The Lady and the Peacock (60 page)

The attackers beat women and pulled off their longyi and their blouses. When victims, covered in blood, fell to the ground, the attackers grabbed their hair and pounded their heads on the pavement until their bodies stopped moving. The whole time the attackers were screaming the words, “Die, die, die . . .” There was so much blood. I still cannot get rid of the sight of people, covered in blood, being beaten mercilessly to death.
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What saved Suu's life, according to Aung Lynn Htut, the senior MI officer who later defected to the United States, was that the officers in charge of the attack had not expected her car to be at the front—which was why the initial attack was concentrated on the cars in the middle and the rear. But it was not long before they realized their mistake.

“As the USDA members approached Daw Suu's car, we braced ourselves for the attacks,” Wunna Maung recalled. “The attackers first beat the outer ring of my colleagues on the left side of Daw Suu's car, and smashed the window . . . As my colleagues collapsed one by one, the attackers then started beating the inner ring of security. The attackers hit my colleagues ferociously, because they knew we would not fight back.”
Wunna Maung was only saved because he was on the right side of the car, while the attacks were concentrated on the left.

Inside the car Suu's driver pleaded with the attackers, telling them who exactly he was carrying in the back—but that only inflamed them further. “My anger exploded,” he admitted, “I wanted to run them over.” He put the vehicle into reverse, stamped on the accelerator and the car hurtled back; the assailants reacted by raining blows on the car, breaking the windows both in the front and the back, where Suu was traveling, as well as the wing mirrors and the headlights, and battering the car's bodywork.

Over his shoulder as he roared backwards Kyaw Soe Lin saw wounded colleagues sprawled across the road, in his path; frightened that he might run them over, he again reversed direction—but now the road ahead was blocked by trucks.

Pulling over to the verge he succeeded in squeezing past them, but then found himself faced by dozens more trucks, their lights illuminating more attackers—two to three hundred was his estimate—“there were so many of them,” he said—some of them holding banners with anti-NLD slogans.

The USDA men looked on “in surprise,” he said, as he hurtled towards them. Some of his party's bodyguards were clinging to the outside of the vehicle, hanging on for dear life. “I was worried that the attackers might pull them off if we got too close,” he said, “so I drove straight at them, pretending I was going to run into them, and they scattered. Then I pulled the car back onto the road and kept on driving.”

In the murk ahead he saw more road blocks, but resolved to get through them without stopping. “I realized that all of us, including Daw Daw, would die if we didn't get out of this place, so I kept on driving.” As he roared through the hostile mob they threw objects at the car, smashing the remaining windows and one of them striking him.

“Daw Daw asked me if I was okay. I said I was fine and kept on driving. I knew that if I stopped at the road blocks they would beat us to death.” He kept driving as fast as he could, weaving through another barricade of trucks and past a line of police with their guns pointed at the road, and other figures with guns who looked like soldiers. “I drove through them but didn't hit anyone as they jumped out of the way,” he recalled. “Daw Daw said we should only stop when we reached Depayin.”

But they didn't make it that far. As they entered the town of Yea U, armed guards forced them to stop, demanded to know who was in the car, and made them wait. Half an hour later a large contingent of soldiers turned up. “One officer, apparently a battalion commander, arrived and put a gun to my temple and ordered us to go with them,” Kyaw Soe Lin said. “Daw Daw nodded at me, so I did as they said. We were taken to Yea U Jail.” Suu's year of freedom—her year of living more dangerously than ever before—was over.

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Suu survived the Depayin massacre without serious injury thanks to the courage and skill of her driver, but it cost the lives of about seventy of her supporters. For the outside world, and for most people in Burma, too, it was seen as another disastrous setback for the cause of Burmese democracy. But in the highest, most secretive echelons of the junta, a different story was being played out. Depayin was the worst, bloodiest and most perilous moment in Suu's career, indeed in her entire life. Yet paradoxically the months that followed brought her and her party closer to a political breakthrough than they have ever been before or since—one which only now, nearly a decade later, is coming to light.

