Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  However, 1988 was also the starting point for a year of intensive election work. Only a few weeks after Saw Maung’s and the new junta’s seizure of power, Aung San Suu Kyi became one of the founders of a political party, the National League for Democracy. U Tin Oo, the former commander in chief who had ended up in a conflict with the junta in the 1970s, was chosen as the party chairman. Aung San Suu Kyi was the general secretary.

  The new junta, the SLORC, had sent out a message that the elections would be held some time during 1990, which meant that the NLD had between one and two years at its disposal in which to carry out an election campaign. After 1962, Ne Win had banned all parties except Burma’s socialist party, the BSPP, whose central committee had been more powerful than the country’s formal government. When the SLORC took over after the BSPP in 1988, they promised that the one-party state would be abolished and that promise gave rise to enormous activity in civilian society. New parties sprouted like mushrooms out of the ground, and within a couple of months more than two hundred new parties had been registered. Scarcely one hundred of them were later authorized by the junta and actually allowed to participate in the elections.

  The junta had given all the new parties the right to use the telephone (which was far from self-evident in Burma in 1988), and they had been given special rations of gasoline so that they could travel around the country. The junta had also started a new party, the National Unity Party (NUP), which replaced Burma’s socialist party. Saw Maung saw to it that all the parties that allied themselves with the NUP were able to run their election campaigns with money from the state, while all the SLORC’s critics had to manage as best they could. Throughout the entire election campaign the generals refused to meet the representatives of the opposition in debates or in order to make clear which rules were to apply for the election process. “There are more than one hundred political parties. Which one of them are we supposed to meet?” they asked rhetorically. Then Aung San Suu Kyi suggested that the opposition should choose one representative in common, and at a meeting in Rangoon the 104 different parties united in choosing Aung San Suu Kyi to represent the assembled opposition in talks with the junta.

  After the meeting, leaders of all the parties except the NLD were called in for interrogation by the security police. A pair of handcuffs had been symbolically placed in front of them on the table, and several of them were pressured to renounce their support for Aung San Suu Kyi. Those who refused were subjected to very tough reprisals. Khin Maung Myint, the party leader for the People’s Progressive Party, was thrown into prison where he became very ill several years later. One of his medical orderlies related that the junta gave him an ultimatum right up to the last moment of his life: he would be given medicine and medical care, but only if he rejected Aung San Suu Kyi. Khin Maung Myint had an extremely high temperature, but nonetheless he yelled at his warders: “No uniforms! Don’t come here! I’d rather die than sign your papers!” He died after four years in prison.

  Despite the junta’s efforts, the citizens of Burma knew that Aung San Suu Kyi had support from most of the political parties and groups. She suggested later that in order not to split the votes any further, an even greater degree of coordination was required of the opposition parties, which meant sharing only one candidate in each constituency. No such alliance was ever created, however.

  The SLORC had promised political freedom, but it only took a few weeks for that promise to be broken. The military cracked down on the whole of the opposition. The largest student party, the Democratic Party for a New Society (DPNS), that openly supported the NLD, had the whole time to choose new leaders since the junta imprisoned them as soon as they had been nominated. One of them, the young student Moe Thee Zun, went underground when he found out that the security service was searching for him. Some weeks later he turned up on the border with Thailand, where he declared that peaceful methods were no longer of any use. It was time to take up arms in the struggle against the junta. He became one of the leading forces in the student army that warred along with the ethnic minorities against the junta for a number of years along the Thai border.

  Aung San Suu Kyi, however, was a tougher nut to crack. She immediately became extremely popular, even among the soldiers in the army, and she launched an election campaign that was several months long. She traveled as though she were obsessed. She held political meetings and met NLD activists all over Burma. Everywhere she went, tens of thousands of people turned up to listen, and in record time the party succeeded in building up a comprehensive network of local offices and party associations. At the end of the year they had registered a dizzying three million members.

  Traveling in Burma takes time. The roads are in a terrible state, and a swarm of cyclists, ox carts, and pedestrians make for slow going. The whole traffic situation is made even worse on account of the steering wheel in most cars being on the right, despite the introduction of right-hand traffic in the country way back in the 1970s. For an inexperienced driver, it is in other words lethal to pass since he or she cannot see the oncoming traffic.

  For Aung San Suu Kyi and her companions, it was essential to plan the journeys well ahead of time in order to exploit every opportunity of meeting people and recruiting new members. Most of Suu Kyi’s meetings were held late in the afternoons or in the evenings. After each meeting she and her companions would spend the night in some guesthouse or another in order to get up as early as four o’clock in the morning and start on their journey to the next village.

  “I have never ceased to be moved by the sense of the world lying quiescent and vulnerable, waiting to be awakened by the light of the new day quivering just beyond the horizon,” she wrote some years later in a Japanese newspaper.

  When I talked to the journalist and author Bertil Lintner, one of the world’s leading experts on Burmese politics, he described the election campaign as presenting a much more dangerous challenge to the junta than the protests in 1988. Despite the way that the junta harassed and arrested activists, the democratic movement succeeded in disciplining its opposition. Instead of chaotic and often violent demonstrations through the big cities, people gathered to listen to quiet political speeches, and when the military and the police provoked them, they succeeded in keeping calm anyway. The whole election campaign was transformed into an education in democracy and civil disobedience.

