The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (7 page)

20
. On the impact of the resistance and pacification on Burmese society, see Myint-U,
The Making of Modern Burma
, chapter 8.

*
“The Court of Ava” was how the government of Burma had long been referred to, a reference to its old capital of Ava, near Mandalay.

*
Kinwun is the best remembered of his many titles and styles and refers to a military office he held. He was also known as the lord of Legaing and his personal name was U Kaung; “U” is an honorific in Burmese, roughly equivalent to “Mister” and traditionally denoting a gentleman of some rank.

TWO

DEBATING BURMA

E
LAINE
: “Peterman ran off to Burma.”

S
EINFELD
: “Isn’t it Myanmar now?”

K
RAMER
: “Myanmar … isn’t that the discount pharmacy?”

I
n the summer of 1988, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and almost exactly a hundred years after Harry Prendergast’s field force had landed at Mandalay, the Burmese people took to the streets in their tens of thousands to demand an end to decades of military dictatorship and international isolation. The protests had been rumbling on for months, starting with students at the select Rangoon Institute of Technology, spreading through the sprawling capital and then up-country. In March riot police had arrested dozens of students after unrest around the Rangoon University campus. Over thirty suffocated to death in a police van on the way to detention. More protests followed. The price of food skyrocketed, and a mood of opportunity and imminent upheaval fused with long-pent-up anger and resentment against the authorities. There were rumors of strikes and rallies in different towns. Those who could listened every night for the latest (and uncensored) news on the Burmese-language broadcasts of the BBC. Even in the homes of the urban well-to-do, senior civil servants and professionals who lived in relative comfort, there was a sense that “something had to change.” A revolutionary atmosphere had developed.
¹

On 23 July, not long after the monsoon rains had started in earnest, General Ne Win, the man who had seized power in 1962 and had ruled single-handedly ever since, took to the podium and addressed the hundreds of assembled delegates. Rangoon was hot and muggy, but this meeting was in a cavernous air-conditioned chamber, built next to the old racetrack, with wall-to-wall carpeting and rows of neatly dressed men (and a few women), a rare picture of modernity in a country that had seemingly turned its back on the twentieth century. General Ne Win had called an extraordinary session of his Burma Socialist Programme Party Central Committee. The party was his personal creation and the only legal political party in the country, made up almost entirely of ex-military men as a sort of civilian facade for the armed forces.

And there, in front of his cooled and pliant audience, and after a short speech on recent events, General Ne Win, the dictator of Burma, said something no one expected. Speaking in clear, measured tones, he called for a popular referendum on a return to democracy and outlined a very specific process that could lead to “a multiparty system of government” within months. He said that he took responsibility for the deaths of students in police custody in March. But continued demonstrations and violence had shown that people had lost confidence in the government more generally. If the referendum opted for change, a parliament would have to be elected that would then write a new constitution. He himself would stand down immediately, together with his top aides.

Whether Ne Win meant what he said that day is impossible to tell. In resigning, he chose as his successor an old subordinate, General “the Lion” Sein Lwin, a man not known for his liberal ways. It was, in any event, an incredible speech. The ruling elite in front of him sat in amazed silence. Looking straight at the television cameras, he also included a less than veiled threat: “Although I said I would retire from politics, we will have to maintain control to prevent the country from falling apart, from disarray, till the future organizations can take full control. In continuing to maintain control, I want the entire nation, the people, to know that if in future there are mob disturbances, if the army shoots, it hits—there is no firing into the air to scare.”

Burma’s democracy movement began that day.

Rangoon was electric. Normally a sleepy city of perhaps two million people, with lush tree-lined streets, crumbling masonry, and endlessly repaired 1950s sedans, the Burmese capital was now primed for action. People did not either trust or want to wait for the process Ne Win had outlined. Underground student groups began mobilizing and busily distributed leaflets calling for a general strike. A small stream of foreign journalists slipped through the decrepit Mingaladon Airport. Outside the capital sporadic protests continued.

And then, on 8 August 1988, at eight minutes past eight in the morning, a day and time deemed auspicious by the student organizers, dockworkers along the Rangoon River walked off their jobs. When word spread, people began marching toward the city center, waving flags, banners, and placards. With no one to champion, many carried portraits of the 1940s nationalist supremo Aung San. From the northern suburbs, long columns of university and school students ambled down the leafy boulevards that led to the city center, and by noon the broad expanse around Bandoola Park was crammed with sarong-clad crowds of cheering people. Apartment balconies and rooftops across the old colonial downtown area filled with onlookers. Makeshift podiums were put up in front of City Hall, and one speaker after another pushed forward to denounce a government that had oppressed and impoverished them for more than a generation. The call was clear and echoed Ne Win’s: a return to multiparty government. Thousands moved toward the Shwedagon Pagoda about a mile away, where more fiery speeches were given. Hawkers sold cigarettes and drinks, and no one doubted that the country was at a watershed.

The demonstrations were not confined to Rangoon. Across every major city in Burma that afternoon big crowds of ordinary people left work and gathered on the streets to voice their frustrations against Ne Win’s regime. Nothing like this had happened in decades.