The aftermath of Depayin reveals two things about the Burmese junta. One is the extraordinary brutishness of Senior General Than Shwe, who soon afterwards admitted ordering the massacre, with the aim of “eradicating” Aung San Suu Kyi. The other is the total disarray within the ruling triumvirate. However, as the negative consequences of the massacre unfolded, it was Than Shwe's rival Khin Nyunt who, against the odds, found himself back in the ascendant. And his longstanding ambition of reaching agreement with Suu and her party finally began to bear fruit.

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In the days after the attack, Suu was locked up in Insein Jail, all her senior colleagues in the party were put in jail or under house arrest, and party offices throughout the country, including the ones she had been busy reopening in the days leading up to the attack, were closed down again. The brave if vague hopes raised by her release, which had led the insiders
I interviewed in May 2002 to predict a power-sharing agreement between her and the junta, were dashed.

The international community, which had been expecting to see results from Suu's liberation, was shocked. The United States and the European Union tightened economic sanctions, the United States banning most imports (although Burma's three main exports, gas, gems and timber, continued to get through the net), and Japan, as ever a bellwether for what the junta could get away with, suspended economic aid. Even the flaccid councils of ASEAN were bounced into reacting by the United States, demanding Suu's release for the first time ever.

For UN envoy Razali Ismail, the massacre killed off all the hopes that had been raised during many months of painstaking negotiations. He flew into Rangoon a few days after the massacre, when Suu's condition and even her whereabouts were still unknown, and demanded to see her. “I was taken in a car with darkened windows, and we changed cars along the way,” he recalled. “Finally we arrived at Insein Prison and I was totally shocked. They had never told me she was in jail: Khin Nyunt had simply told me he had rescued her from the mob.”
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Despite everything that had happened, Suu told the Malaysian diplomat that she was still willing to “turn the page” and use the situation as an opportunity for dialogue. But Ismail could see no redeeming elements in the situation: Instead he anticipated all too clearly the outside world's reaction. “I came out very angry,” he said. “I told Khin Nyunt, ‘What are you doing? Do you know if I go out and tell the world that Aung San Suu Kyi is in Insein Prison what will happen? What are your intentions? Why are you keeping her like this? Why is she looking so bedraggled?' The next day she was given clean clothes, better food, and within two weeks she was out.” Suu was taken straight from the prison to her home, where she was once again put under detention.

Yet although Khin Nyunt was the target of Ismail's anger—his only interlocutor within the junta—Khin Nyunt was just as livid himself.

It was he who had been the junta's representative in the talks with Suu and Ismail that had begun well before her release from detention; it was he who saw her integration into Burma's governing structure as the key to his country's international rehabilitation. And now his plans, like Ismail's, were in ruins.

Khin Nyunt and Brigadier General Than Tun, his subordinate who had the job of liaising with Suu, had warned her that it was risky to tour the country so soon after her release, but they had no prior knowledge of what was planned at Depayin. That was because of the intense distrust between the three men at the head of the junta, all of whom had climbed to the top by different routes. Khin Nyunt was a university graduate who had gone on to the Officers' Training School in Rangoon, Maung Aye was a product of the Defense Academy in Maymyo, the old British hill station near Mandalay, while Than Shwe had no such elite training but had come up through the ranks. Each had their own culture, their own entourage and their own views of Burma's future, and they guarded their secrets jealously.

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the regime tried to claim that what had happened at Depayin was a minor incident provoked by youths and monks who supported the NLD. In a press conference on June 6th, Deputy Foreign Minister U Khin Maung Win said that Suu's motorcade “attempted to plough through” a crowd of “townspeople protesting against her visit,” causing injuries to people in the crowd and provoking “clashes between the townspeople and the motorcade” that resulted in four people dying and fifty being hospitalized.

