Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  I do not wish to see any split and struggles between the army which my father built up and the people who love my father so much. May I also from this platform ask the personnel of the armed forces to reciprocate this kind of understanding and sympathy?

  Michael Aris and their sons, Alexander and Kim, stood behind her on the podium, and Nyo Ohn Myint, one of the young activists in the democratic movement, relates that Michael Aris was proud but also full of doubt: “He had an expression in his face, kind of like: I’m going to lose my wife and my family and my privacy.” On their way from the meeting, Nyo Ohn Myint traveled in the same car as Michael Aris. Aung San Suu Kyi had decided that she and her husband should travel in different cars so that Michael would not have to be exposed to danger in the case of an attempt on her life.

  “Everyone in the car was talking at once,” says Nyo Ohn Myint when I talk to him more than twenty years later. “But Michael Aris sat silent, looking out of the side window, deeply sunk in thought.”

  Another one of those who listened to Aung San Suu Kyi that day was then twenty-year-old university student Khin (last name withheld). She had become involved in the demonstrations back in the spring. She had confronted the violence of the soldiers, and several of her friends had been mistreated and thrown into prison.

  “When I heard Aung San Suu Kyi speak, tears were streaming down my cheeks,” she said later, after having been compelled to go into exile. “I wept. I knew at once that she was the person we had been searching for. She would be able to lead the democratic movement.”

  The weeks after Aung San Suu Kyi’s speech were tumultuous. After the massacres in August, it was no longer possible to control the masses of people, and the student groups that had led the demonstrations were not numerous enough to keep the most violent elements away. At least fifty security agents got in the way of aggravated mobs, who hanged them from the nearest lamppost or chopped off their heads with homemade machetes.

  Aung San Suu Kyi did what she could to cool the heated mood and repeated time after time the significance of nonviolent methods. But it did not help. The mob continued rampaging, and now the military had been given all the excuse it needed in order to retake control again. On September 18, when the rest of the world had its attention focused on the first events at the Olympic Games in Seoul, Gen. Saw Maung sent out a bulletin that the military had once again taken control. (The date was not selected randomly: 1 + 8 = 9, and September is the ninth month. Ne Win and his astrologer still ruled from the wings.) The civilian Maung Maung was removed from office as prime minister and returned to his role as historian. The group who were now to govern the country called itself the State Law and Order Restoration Committee (SLORC). For the second time in a short while, a state of emergency was declared throughout the country, and for the second time the population responded by carrying out massive protests. Hundreds more lives were claimed yet again when the soldiers opened fire against defenseless civilians.

  This time the military was considerably more structured and better organized than when it had crushed the demonstrations on August 8. The aim was to create an example as a lesson to others, once and for all.

  The coup and the violence that followed it resulted in a wave of refugees who crossed the border to Thailand. Thousands of young students—activists who had been at the head of the protest movement—made contact with the guerrilla troops belonging to the ethnic minorities and joined the armed battle against the junta.

  Amid this chaos, General Maung sent out information that the country was to change its name from Burma to Myanmar. Burma was a colonial name, which apart from anything else had not included the country’s ethnic minorities, he asserted. The only problem was that the ethnic minorities considered just the opposite to be true. Myanmar was the name of the ancient Bamar kingdom, and the change of name was understood by most of the ethnic minorities to be an expression of the junta’s ambitions to be the supreme rulers. Burma was the name given by the British, but it was also a state of which the minorities could see themselves as being a part. The democratic movement in its turn saw the name change as a cheap attempt on the part of the junta to launder their dirty reputation. This is the explanation as to why the democratic movement in exile, like most of the mass media in the world, uses “Burma” nowadays, whereas diplomats within the United Nations and other more formal institutions use the name “Myanmar.”

  Saw Maung also sent out a bulletin—somewhat surprisingly—that the junta was planning to carry out a democratic election. This information was a direct reaction to the popular protests. He realized that something had to be done to prevent the revolt from becoming a full-scale revolution.

  Aung San Suu Kyi received the news via the radio in her mother’s bedroom on the second floor of the house on University Avenue. “My strongest feeling was doubt,” she said long afterward. “I doubted the sincerity of the junta, doubted that they really had the intention to have a free and fair election.”

  This doubt was justified. Behind Saw Maung stood a number of unscrupulous types, like head of the security service Khin Nyunt and Gen. Than Shwe, who was later to maneuver himself to the position as leader of the junta. They were coldly counting on the election leading to a split parliament. Ethnic and political groups would fight against one another just as much as against the military. In that situation the generals would in practice be able to continue running the country. The junta also possibly had an exaggerated and flawed view of public opinion. In Burma there were no independent sources of information. All the newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels were under the intransigent control of the censorship authority. Everything, even down to the most minute funeral notice, was examined in advance and adapted to be of advantage to the interests of the military junta.