  When I made my first trip along the Burma-Thai border in the mid-1990s, I met many political activists: mostly young people who had staked everything on a political change inside Burma but who had lost the struggle and been forced to flee abroad. They spent their days in pulsating Burmese exile communities full of life, in cities like Mae Sot and Chiang Mai. Every single person I met was working for some organization that focused on the situation of political prisoners, women’s rights, the Karen people’s cultural heritage, or medical care to refugees on both sides of the border. On several occasions I asked which political ideology they represented, and the answer was often just a raised eyebrow. “What do you mean, political ideology? We are democrats.” One often meets that point of view among those in political opposition to dictatorships where there is no freedom of the press, where political parties—irrespective of ideology—are strongly opposed, and where a small elite rules arbitrarily.

  This broad, basic democratic attitude also characterized the NLD’s first party program. It was written by Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo during the autumn of 1988. It is true that the SLORC had promised general elections and encouraged the people to get politically organized, but in practice matters were quite different. Burma furthermore had no functioning democratic constitution that could regulate the election process. Everything happened according to the conditions set by the junta.

  The party program demanded the restoration of Burma as a federal union, with respect for the rights of the ethnic minorities and an explicit distribution of power within a democratic system. The ethnic minorities were even to be given more comprehensive rights than afforded in the Con
stitution of 1947, which had been shown to be inadequate when it came to keeping the peace and getting all the different groups within the population to cooperate in building the nation.

  Aung San Suu Kyi’s spirit hovered over the text, not least because it emphasized so clearly that Burma’s rulers must respect human rights and allow the citizens to choose their own leaders. The program also established that the “road towards socialism” that Ne Win had tested from 1962 and onward had been a failure. The almost 100 percent nationalization of the country’s economy and the cultural isolation had cast the country into poverty. Now was the time for a careful liberalization of the economy and greater openness toward the rest of the world.

  The NLD wrote that medical care and schools should be given special priority, which was also a reaction to the junta’s policies since the 1960s. While the military devoured more and more of the national budget, the educational system and medical care, for many decades among the best in Asia, had been totally wrecked.

  However, one of the most important issues during the election campaign had to do with the path chosen by the opposition. Time and again, Aung San Suu Kyi reiterated the significance of nonviolence as an approach. In the interview with Alan Clements several years later she said, “I do not believe in armed struggle because it will perpetrate the tradition that he who is best at wielding arms, wields power. Even if the democracy movement were to succeed through force of arms, it would leave in the minds of the people the idea that whoever has the greater armed might wins in the end. That will not help democracy.”

  Yet she still did not completely reject violence as a method. She was compelled to accept that several thousand students had fled into the jungle and founded an army with its base in the rebel stronghold Manerplaw near the border with Thailand. Aung San Suu Kyi realized that they were basically on her side, and chose a diplomatic middle road. She expressed understanding for resorting to violent methods out of sheer desperation but emphasized that the NLD was a nonviolent movement.

  Quickly and without any visible effort, Aung San Suu Kyi fell into her role as Burma’s leading politician of the opposition. It was as though she had lived her whole life waiting for just this moment in time, when the paths of history crossed, revealing to her what was to be her destiny.

  While the election campaign was being carried on with ever greater intensity, it was clear that her mother, Khin Kyi, was not going to survive for much longer. Her condition worsened, and she died at the end of December. She was seventy-six years old, and despite having survived her husband by over forty years, she had never met another man. There is not even a note anywhere about a “male acquaintance” or anything else that might hint at a love relationship. Aung San Suu Kyi has said that her mother had far too great a sense of responsibility to meet anyone new. She was Aung San’s widow, and the national consciousness required her to remain just that. Full stop. She had a sense of responsibility that we in the West would normally associate with royal families, if with anyone at all.

  The funeral was held on January 2, 1989, and it developed into yet another gigantic protest against the junta. On account of the military violence, people had not dared to venture out and take part in any large demonstrations since September. But the funeral of Aung San’s widow was sanctioned by the whole social machinery, and the SLORC could not do a thing when more than a hundred thousand people took to the streets once again. The NLD, fearing new violence, called out several hundred party activists to ensure it was carried out peacefully and in an organized manner as the huge procession slowly advanced along University Avenue.

  Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, and their sons, who had returned to England just after the speech at Shwedagon to start their school term, now traveled once again to Burma to be present at Khin Kyi’s funeral. The splitting up of the family had yet been neither painful nor particularly dramatic. As on earlier occasions during their marriage, Michael and Suu Kyi kept in contact by writing long letters to each other, and they spoke on the telephone almost every day. However, Suu Kyi’s family’s visit to Burma turned out to be brief. Only a few days after the funeral, Michael was recalled to Oxford by his duties, and Suu Kyi increased the pace of the election campaign.

