The Lady and the Peacock (57 page)

“In 1995 the country was booming,” Leon de Riedmatten, an international mediator, head of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue and right-hand man of UN envoy Razali Ismail, explained soon after I arrived. “The generals thought they would succeed economically, so they had no need to deal with the opposition.”

That was the period, with Military Intelligence chief Khin Nyunt making his presence felt, when the smart new airport building and hotels like the Sofitel and the even swankier Traders were built, when the ceasefire deals were cut with the insurgent groups, when the doors were thrown open to tourists for Visit Myanmar Year, when Burma was given observer status in ASEAN—when it must have seemed to SLORC that they were on the brink of being accepted by the rest of the world on their own terms. Releasing Suu was the icing on the gingerbread, a sop to the West and one which would not require any follow-up because—as the generals must have assured each other, still sealed into their impregnable conceit—the people had forgotten all about her anyway. In the
New Light of Myanmar
they depicted her in cartoons as a gap-toothed crone, boring Rangoon street urchins to death with her interminable rants—and that was what they really thought of her. The Achilles heel of regimes such as
this is the reluctance of junior officers, who are in touch with reality, to tell their superiors uncomfortable truths.

But after Suu's release in 1995, any hopes SLORC may have entertained of pain-free international integration rapidly unraveled. Suu's charisma proved as powerful as ever, and her message no less disagreeable. Generals brought up in Burma's closed socialist system struggled to make sense of the rules of international capitalism and fiercely resisted the loss of control which they brought with them: Burma remained an impossible working environment for foreign businesses. Rangoon and the other towns and cities on the tourist route were smartened up for Visit Myanmar Year, but then in 1997 the Asian financial crisis struck and Burma's frail recovery was hit along with the far more robust economies of its neighbors. The flashy new hotels were now half-empty most of the time.

De Riedmatten, who had first begun brokering talks between Suu and the regime in June 2001, explained to me his view of the country's political prospects. “There is no other choice than cooperation between the NLD and the regime,” he said. “The first priority is how to improve the living conditions of the people. Then they should start talking about the future of the country. Today the situation is completely different from '95: Now they have to cooperate, both sides need the other.”

Yet as our conversation progressed it became clear that there was still a long way to go before anyone could start claiming results. “They [Suu and the regime] have talked, but they have not yet agreed to do things together,” he admitted. “Until last Monday”—when Suu was still in detention—“they talked to each other, and found some understanding, some room; now it's the test. They say: Let's see if, when she's out, [her actions] correspond to what we thought. On her side she wants to see how far she can do what she wants.”

But then the optimism came steaming back into his voice. “I think the process is irreversible,” he said, “the question now is the pace . . . They all need to go quite fast.”

It was clear that I had arrived in Rangoon at an interesting moment. Change was bursting out all over. For thirty years, ever since Ne Win closed down the free press after his coup, Burmese newspapers had been as dreary, mendacious and slavish as any in the world. But even that seemed to be changing: A bald, blunt-mannered Australian called Ross Dunkley who had spent seven years building up the
Vietnam Investment
Review
in Ho Chi Minh City, arrived to launch an English language weekly, Burma's first, called the
Myanmar Times
.

In the paper's newsroom—“the biggest in the country” he boasted—Dunkley explained to me how he had reached this point. “I sold the Vietnam paper to James Packer, the son of Kerry [Packer, the media and cricket tycoon],” he said. “In '99 I started to think what I was going to do next, I had Myanmar in mind anyway, I came for a week in '99 to have a look around. It's a virgin market.”

On holiday in California, Dunkley chanced to meet a Burmese expatriate called Sonny Swe, the son of Brigadier General Thein Swe, a high official in Military Intelligence, which was of course headed by Khin Nyunt. Dunkley had been knocking around Asia long enough to know the value of a well-placed patron, and Sonny seemed the ideal person to help him break into Burma. “Coming into a market like this you have to have a political umbrella,” he pointed out. “Our general is a diplomatic assistant to Khin Nyunt.”

