. Eighteen members of the NLD's central executive committee out of twenty-two were now in detention. At the same time SLORC tackled the party's foot soldiers, arresting more than forty MPs, allegedly for refusing to sign the 1/90 declaration. Two of them died in jail soon after their arrest, apparently under torture. And what of Aung San Suu Kyi herself? SLORC told foreign diplomats in Rangoon that she would only be freed if she agreed to give up politics and leave the country for ever.

Hope of reaching any sort of accommodation with the junta was now dead. The country had come full circle since Ne Win's “multiparty
democracy” declaration of July 1988 and was back exactly where it started—with the same psychopathic tyrant in charge.

The men and women who had been voted into power by their fellow-countrymen were all now in grave peril, and some of the most promising and well-qualified new MPs decided that there was nothing to be gained by hanging around in Rangoon waiting to be arrested. Eight of them, led by a cousin of Suu called Dr. Sein Win, the newly elected MP for Paukkaung, 125 miles north of Rangoon, and Western-educated like her, trekked through the mountains in the east of the country, finally arriving at a place called Manerplaw: the jungle camp which was the headquarters of the Democratic Alliance of Burma (DAB), a coalition of the insurgent forces that had been fighting the Burmese Army for many years.

First the MPs declared a ceasefire with the Alliance, then they announced that they were forming a government. Claiming the support of more than 250 elected MPs, they explained that their efforts to form a government, first in a monastery in Mandalay, then in a foreign embassy in Rangoon, had been foiled. So instead they were setting up what they called the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB) here in Manerplaw, with Sein Win as prime minister.

And it was there, a few months later, that I caught up with them.

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Mountains and forest in Karen state, near the site of Manerplaw, the Karen jungle camp destroyed by the Burmese Army.

As you would expect of a camp that had managed to hold out against everything the Burmese Army threw at it, Manerplaw was not easy to reach. For some fifteen years it had been the command center of the most stubborn and enduring of Burma's ethnic armies, the Karen National Liberation Army.
GIVE US LIBERTY OR GIVE US DEATH
read the sign over the camp's entrance. The settlement had survived because it occupied a narrow shelf between the Moei river on the east and steep mountains that climbed straight out of the grassy parade ground on the west. Beyond those mountains was another, more daunting range before the descent towards the Salween river and the positions held by the Burmese Army.

The only practicable way for a foreigner to approach Manerplaw was from the Thai side.
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Commissioned to write a magazine piece about
Manerplaw and its residents, I took a bus to the Thai border town of Mae Sariang with the photographer Greg Girard, and persuaded the owner of our little hotel to take us closer to our destination.

The tarmac road soon gave way to rutted mud and we bumped down it for hours, fording streams and winding through wooded mountains. When our driver's pick-up truck died on us he flagged down a lorry which took us the rest of the way to the riverside village of Mae Sam Leb: no more than a dirt road lined with little eateries and stores selling chains and spare parts for outboard engines, ending at a dice gambling den on the shore of the Salween river.

We had arrived in the war zone. Directly across the river but out of sight was a Burmese Army post. The bamboo shops of Mae Sam Leb were as new as they were flimsy: A year before the village had been wiped out by Burmese Army bombs. In the weeks before our arrival in early April the army had been pounding Karen villages in the area.

At the river we found a long-tailed boat going our way, with a boy who looked about ten at the helm. When it was crammed full of passengers we set off, a cool breeze in our faces and the water slapping against the sides. We turned into the Moei River heading southeast, with Thailand and its denuded mountains on the east bank, the richer forests of Burma on the west, and the grey forms of steep conical peaks looming ahead. We puttered along for several hours. Finally the boat nosed on to a gravel shore on the west side and we had arrived.