Living Silence in Burma (32 page)

A former soldier related how he and some of the captains he knew were not satisfied with the regime’s handling of Khun Sa. ‘When Khun Sa was making opium,’ he said, ‘these captains had to go and fight Khun Sa. Now, since they announced on the front page of the newspaper, “May U Khun Sa live longer than a hundred years,” the captains started to swear at the SPDC. They said, “When we had to fight Khun Sa, many of us died. They treat us like we’re nothing.”’

Dissenting soldiers

Throughout the period of military rule, there have been people in the military who have come to disagree with the system, but they have rarely spoken up. Colonel Soe Thein declared, ‘I’m a pure soldier. I don’t like the military playing in politics. Our main duty is to protect the country and the people.’ He said that, even before 1988, many other officers shared his feelings, but out of fear, they pretended otherwise.

In 1988, a number of military personnel joined the demonstrators on the streets. Most came from the better-educated corps based in and near Rangoon. One who joined was a young Rakhine, Khaing Aung Soe, who had been working in the air force’s supply department for three years. He and his friends were also enrolled in correspondence courses through the Workers’ College and were sympathetic to the university students’ demands. Starting in March 1988, they had begun secretly collecting money for anti-government activities at Rangoon University.

When the demonstrations started in August, they at first stayed in their barracks at Mingaladon outside Rangoon, but cheered on truckloads of people heading into the city. Then, on 9 September 1988, Khaing Aung Soe and a group of his friends left the barracks and joined the Rangoon University students. Khaing Aung Soe said, ‘We went in full uniforms but with no guns. We arrived in the student compound and had a kind of press conference in the evening.’ There were about 450 of them, including a female sergeant. The students arranged for them to stay at Thayet Daw monastery, where the monks were very supportive of the movement.

‘During 1988,’ Khaing Aung Soe said,

    we didn’t think we’d win just by these demonstrations. We left some people in the main base to collect guns if necessary. We also made contacts with people in the navy and army. On the seventeenth, some students seized ammunition from the Trade Ministry and kept it in the monastery so they would be ready to fight the soldiers.

On the morning of 19 September, the day after the coup, the abbot of the
monastery grew increasingly nervous and insisted that all the democracy soldiers leave that day.

Khaing Aung Soe recalled:

    We took the guns and hid in civilian houses. We moved every day, but after a couple of days, people were afraid and changed to civilian clothes, stored all the ammunition in monasteries and spread out. We didn’t want to go back to the barracks without democracy, so six others and I made our way out to the border where we joined one of the pro-democracy armies.

He said that a number of the officers he knew also supported the democracy movement. Some went out on the streets in civilian clothes without informing their superiors, while others encouraged those who went out but were afraid to leave the bases themselves. Khaing Aung Soe remembers his commander telling him and others, ‘I won’t stop you or support you if you join the demonstrations. You have to decide by yourself. But we must try to get democracy.’ Before the coup, he sent a message to the monastery where all the air force defectors were staying and asked them to come back to the base. Khaing Aung Soe said that friends of his who returned to the base were imprisoned for six months and expelled from the military. His commander was forced to resign.

Many more soldiers were loyal to the regime, and followed orders to shoot the civilian demonstrators. At least some troops from other battalions, however, were upset with their comrades. According to one soldier at the time, ‘None of the battalions could stand the sight of Division 22,’ the light infantry division that gunned down the most demonstrators in 1988. Still, it is likely that most of them would have done the same thing had they been sent to Rangoon.

During and after the election campaign period, the SLORC fired military personnel and civil servants who had actively supported the demonstrations. The regime tried to weaken support for Aung San Suu Kyi by calling her a traitor to the Burman race for marrying a Westerner. In newspaper editorials and in propaganda speeches she was termed a prostitute and other shockingly derogatory epithets. Whipping up nationalist fervour, the regime achieved a measure of success with these attacks, particularly in the military. After thinking it through, though, some later changed their minds.