All day the military had stood around and watched. There had been no incident. The army had allowed the demonstrations to take place. But at 11:30 p.m., with thousands still milling around in front of City Hall, it decided to draw the line. Across downtown the electricity was turned off, and big mobile loudspeakers ordered the crowd to disperse. No one budged. Then, in the dark muggy night, Bren gun carriers and trucks heavy with combat-ready troops in olive-green fatigues and steel helmets wheeled out onto the main square, and the young crowd, refusing 
to be cowed, began singing the Burmese national anthem. The army opened fire. The firing continued until the next morning. Dozens were believed to have been killed and wounded that first night, but there was never any proper count.

The response was not what the army had in mind. Rather than curtail the demonstrations, the bloodshed incited people further, and for the next five days the death toll rose as soldiers used lethal force to break up the mounting protests. On 10 August troops opened fire on a group of exhausted doctors and nurses in front of Rangoon General Hospital who ventured out to call for an end to the violence. Many of the dead around the city were high school students or young men from the poorer neighborhoods; they had shown themselves the bravest or most foolhardy in facing the German-manufactured G-7 rifles of the Burmese army. Some placed the number of dead and wounded well into the hundreds.

Finally, on 13 August, as if the men in charge had themselves had enough of the bloodletting, the army called a halt to its actions and announced the resignation of General Sein Lwin. Everywhere the army was ordered to return to the barracks, and soldiers quietly and quickly crept out of Rangoon. A close civilian associate of the old dictator’s, an English-trained jurist, was appointed president, and he gave a hearty and conciliatory speech over the radio. But the public was not impressed. Instead a feeling of imminent victory filled the air.

Over the next many days civil administration in Burma collapsed in practically every city and town in the country, as millions of people happily strolled out of their homes and did what they had not been able to do for so long: organize as they wished and speak their minds. It was no longer just the students or the workers, but people from every walk of life. Rangoon developed a carnival atmosphere. Trade unions developed overnight. And in a country where the press had been tightly controlled for a generation, dozens of newspapers and magazines, laboriously mimeographed, suddenly appeared in shops and on sidewalks. In Mandalay the army retreated behind the walls of the old palace as committees of students, workers, and Buddhist monks took over the management of Thibaw’s town. When the still-government-controlled radio and television claimed that the demonstrators did not represent the silent majority of law-abiding housewives and others, the All-Burma Housewives Association was formed, and hundreds of middle-class
women, happily clanging pots and pans, marched with the teeming crowds under their newly furled banners. Soon the government itself broke ranks. In ministry after ministry civil servants and clerical workers left their offices and joined the throngs in the street. At the Foreign Office top-ranking diplomats signed a letter saying that the policies of the military regime had destroyed Burma’s once-proud international reputation. Eventually the staff of the Burmese Broadcasting Corporation walked off their jobs, and the official media were suddenly silenced. Even the police went on strike. The revolution seemed on the verge of success. But who would lead it?

One by one, old and new politicians came forward. First it was Aung Gyi, once Ne Win’s own deputy in the armed forces. Then, on 25 August, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, spoke for the first time to a massive gathering along the western slope of the Shwedagon Pagoda. And on 28 August, U Nu, in his eighties and the last democratically elected prime minister, announced the formation of his new League for Democracy and Peace. A number of those who came into view were old leftist or Communist leaders, including several old men who had helped lead the insurrections in the 1950s. Thakin Soe, onetime Stalinist agitator and guerrilla strategist, now eighty-three, issued a rousing call to revolution from his hospital bed. General Strike Centers were set up in more than two hundred towns. But it seemed to many students (and others) that the politicians were only grandstanding. No single party or organization enjoyed the broad support needed to deal the final blow. And after the initial euphoria of revolt, many, especially in the middle classes, began to be fearful of a coming anarchy.

By late August the violence had spread to the working-class suburbs of Rangoon, and food shortages led to rioting. Rumors spread that Ne Win’s spies had secretly poisoned the water supply or had infiltrated the student leadership. On 25 August, prisoners were released or broke free everywhere in the country, adding to a growing sense of insecurity. On more than one occasion suspected government agents were gruesomely beheaded or hacked to death in front of cheering crowds. What had begun as a political revolt by disaffected students was now on the verge of becoming a bloody social revolution.

Many realized that time was running out. There were hundreds of political meetings a day, in smoke-filled living rooms and corner tea shops, as men and women in cotton
longyis
engaged in passionate and
sometimes ill-tempered arguments about what should happen next. On 17 September a huge mob gathered outside the Trade Ministry and disarmed the soldiers guarding the building, the first time soldiers had peacefully given up their arms. Another crowd almost stormed the War Office, the very headquarters of the armed forces, but were dissuaded from doing so by politicians who promised that the government would soon resign voluntarily. These same politicians—Aung Gyi, Aung San Suu Kyi, U Nu, and others—agreed to meet together with student leaders on 19 September to form a revolutionary transitional government. Foreign embassies in Rangoon were approached to ensure immediate recognition. But General Ne Win and his men, shocked at recent goings-on, had devised other plans.