  The SLORC continued its brutal, sometimes almost tragicomical propaganda against her. The security chief, Khin Nyunt, explained that Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo were part of an international right-wing conspiracy that also included several foreign governments. He never declared which ones, but he mentioned that the British BBC and the radio channel Voice of America belonged to those who spread lies about the country. Shortly afterward his criticism did an about-face, and he accused Suu Kyi of being totally in the hands of the Burmese communist party instead. The idea was to link both Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD to the forty-year-old conflict with the communist guerrillas.

  However, the propaganda was most often quite simply about discrediting her as a person. They called her a “Western fashion girl,” and since she was married to a foreigner she must, according to the junta’s crazy, xenophobic image of the world, per definition be a foreign spy, an “axe in the hands of the neocolonialists.”

  When Aung San Suu Kyi held election meetings, the security police used to regularly harass and arrest the public. During one campaign trip to the Irrawaddy Delta, her party was followed the whole time by a military truck with a sound system at its back. As soon as they stopped to give a speech, the army started playing military music at top volume to drown her out.

  The strategy of strictly monitoring the NLD’s meetings boomeranged against the junta in a slightly surprising way. Propaganda portrayed her as a terrorist and agitator, a person who would bring chaos to the country, but out in the field the soldiers met quite another person. When her followers yelled insults at the soldiers and the army (a popular criticism was about the junta leaders not having any education), she encouraged them to stop. Soldiers who had been sent out to disturb meetings often jumped down from their trucks and joined the crowd to listen to her speeches.

  One of her bodyguards at that time, Moe Myat Thu, tells the story of something that happened in October 1988 when Aung San Suu Kyi was about to travel to the village of her father’s birth, Natmauk. Just before the city boundary she was stopped at a checkpoint, but instead of letting herself be provoked by the soldiers, she began talking to them as though they were old acquaintances. She asked about their children and the living standards of their families, and about how they liked being in the army. For the soldiers this was something quite new. Burma has always been a hierarchical society. Throughout history the distinctions between those up there and those down here have been sharp and impenetrable. People with power have always expected a degree of subordination from those further down the social ladder, irrespective of whether the rulers have been the British colonizers or the Bamar nobility. The junta had sharpened the contrasts by situating a strictly military hierarchy on top of the more traditional class distinction. Officers communicated with their soldiers by means of direct orders, never through social small talk. Aung San Suu Kyi broke all those rules. A few of those I have spoken to in the course of this work have described her as snobbish and haughty. They have seen a side of Suu Kyi that she seems to display when she does not like the person she meets. However, the absolute majority say the complete opposite. Despite her family background, despite her education and her status as a national icon, she treats people as equals.

  During the election campaign, she often received questions about why she was married to a foreigner. Moe Myat Thu remembers a meeting in a little village in central Burma, where the question was put by a man at the very back of the audience. “It’s not very strange,” explained Aung San Suu Kyi with a smile. “I just happened to live in England when I was at the age when you get married. If I had lived in this village I might have been married to you.”

  The generals in the junta quite simply did not know how to handle a person with such disarming charm.

&
nbsp; During those first months of the election campaign there were few direct threats aimed at her person. The junta did not dare. They realized that such a measure might lead to a full-scale revolution. During one trip, however, Aung San Suu Kyi was only seconds from being shot to death. The occurrence has now become part of the mythmaking around her, not least because it says something important about her personality.

  It all happened in Danubyu, a dusty little dump in the Irrawaddy Delta about sixty miles northwest of Rangoon. It was April 5, 1989. During the day Suu Kyi and her people had been out with a boat in the Irrawaddy Delta, carrying out their election campaign. Everywhere they had been met by rejoicing crowds, and neither the police nor the military had intervened to stop their meetings. When evening was approaching, they were on their way back to the town of Danubyu. As they got closer to the harbor area, they saw that it was full of soldiers who were standing with rifles raised and aimed at their boats.

  They were not surprised. When they had arrived at Danubyu the same morning, the streets had been full of soldiers. The inhabitants in the town had been ordered to stay at home, otherwise they would risk getting arrested or even shot. Once at the NLD office, they were met by a certain Capt. Myint Oo, who forbade them to hold any political meeting. “For security reasons,” he explained. Aung San Suu Kyi had agreed to their demand and met her party comrades inside the office instead.

  When they were about to leave Danubyu later on, Capt. Myint Oo tried to stop them again but allowed them to pass after Aung San Suu Kyi had promised that they would be back before six o’clock.

  Despite the fact that they were back well before the time agreed on, the atmosphere was now very threatening in the harbor area. Nyo Ohn Myint, who was the chairman of the NLD youth section and also included in Suu Kyi’s force of bodyguards, suggested that they should get out of the boats on the beach beside the jetty. Suu Kyi climbed out first onto the clay bank. When the rest of her party had come ashore, they were surrounded by a group of soldiers who pressed them toward the water, pulled at their clothes, and yelled at them to turn around. One of Suu Kyi’s bodyguards lost his temper and nearly started a fight with one of the soldiers, but after a couple of minutes the pressure eased and Aung San Suu Kyi suggested that she should walk ahead toward the NLD office.