The
Myanmar Times
was quite unlike any other Burmese paper on the market. The front page was not dominated by a picture of a general handing out an award or inspecting something, the editors clearly understood the difference between a news story and a hole in the head, the headlines encouraged you to read on, and one got the impression that some of the reporting might even be true. I asked Dunkley, “What about censorship?” He replied: “I said [to Sonny] I will refuse to submit to press censorship. Sonny assured me it wouldn't happen.” Then, a little later in the conversation: “It's a question of how to put the right spin on things.” And later still: “Now it's a new ball game. We have to think about the right to press freedom or we cannot move forward. It's one of the fundamental rights. I see the
Myanmar Times
as a litmus test to determine how fast [the country is] moving forward. We're the first paper in the country to talk about the NLD, the first to talk about HIV/AIDS . . .”

And if his generals were purged or Sonny went missing—did Dunkley have an exit strategy, a plan for extracting himself from Burma and getting back to Perth with the loot? “I've got no exit strategy,” he said. “I see this as my family business.”

*

I met Dunkley on the morning of Thursday, May 9, 2002 and when the interview was over I took a taxi from his office a couple of miles to a shabby-looking two-story house with an overhanging roof on a broad and busy main road near the Shwedagon pagoda, the headquarters of the NDL. The entrance was crowded with party members: students, grizzled political veterans, women on their haunches with babies, all flapping fans and chatting in the pre-monsoon heat and waiting for a particular event. I had a pretty good idea what it was.

Inside the long dingy oblong of the ground floor the scene was no less busy, with an impromptu English class under way in one corner, party women running up peacock flags on treadle sewing machines in another, the librarian shelving battered paperbacks in her small collection. A few foreign journalists were sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the main event.

In my notebook I recorded Suu's arrival at the office:

1
PM
: She's approaching. Staff pull themselves into shape, pin on red arm bands, line up either side of door, staring out watchfully, drumming fingers, gulping water from water pot. One electric fan going is the only sound.

1:10: No action. There is a poster of Suu next to Aung San on the wall behind the grill of a Post Office type desk at the entrance.

1:23: Everyone suddenly re-mustered—she comes striding in at the head of a group of four, quick, definite, unhesitating, arms swinging like a soldier, smiling lightly, and vanishes up the stairs.

After waiting most of the afternoon it was eventually my turn to go up the stairs.

“The door to the long, shabby, boiling hot committee room squeaks open,” I wrote in the
Independent
on May 13, 2002,

and the famous lady in the blue Burmese jacket and longyi is discovered sitting at one corner of a long table.

She rises: a firm handshake, very long fingers; a head rather large for the slim, fragile-looking frame—some say she has lost weight since she was last seen in public, and she is certainly ashy pale. But the gaze of her large brown eyes is bold and steady. “I'm sorry to have kept you waiting such a long time,” she says in her cut-glass Oxford accent. “Please give my regards to all our old friends at the
Independent
.”

I mentioned how struck I was by the amount Rangoon had changed since my last visit. Did she feel that Burma was finally on the move? “I've always said I'm a cautious optimist,” she said. “So in one sense I agree with people when they say that. At least we're somewhere new where we have not been and I would cautiously say that where we are is better than where we have ever been. But I think the more important thing is where we're going to, and how quickly.”

De Riedmatten, Suu's go-between with the regime, made the same point during our meeting: Speed was important, her release had put some momentum back into the relationship but for trust to build there must be a follow-up, and soon.

There were some in Rangoon, supposedly well informed, who were sure it was coming. De Riedmatten put me on to one of them, a retired Burmese professor, “a political observer-cum-analyst” as he asked me to describe him, who invited me to his home and told me with serene confidence,

Aung San Suu Kyi has made concessions to the government and they will move towards some kind of democracy on Suharto regime lines, with 25 percent of seats reserved for the military. The government is prepared to go along with recognition of the results of the 1990 election, but will retain veto powers. They are not going to give up all power right away. I believe a lot of details have been agreed. They are now putting finishing touches to the agreement.

