Living Silence in Burma (16 page)

Stories began emerging about the hardships she had faced during her house arrest. She had run out of money and refused donations of food from the military authorities. When her poor diet led to illness, she finally agreed to sell her furniture to the regime to obtain cash. On a few occasions her husband and sons had been permitted to visit, but most of her time was spent alone, reading, listening to the radio and meditating. Military intelligence lived just inside her front gate, preventing all except a few relatives from entering or leaving. Although she tried to befriend the intelligence agents, the personnel were changed regularly to prevent warm relations from developing.

Upon her release, foreign journalists poured into the country to interview her. When they expressed sympathy with her plight she insisted that others had suffered much more than she had. Two other senior party members, Tin Oo and Kyi Maung, for instance, had been sent to Insein prison. But they had recently been freed and, when they learned of Aung San Suu Kyi’s release, they headed to her compound and agreed to work with her to rebuild the party.

It seems that the SLORC let Aung San Suu Kyi go in order to improve relations with Japan. Japan was promising to resume full-scale development aid if the regime restored greater political and economic openness in Burma.
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The SLORC felt confident that with the economy picking up, people would soon lose interest in Aung San Suu Kyi, and she would fade from the political scene. Moreover, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party was a shambles, and she and Tin Oo had been removed from their positions on the Central Executive Committee in 1991 to keep the party legal. Many NLD members were still in prison or had given up political work.

Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t appear to be much of a threat, but the regime
underestimated her power to revitalize the party and to draw international attention. Foreign journalists were captivated, NLD party members from the various townships and divisions came to Rangoon for instructions, and the NLD Central Executive Committee started holding daily meetings, with Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo reinstated in their former positions. Although a posse of military intelligence officers continued to live just inside the compound, registering everyone who entered, at first they did not hinder anyone. Soon the compound was in full swing, with meetings, study groups and press conferences taking place. The National Convention was still holding sessions, but the NLD members who had attended the convention felt as frustrated as Daniel Aung did. When the convention reconvened at the end of November 1995, the NLD delegates decided to walk out, saying they would not return until a real political dialogue began. The SLORC dismissed their demand and announced their expulsion from the convention a few days later.

Meanwhile, a new political centre emerged at Aung San Suu Kyi’s compound, with foreign governments, ethnic political leaders and the domestic population carefully watching her every move. Many hoped that a dialogue between the NLD and the regime could take place, but the generals thought it was unnecessary. They believed they could limit Aung San Suu Kyi’s influence and maintain control without having to make any concessions.

With the regime seemingly unwilling to talk, the NLD felt compelled to raise its public profile. In January 1996, the NLD held an Independence Day celebration at Aung San Suu Kyi’s compound and invited a famous troupe of comedians and dancers from Mandalay to perform. Exhilarated by the NLD’s resurgence, Par Par Lay and Lu Zaw used mime to parody the regime indirectly. In one skit, one of the comedians sat on a chair beaming. There was only a single chair, so when the second man came on to the stage, he gestured that he would like a turn. The first comedian refused to yield to him, despite his pleas for fairness and attempts at persuasion. Watching this, the audience was doubled over in laughter, for the chair obviously represented the government, the person sitting on the chair was the military regime, and the person asking politely for his turn symbolized the elected MPs.
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Because they dared to make these kinds of jokes, the two comedians were arrested. Aung San Suu Kyi and several other members tried to go to Mandalay to attend the trial, but when they arrived at the train station in Rangoon, they were informed that their assigned carriage happened to have mechanical problems, so they wouldn’t be able to travel. Meanwhile,
the comedians were sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.
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They were sent to a hard labour camp in Kachin State, where they were originally set to work breaking rocks. The health of both declined rapidly, and they were later moved to a prison in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State.

Still, the NLD went on to hold large meetings in May 1996 to commemorate the 1990 election victory and in September 1996 to mark the eighth anniversary of the party’s founding. Each time, military intelligence prevented large numbers of invitees from leaving their home towns, or put them under detention in military barracks until the meetings were over. In one case, delegates who made it to Aung San Suu Kyi’s street were simply put into a truck and driven to a rural area several miles out of Rangoon, where they were dumped and had to make their own way back. By the time they reached the city, the meeting was over.