Maung Maung recalled that, after the coup, Brigadier General Tin Hla gave a speech to his battalion. He said, ‘Aung San Suu Kyi is the wife of a foreigner. Do you want to be ruled by a woman who is the wife of a
foreigner?’ At first, Maung Maung said, he and others agreed that they definitely did not. Later, he reconsidered and discussed the issue with the soldiers under him. ‘In Burma’s history,’ Maung Maung told them,

    King Thibaw was taken to India by the British. At that time, King Thibaw’s relatives got married to whoever was close to them [Indians]. It’s the same for the daughter of General Aung San. After the assassination of General Aung San, U Ne Win sent her abroad and she grew up abroad. Who else could she marry besides a foreigner? She didn’t do anything wrong.

While
tatmadaw
leaders and instructors at the officer training schools told the soldiers that Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD wanted to break up the army, those who had a chance to hear Aung San Suu Kyi speak in person began to doubt their superiors’ claims. Another former sergeant, Nyi Nyi, who worked at the army’s weapons production factory in Rangoon in the 1980s, attended one of Aung San Suu Kyi’s campaign speeches in 1989. He remembers her explaining that the
tatmadaw
was founded by her father and that she herself was born in the military and grew up among soldiers. She said that she would never divide the military and the people. Nyi Nyi said, ‘Some soldiers – I met four or five – cried when she said that. It really affected them.’

Nyi Nyi said he realized that his superiors were worried that the soldiers might vote for the NLD in the 1990 election, so they were trying to create a rift between the military personnel and Aung San Suu Kyi. Both sergeants claimed that they represented many of their peers in the army when they said that they supported Aung San Suu Kyi and wanted the military to return to the barracks. But they didn’t want to join the NLD themselves. Instead, they were hoping for the emergence of a visionary leader within the military whom they could follow. Nyi Nyi considered soldiers demonstrating within the military unimaginable, but he thought some might break away if there were someone or some organization that could provide support and capable leadership. He said, however, ‘If there is no leader who sides with the people, it is impossible for people in the military to break away even though they wish to do so.’

Given the fact that Maung Maung and Nyi Nyi had to flee and are now living outside Burma, they may be overstating the support of soldiers inside Burma for democracy. But they still love the army and see themselves as army men, so they are perhaps not too far off the mark.

The large number of military votes for the NLD in the 1990 election confirmed a significant degree of dissatisfaction with military rule at
that time. The SLORC leaders were apparently nervous enough about their troops’ loyalty that they had them moved around, the composition of battalions rearranged, and counter-intelligence personnel sent to the units to monitor their activities.
¹¹

According to Thiha, an intelligence agent in the 1990s, intelligence officers were even used to spy on senior generals to find out whether they had any intention of trying to overthrow General Than Shwe and take power for themselves.

The
tatmadaw
has also attempted to strengthen the loyalty of its forces by recruiting family members of current military personnel. With parents, brothers or uncles in the military service, a soldier would be reluctant to engage in anti-government activities, both because of family pressure and worries that his relatives would be adversely affected.

Nevertheless, the regime has done little to improve morale or working conditions in the
tatmadaw
. In the years since 1990, the regime has invested large sums in upgrading the
tatmadaw
’s weapons and equipment, but it has continued to pay insufficient salaries to its officers and soldiers. Moreover, officers’ positions are never certain and, like ordinary soldiers, they must curry favour with their superiors in order to ensure promotion. The imperious behaviour of the senior generals, their inability to improve the economy and their orders to shoot monks in 2007 have further soured many soldiers’ and officers’ feelings about the regime.

The danger of falling

While the rewards of reaching the top echelons of the military have remained high, the dangers of falling are also very real for generals, their families and their supporters. Successive leaders have maintained their control by rewarding talented and loyal officers with promotions, until they become potential threats to the leader’s own power. At that point, they are often sidelined, retired early or charged with corruption or other offences. The most senior generals have used various military intelligence units to gather information on the weaknesses of other generals, so that they could be blackmailed into loyalty or sacked if necessary.