But it was not long before the truth emerged. Soon after the massacre, according to the defector Aung Lynn Htut, “Maung Aye and Khin Nyunt approached Than Shwe and asked him whether he had ordered the assassination of Aung San Suu Kyi. He admitted yes, he had ordered the attack to kill her.”
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Than Shwe, whose ruthlessness is matched by an amazing unawareness of the effect his orders can have on the outside world, later repeated the admission to a larger audience. In a letter to Asian governments, he justified the attack by claiming that Suu and her party had been “conspiring to create an anarchic situation . . . with a view to attaining power” by Suu's birthday on June 19th. He maintained that he was faced with “a threat to national security by this militant group,” and was compelled to take firm measures “to prevent the country from sliding down the road to anarchy and disintegration.”

But within a month of the attack, as the scale of the outside world's reaction became clear, Than Shwe was forced onto the defensive. In June, as the true culprits were exposed and the US Congress's Subcommittee on
International Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Human Rights mounted an investigation, he ordered the closure of USDA offices around the country. It was a sham—none of them stayed closed for long, and soon the organization was once again prospering—but it was a sign that his attempt to bluster his way out of the crisis had failed.

Than Shwe is an intensely superstitious man, like his predecessors, and it is possible that he saw in Suu's survival of this concerted and well-planned attempt to kill her further proof of her supernatural powers. With the careful work of rebuilding Burma's prestige now in tatters, he was forced to accept that a new policy was required. And the only man to provide it was Khin Nyunt. The only English speaker at the summit of the junta, the only man willing and able to talk to foreign diplomats, he was put in charge of cleaning up Than Shwe's mess. And in August, less than three months later, Than Shwe named him prime minister in place of himself, retaining his own positions as head of state and chairman of the State Peace and Development Council.

“Khin Nyunt's power had been on the wane in the months leading up to the Depayin massacre,” said Dr. Maung Zarni, “but the failure of Depayin, which was intended to get rid of Aung San Suu Kyi, and the negative international reaction to it, put him back in the game: His men were the most polished in the Ministry of Defense and within SPDC as a whole. It was his team's trouble-shooting prowess that gave Khin Nyunt greater scope.”

Five days after his promotion, in response to the new sanctions, Khin Nyunt announced the plan that has dominated political discourse in the country ever since: the Seven-Point Road Map to Democracy.

It was an attempt to tackle the bogey of legitimacy which had bedeviled the junta ever since the army crackdown of September 18, 1988. When the newly named SLORC took the place of the old socialist one-party system designed by Ne Win, it was presented as a stopgap to deal with the emergency caused by the popular rising, which would melt away once a new government had been elected.

When the elections were won by the NLD, that plan was aborted and SLORC, later renamed SPDC, clung to power, but still with the understanding that it was a provisional arrangement that would last only until a permanent constitutional framework could be agreed on. But with the NLD's walkout from the torpid, regimented and pre-cooked National
Convention in 1996, all efforts to build that framework were suspended, along with the Convention itself. Khin Nyunt's road map was an attempt to get the whole process started again.

The first step, as he told his colleagues in the highest levels of the junta at Rangoon's People's Assembly Building at 9:30
AM
on August 30, 2003, “is to reconvene the National Convention that has been adjourned since 1996.” Subsequent steps would involve the drafting of a constitution by the National Convention, the submission of the constitution to a referendum, the holding of new elections under the constitution and the convening of parliament, followed by the building of “a modern, developed and democratic nation.” This, he told his colleagues, would be the “road map” to “a disciplined democratic system.”

Khin Nyunt only mentioned Suu directly once in the speech, referring to the fact that his senior colleague Than Shwe had “with magnanimity” met her—nine years before plotting her violent death—to try to “find ways to smooth out the differences.” Elsewhere he refers to her obliquely as “an individual” and “a preferred individual,” but her problematic person dominates his discourse. The National Convention had been suspended because her party, overwhelmingly the most important one, had walked out of it; the only way to reconstitute the Convention and gain the credibility of the outside world, in particular of the “big nations” which are “unfairly pressuring our country”—a clear reference to the new sanctions imposed after the Depayin massacre—was to persuade the NLD to sign up for it again. And although no mention was made of this in his speech, and few hints of it were picked up by the foreign press, this was now his urgent priority.