  In most such national systems with iron control, the population knows that the media lie. They often do not bother about what is in the newspaper since there are other underground channels for finding out what is really happening in the country. This insight does not necessarily reach those at the top. The members of the junta are fed with information by subordinates who want to ingratiate themselves and make a career for themselves, and who therefore adapt the information, wash it clean of all unpleasant truths, and say what the generals want to hear. In that situation it seems as though SLORC leaders had understood that they enjoyed a popular support that in fact had never existed. They actually believed that they would win the election. They believed that the millions who had protested in the streets represented, despite everything, a minority. An unparalleled blindness.

  The generals first chose to ignore the power of the protests. They then did not see what was specifically new in the democratic movement that had grown up during the year. Never before had all of Burma’s ethnic groups joined forces in the same demonstration procession. Never before had they been so united in their criticism of the junta’s misrule. Apart from this, Aung San Suu Kyi had made her entrance onto the political stage. She gradually adapted to the thought of not only mediating in the political crisis but also leading the opposition. The combination of a special moment in history and fate had carried her to her homeland just when she was most needed. For the first time in more than forty years, the critics of the regime had a person they could all unite behind. Her name was Aung San Suu Kyi. For the first time since independence, the path forward was once again wide open.

  4

  The Heritage

  It is easy to start a conversation with people in Burma. Despite years of repression and the network of informers maintained by the security police throughout the country, people still want to talk about their daily lives and their contempt for the country’s rulers.

  During a trip to Burma a couple of years ago, I visited a Christian organization whose main location was in Rangoon. One of the pastors told me about the resistance of the ethnic minorities against the junta and their struggle to be allowed to keep their own language and their own traditions.

  After this m
eeting I crossed the road and went into a teahouse. It was the middle of the day and the heat was ridiculously oppressive. I ordered a Star Cola—Burma’s equivalent of a Pepsi—and sat down to go through my notes. After a short while a man at the neighboring table started talking to me. It was only then that I noticed that he was wearing a military shirt. A worn-out green shirt without any officer’s tabs. He may perhaps have been a soldier once, or he was possibly on leave.

  The man, who was about twenty-five, asked what I thought about Burma, and since I was formally there as a tourist, I said all the usual things about beautiful pagodas and historical monuments.

  “And what do you think about the economy?” he asked.

  I looked up in surprise. Economy is a code word. When people ask about that, it is usually an invitation to a conversation on politics. After that we carried on a whispered conversation about the regime, poverty, and the lack of development. We were not able to speak about Aung San Suu Kyi. I did not dare to go that far. But when the conversation had almost come to an end, I pointed to a picture on the wall depicting her father, Gen. Aung San.

  “He understood Burma’s problem,” said the man quietly. “He would have been able to stop the disruption.”

  This comment is typical. One hears it all the time.

  Despite the passing of over sixty years since he was murdered, Aung San is still one of the most significant figures in Burma. Independence has been ascribed to him, and both the military and the democratic movement use the political heritage from him to legitimate their own politics. To put it simply, one could say that he is Burma’s equivalent of George Washington, or perhaps the Swedish king Gustav Vasa. A man who chucked out the colonial rulers and established a nation.

  Aung San was born in 1915 in Natmauk, a sleepy town in the dry central regions of Burma. He was the youngest of nine children. They and their parents belonged to the lower middle class—to the extent that one can speak of a middle class in the Burma of those days. Their father, U Pha, had grown up in a farming family but left the country and was educated as a lawyer. During Aung San’s youth, U Pha ran a small legal office, but in a town like Natmauk the client base was limited and the firm earned just enough to pay its costs. It seems to have been their mother, Daw Suu, who stood for economic stability instead. She had inherited some land outside the town, and at the same time as she brought up the children and took care of the household, she also saw to it that the yield from the fields was sufficient for the family to get by on.

  During the last years of the Bamar Kingdom in the nineteenth century, her family had belonged to the Bamar gentry. Her mother’s cousin, U Min Yaung, had been one of the most stubborn guerrilla leaders during the first years of the British occupation in the 1880s. Aung San grew up with the stories about his famous relative, and he dreamed even as a child of standing at the head of a large army against the British colonial power.

  The British had occupied Burma in three stages during the nineteenth century. In the 1820s they had taken the provinces Arakan and Tenasserim on the coast. On that occasion the aim had really been only to push back the Bamar Kingdom, which had its own plans of becoming a major power. During the rule of King Bodawpaya the Bamar had invaded Arakan in 1784 and in principle made slaves out of the population. The effect was that a wave of refugees fled over the border to India, where the British had already taken power. In 1817 the Bamar invaded Assam in northeastern India, and two years later they made a violent raid into Manipur and later also into Cachar, where the previous rulers sought support from the British against the Bamar attack. However, it was not until 1823, when the Bamar attacked the British outpost on the island of Shapura, that the conflict with the British led to a full-scale war. The British sent in an enormous armed force that almost perished from disease when it was confronted by the Burmese rainy season. Fifteen thousand soldiers died and the war cost the British five million pounds.