The insecurity of the top leaders is exemplified by the case of General Ne Win, who had ruled Burma for over twenty years and nurtured the generation of leaders who replaced him. In March 2002, he was put under house arrest after one of his sons-in-law and three of his grandsons were charged with treason. The grandsons were the sons of his favourite daughter, Sandar Win, and they were notorious for their wild behaviour on the streets and in the nightclubs of Rangoon. They were also involved in
various commercial ventures, and may have been frustrated that lucrative contracts were increasingly going to other generals’ children and friends. The grandsons and their father were accused of plotting a coup attempt with some military officers. While they may have raised the issue with a few lower-ranking military officers, it doesn’t seem to have gone farther than that.
¹²
Nevertheless, they were sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was not carried out, but they have remained in Insein Prison ever since.

That this would be their fate seemed unimaginable not only to them but also to others in Burma, who had viewed them as untouchable. But successive generals have proved time and again that they will act ruthlessly against anyone they perceive as posing a potential threat to their continued rule. General Ne Win, who was already in his nineties and was not accused of involvement in the coup plot, was kept under house arrest until he died in December 2002. The senior generals did not accord him a state funeral and only a few dozen family members and friends attended the simple ceremony.

Similarly, in October 2004, Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt, who was the head of military intelligence and the prime minister at the time, was suddenly sacked. Soon thereafter, he was accused of insubordination and responsibility for corruption scandals involving military intelligence officers under his supervision. The real problem was that Khin Nyunt and his military intelligence service had become too powerful.

Many military intelligence officers were operating lucrative illegal businesses or taking bribes. They tended to have a much better standard of living than other military officers. Some had opportunities to go abroad for training or as spies, and they rarely had to risk their lives. Intelligence agents tended to think highly of themselves and to treat other military officers with little respect.
¹³
At the same time, military intelligence had been gathering information on the illegal activities of military officers and sometimes used this against them.
¹⁴
For all these reasons, tensions between the two groups often ran high.

Meanwhile, under Khin Nyunt, the Directorate of Defence Services Intelligence had been busily expanding its scope of operations. Khin Nyunt set up the Office of Strategic Studies in 1994, and it soon began to engage in developing domestic and foreign policies, writing speeches for the junta’s spokesmen, and even overseeing archaeological digs.
¹⁵
In an effort to boost national pride and his own stature, Khin Nyunt had one of his staff lead an expedition to uncover positive proof that there were 40-million-year-old primate fossils in Burma. Khin Nyunt claimed that
this would mean that humans might have originated in Burma (a claim later asserted as fact in the state media although debated by international scientists).
¹⁶

After successfully negotiating ceasefire agreements with many of the armed ethnic groups, Khin Nyunt had confidence in his ability to handle the country’s politics. He had also been praised in the foreign press as a reformer and someone the international community could work with. Than Shwe is likely to have had doubts about Khin Nyunt’s ultimate intentions. Khin Nyunt was given a forty-four-year suspended sentence, and along with his wife and two sons, has been kept under house arrest ever since. Three hundred military intelligence officers were also arrested in 2004, with convicted officers receiving prison sentences ranging from twenty to a hundred years.

The punishment of whole families and groups of officials might seem extreme to outsiders, but such practices have a long history in Burma. In the pre-colonial period, there was no fixed system for determining the king’s successor, and because kings generally had many wives, there were many princes to choose from. Claimants to the throne sometimes resorted to killing all their potential rivals in order to secure their rule. For instance, after Thibaw became king in 1878, his wife, Queen Supayalat, and his chief minister ordered the execution of no fewer than forty of Thibaw’s half-brothers and half-sisters.
¹⁷
A number of court officials and military officers of doubtful loyalty were put to death as well.