As evidence for progress, he pointed to the low profile Suu had maintained in the days since her release. “I don't think she would have agreed not to hold mass meetings without concessions on the part of the government,” he said.

Suu confirmed that she had been lying rather low, despite her liberty. “I've been to see one or two people,” she said, “an old aunt of mine; I went to pay my respects to an abbot who has been very kind to us—but nothing much, because there hasn't been time.” She confirmed that her party was not going to be dogmatic about 1990—demanding that the military simply relinquish power, which had been the NLD's theme song in the past. “We are not holding on to the 1990 elections in the sense of using it to gain power,” she insisted. “What we are concerned about is
the democratic principle, not so much the question of who holds power. Which means there is obviously room for negotiations as to how they choose to honor the results of the 1990 election.” I pointed out that twelve years had passed since that triumph, so if anyone questioned her party's claim to represent the views of the Burmese people today they would have a point. “It's fair to say that,” she conceded. “But who's to say we won't get a bigger majority this time?”

But belying the confidence of the “political observer” I had met that agreement was right around the corner, Suu sounded a much more cautious note. In fact she gave me no reason to think that substantive talks had even begun. She had agreed not to hold impromptu meetings at her front gate, as she had done in 1995; the regime had agreed to let her out of her house. As far as I could tell that was the extent of their accord so far.

Suu hinted that she was impatient for things to start. “I believe that in an official statement the authorities said something about turning a new page,” she told me, “and I certainly don't want the page to remain blank for a long time—blank until it turns grubby. What we want is for the page to be filled up, quickly, with a lot of useful and desirable stuff. The confidence-building stage is over, and it has to be over, you can't keep on at that stage forever, it becomes counterproductive.”

Did she mean, I pressed, that she was waiting for the regime to make the next move? “I don't think I would put it like that,” she replied. “I think if it is the right time, either side should be prepared to make the right move. It's not a question of you first or me first.”

Yet clearly that is what she
was
waiting for: It was up to the holders of power to give an indication that they were prepared to do more than merely restore her freedom of movement. That meant their taking a first, irreversible step to acknowledging her as an interlocutor, as a person with a just claim to discussing issues of immense moment with them on a basis of something like equality. There is no indication that they had ever taken that step in the past, if you ignore the meaningless “Dialogue” splashed across the
New Light of Myanmar
eight years before, nor that they had taken it now.

Much has been made down the years of Suu's alleged stubbornness, her inflexibility, her refusal to concede the slightest thing in the interests of starting a dialogue. Ma Thanegi, whom I met for the first time a couple
of days after seeing Suu, made that point. “I think she should be more compromising,” she told me. “She should set up a good relationship with the government. She should talk to them privately and not scold them.” But regardless of whether Suu used sweet words to describe her captors or blasted them to hell, the ball was and would remain in their court. Diplomats, mediators, the UN Envoy, “political analysts,” journalists, all of us could enthuse, encourage, cajole, remonstrate until we were blue in the face. But until a certain general grasped this particular nettle, nothing would happen.

“We have both kept our sides of the bargain,” Suu told me. “I have not been stopped from going wherever I pleased, and they have not followed us, they have not made problems for some of our supporters . . . I think we've kept our side of the bargain because we've made it clear to our people that we don't want them to come here and turn every day into a political rally.”

Suu had kept her side: Her supporters, the thousands and thousands who had crowded around her garden gate seven years before, did as she requested and stayed well away. Now it was up to the generals to take the whole thing a step further. But amid the atmosphere of heady optimism, there were more somber voices. “Is it a developing situation?” a British diplomat queried, not impressed by the excitement. “Nothing concrete has been achieved. There are no easy answers here. The regime have dug themselves a very deep hole. Coming out of that hole is going to be difficult.”