  However, the British won the war, and thanks to this, they were able to take power over some of the most strategically important sections along Burma’s coast. One of the deciding battles took place at Danubyu, roughly fifteen miles northwest of Rangoon. Up until then the Bamar had been the most victorious army, but at Danubyu the British succeeded in killing the Bamar supreme commander, General Bandula, a military genius who had personally drawn up the strategy during the war.

  The Bamar court signed a peace treaty with the British (the Treaty of Yandabo) that provided advantageous trading terms for the British East India Company. Some years later, the British merchants started yet another war, and in just a few days Rangoon was also occupied, along with parts of the Irrawaddy Delta.

  Now the British were in control of the entire coast and the fertile farming country in the south, and for all intents and purposes the power lay in the hands of the British East India Company. A trading company had been accorded the status of a colonial power—even though it had a symbiotic relationship with the English government.

  What was left of the Bamar Kingdom became totally dependent on the goodwill of the British for its survival. However, the merchants of the British East India Company were still not satisfied. They wanted to construct a trade route between the Indian Ocean and China, and they were of the opinion that the mountains of northern Burma provided the best alternative. The French were simultaneously expanding their sphere of interest in IndoChina, and the British grew nervous about the competition. In a letter to the governor-general of India in 1867, England’s foreign minister, Lord Cranborne, wrote,

  It is of primary importance to allow no other European power to insert itself between British Burmah and China. Our influence in that country must be paramount. The country itself is of no great importance. But an easy communication with the multitudes who inhabit Western China is an object of national importance.

  In the Bamar capital of Mandalay, King Thibaw later came to power via a complicated web of intrigues. In order to get rid of all conceivable competitors to the throne, he had had more than eighty of his closest relatives executed. Men, women, and children had been stuffed into white sacks and carted out to the palace courtyard where they all were clubbed to death by Thibaw’s bodyguards. The British had been looking for a good moral excuse to occupy the northern parts of the country as well, and when this brutality continued they were provided with one. When they actually attacked in the autumn of 1885, the Bamar army had no means of defending itself against the well-armed, disciplined English troops, and the war was over in two weeks. Mandalay was captured and plundered and Thibaw was sent into exile on the eastern coast of India.

  Just before the British attack, Thibaw had made Aung San’s relative U Min Yaung commander of the town of Myolulin, situated near Natmauk, Aung San’s own birthplace. When the British had overthrown Thibaw, they immediately destroyed the entire Bamar system of nobility and all the local rulers were ordered to swear loyalty to the occupying powers. U Min Yaung refused, however. He declared that he would rather die than give way to the British, and he gathered together a guerrilla army under his command. The British knew that he was a popular leader in central Burma, and they did all they could to get him on their side. When they did not succeed, they started a military operation to crush the opposition. After a time of playing cat and mouse with each other, U Min Yaung was captured and beheaded.

  Even so, in practice it took over ten years for the colonial powers to gain control over Burma. The red-clad soldiers met resistance everywhere, partly from exofficers in the Bamar army and partly from the ethnic minorities.

  The Bamar are the largest group of people in Burma. They constitute around 60 percent of the total population and they live mainly in the central parts of the country, in the vicinity of the Irrawaddy River with its six hundred miles. When using the word “Bamar,” one thus means the majority group. The word “Burmese” is used to describe all the ethnic groups living within the mapped-out borders that constitute Burma.

  Apart from the Bamar, there are several dozen ethnic
minorities, of which the smallest consists of not more than a couple thousand people. The larger of these groups, however, are easy to distinguish as distinct and separate. They have had control over their own territory for a long time and built up their own social and political structures. They have their own languages, their own culture, and their own stories about their people’s history. The largest groups are the Karen, Karenni, Mon, Chin, Shan, Kachin, and Rakhine. They live mainly in the mountainous, jungle-clad border regions of the country, and historically they have actually never been subjugated to the Bamar central rule. The country that is today called Burma/Myanmar and that nowadays is to be seen on the maps of the world has, in other words, never existed. The various groups of people have lived in their own societies, and the mountains have protected them from occupation and given them a certain degree of independence.

  The border peoples have often been in conflict with the Bamar kings, and when the British attacked they did not intend to defend the Bamar monarchy. However, they also feared that the British would be more effective in their ambition to conquer the mountainous regions, and therefore several of the ethnic groups went out into battle to fight against the occupation.