In the meantime, Aung San Suu Kyi had been giving public talks from her gate every weekend. On Saturdays, she would speak for an hour, and on Sundays, she, Tin Oo and Kyi Maung would each speak for twenty minutes. These talks, which came to be known as ‘People’s Forums’, were an attempt by the NLD leadership to communicate their ideas to the people and to inspire them to take part in the political movement. Aung San Suu Kyi had a mailbox attached to the front of her gate so that people could drop off questions during the week. Her staff selected the most pressing questions for her to address. The reading and answering of the letters gave the talks a give-and-take feeling, and the audience frequently chimed in with laughter and applause.

Two hours before the talk was scheduled to begin, people would begin arriving in front of her house, bringing pieces of newspaper to sit on and umbrellas to block the sun or rain. Soon hawkers would arrive peddling betel nut, cold water and snacks. Friends gathered at appointed locations, chatting happily in the festive atmosphere. By 3 p.m., the area in front of her gate and across the street would be packed with people. At 3.45, the crowd would begin chanting, ‘Long live Daw Aung San Suu Kyi! Long live U Kyi Maung! Long live U Tin Oo!’ By 3.55, the chanting would have reached fever pitch, and when the NLD leaders arrived at the gate, everyone would leap up, shouting and clapping ecstatically.

On the several occasions that I attended, I found all kinds of people in the crowd, including students, retired businessmen, young couples, market vendors and monks. Once I made the mistake of sitting next to a wizened old man, long past seventy and missing most of his teeth. When Aung San Suu Kyi appeared, he was so eager to signal his joy that he jumped to his feet and proceeded to twirl his umbrella over his head
faster and faster, endangering the lives of all sitting around him. He had to be gently restrained by the students behind him.

Each week, Aung San Suu Kyi urged her listeners to consider ways in which they could participate in the movement. Despite many people’s hopes that she would effect political change for them, she realized that she and the remaining NLD members could do little without popular participation. On 16 March 1996, she urged her audience to recognize the power that they had but were not tapping into. She read out a question that had been sent to her. ‘Why don’t we have democracy yet in our country? Why is it delayed?’ She answered,

    Some people [the generals] don’t really want to give democracy. And people aren’t really working for it. Democracy activists need to put in more effort … The reason for the delay in getting democracy is that we Burmese people lack confidence in ourselves. People think they are not able to do it.

She then brought up Vaclav Havel’s essay, ‘The power of the powerless’. Written about Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule, Havel’s words had relevance for the struggle in Burma as well. She said, ‘We need to understand that people who are not in power have their own power. Don’t think you don’t have any power just because you are not part of the power structure.’ She talked about how the regime made great efforts to demonstrate they had the support of the people, for instance by staging pro-government rallies which people were forced to attend. The regime, she said, was using the power of the people to prop up their own power structure. If people didn’t have power, the regime would not bother with them. She declared, ‘That is why we rely on the people. Because you have power. For that reason, we are openly requesting people-power from the people.’

On Sundays, Tin Oo talked mostly about legal issues and the application of Buddhist principles. After being expelled from the military and imprisoned in the mid-1970s, he studied law and also spent a period of time as a monk. On 18 February 1996, he related the words of the Buddha to the current political situation, explaining how the Buddha had said that you must do exactly as you say and you must be honest in reporting what you have done. The regime, he said, was always talking about restoring democracy but was doing nothing to make it happen.

Kyi Maung, also a former senior military officer who had retired in the 1960s, often used the format of his young grandson asking him simple questions. On 5 May 1996, he said that his grandson had asked him what kind of newspaper he wanted to see in Burma. Because all the newspapers
in the country were under state control and the regime sought to turn public opinion against the NLD through scathing editorials, freedom of expression was naturally an important issue for the NLD. Kyi Maung said that he told his grandson he wanted a newspaper that was ‘not slanted, not weighted to one side, not expressing a personal point of view as if it’s everyone’s view’. He concluded by pointing out that in democratic countries there are no government-controlled newspapers.

The celebratory feeling at the talks was infectious. Here were people announcing over loudspeakers what other people only dared to whisper. Still, the talks never attracted more than 10,000 people, and usually only around 3,000 or so. The SLORC assumed people would soon become bored, but the crowds, while not growing, held steady. So the regime began intimidating the audience by having military intelligence personnel walk slowly through the crowds videotaping each and every face. This brought the size of the audiences down somewhat, but didn’t eliminate them. Some people resorted to driving slowly back and forth in front of the house or taking the bus that passed the compound so that they could get a taste of the event without being identified. Others listened to the audio tapes or even watched videotapes of the talks, made and copied by pro-democracy supporters. The video and audio tapes found their way to Mandalay and other towns around the country, where NLD members set up free lending libraries. The authorities began arresting people caught distributing these tapes outside Rangoon.
¹¹

The battle was also played out in the entertainment industry. The military-sponsored TV station ran a programme mocking Aung San Suu Kyi. A dishevelled old hag missing her front teeth stood behind a rickety gate haranguing a group of sorry-looking children. Some people stoned the house of the actress who played Aung San Suu Kyi. Around the same time, Lay Phyu, a popular rock singer, released a cassette entitled
Power 54
. At first the censorship board passed it, but they later recalled all the cassettes when they realized that the 54 intentionally referred to, or could be interpreted as referring to, Aung San Suu Kyi’s home address, 54 University Avenue. Lay Phyu was forced to change the title to
Power
.

Unwilling to tolerate continued public challenges to their authority, the generals decided to end the talks once and for all. Starting in late September 1996, the military simply placed barbed-wire barricades at either end of the block every weekend and refused to allow people through. Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo managed to get around the barricades to meet the crowds at another junction a few times, but on one occasion in November they were attacked by a mob of 200 people who pelted their
car with stones and smashed it with iron bars. Aung San Suu Kyi was not hurt, although Tin Oo suffered minor injuries. Witnesses reported seeing the young attackers arriving on military trucks, and the attack took place in the lane in front of Kyi Maung’s house, where ordinary people had no access because it was cordoned off by government security personnel. Still, the regime denied its involvement and in a commentary in the government-controlled
New Light of Myanmar
wrote that Aung San Suu Kyi was ‘trying to destroy all prospects for stability of the state with her fangs’ and that many kinds of people were opposed to her.
¹²

During this period, the regime tried to split the NLD by focusing its attacks on Aung San Suu Kyi and stressing her links to the West. Newspaper editorials often referred to her as ‘Suu Kyi’, dropping the first part of her name, which links her to her father, the national hero. Alternatively, they called her ‘Mrs Michael Aris’, using her husband’s name, which emphasized her marriage to a foreigner. This goes against Burmese norms in which women keep their own name after marriage and are not referred to by their husbands’ names.

In the meantime, Aung San Suu Kyi’s political activities in 1995 and 1996 had spurred some old and new activists to take action. Many former student activists who had had little contact since 1988 found each other again at Aung San Suu Kyi’s compound. And as in the mid-1980s, a new generation of student activists began looking for activities they could undertake to spark a movement.

Student demonstrations, 1996

To politicize university students, young activists began marking the anniversary of the March 1988 death of the student Phone Maw. In 1996, numbers of university students came to classes dressed in black. Some of the male students were particularly happy to see fashionable female models wearing black hats and black jean shirts with red roses attached, because the modelling industry had become extremely popular after the country had begun to allow foreign investment. Young activists also found inspiration in the Free Burma groups that began forming in the United States and elsewhere. The Free Burma Coalition was particularly active on American university campuses, where students began boycotting Pepsi because of its investment in Burma. Some students quietly took up the Pepsi boycott in Rangoon as well. Although the students’ activities were limited, they tried to work in parallel to Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD by raising people’s awareness and encouraging them to participate in simple acts of political defiance.