In May 1989, Burma’s military junta abruptly changed the names by which the country and many of its cities, towns and natural features were to be known internationally: ‘Burma’ became ‘Myanmar’, ‘Rangoon’ became ‘Yangon’, ‘Pegu’ became ‘Bago’, and so on. Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy have never accepted the new names because they were imposed without democratic consultation by a body with no constitutional legitimacy. For that reason, although some of these names have become more current in recent years, in this book the older forms are retained.

INTRODUCTION

GIVE US OUR country back. It’s the cry of the oppressed and the dispossessed everywhere.

As I write we hear that cry most urgently from the people of Syria, their land torn apart by foreign militias, the machinery of the state turned against them, forced to flee for safety to anywhere that will take them. They are suffering dispossession of the most absolute type.

But there are other ways a people can be dispossessed. The Burmese feel they had their country stolen by the army more than fifty years ago. Since then they have been doing everything to get it back. They have protested in the streets and been gunned down, they have fled to the borders or into exile to fight the army from outside, they have fallen in behind a leader who promised to free them from their chains and give them back what they had lost, and twice they have voted overwhelmingly for that leader to take power. The first time the vote was simply brushed aside and normal dictatorial service resumed. The second time was on 8 November 2015. The result was the same as the first, an overwhelming mandate for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party to form a government and banish the tyrants. Unlike the first time, the military, closely watched by the international community, agreed to abide by the rules. By the time you read this we will know if they stuck to that commitment, what form the agreement has taken and how far the wishes of the people have been followed. Then, of course, there are the years ahead, with all their vast uncertainties.

But what can be said with confidence is that on 8 November 2015 the Burmese people spoke with just about as unanimous a voice as is conceivable in an election, brushing aside the threats, bribes, inducements, the chauvinistic warnings and all the other devices seized on by the military to try to tilt the result its way, and gave Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy an overwhelming mandate to rule, with nearly 80 per cent of the seats in both houses of parliament. As anyone who was present will agree, it was an ecstatic moment of national catharsis, comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the other events that heralded the end of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe twenty-five years ago. Burma will never be the same again.

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Burma is the in-between country. Its size is imposing, larger than France, a little smaller than Texas, with a population of 53 million, but because it is squashed between India and China, and so much smaller than either, it seems by contrast a diminutive land and its default posture is defensive. In skin colour the Burmese people are typically neither as dark as some Indians nor as pale as the Han Chinese but somewhere between the two. They are full of prejudices about both giant neighbours, while sharing much of the cultural heritage of both, notably Buddhism. Being in-between, they avoided being a destination, which was often a blessing: the British East India Company tackled Gujarat and Bengal and slowly took over India but it was the 1880s before Britain got around to completing the conquest of Burma, and it remained an afterthought to the Raj until the end of the colonial period. During the Second World War the imperial Japanese didn’t want Burma per se, they needed it in order to get their hands on India; but in the end Burma was as far as they were to get. The independence of Burma from British rule became inevitable after India got its freedom, but again there was a sense of it tagging along behind.

This vulnerability of Burma to developments beyond its borders has also given it the tendency to roll up like a hedgehog when the neighbourhood becomes too lively: to shut itself up when the Vietnam War threatened to spill across South East Asia, to spurn for decades the (pacific) advances of its South East Asian neighbours, to prefer garrisoned poverty to the risks of foreign investment, to reject ideas like democracy as if they were toxic. But the Burmese people are not as paranoid as their leaders have been over the past half century. Nor are they content to remain an impoverished and oppressed in-between place, the private domain of strutting soldiers, a country becalmed in ignorance and fear while all around other peoples and countries discover new destinies. For decades now the Burmese have been much braver than the men (all men) who arrogated control of their destiny. They dared to dream. This book is the story of how, against considerable odds and even greater resistance, some of those dreams began to come true.

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At the same time, and for the same reason, it is the story of how the dreams of Aung San Suu Kyi began to come true. I call her Suu, which is simpler than the full mouthful, and not intended disrespectfully: when she had more time for journalists, her first words to them were often ‘Call me Suu’ and it is what she was called by friends and family throughout her years in Britain. This is the second book I have written in which Suu is the principal character, so it is a particular pleasure that my story in this volume ends with the staggering success of her and her party in Burma’s first respectable general election in more than half a century, which leaves it standing – at the time of writing – on the brink of a peaceful handover of power which cannot now be denied without a full-scale demolition by the military of all that has been achieved; a return of the hedgehog instinct that would take the country back to square one. This is not inconceivable but it is unlikely, and by writing that hypothetical and horrible possibility down in black and white, I hope in some talismanic fashion to make it even more so.

Suu’s greatness derives from the fact that for her there was never anything ‘in-between’ about Burma. She was the child of the man, General Aung San, who put the country on the map and made it an independent reality – martyred before independence could be declared, but the author of that achievement, and universally recognised as such. From her earliest years, Suu’s sense of herself was bound up with that achievement, the pride and the sorrow of it: pride in what he had wrought, sorrow at his assassination by political rivals before he could finish his work; pride as Burma took its place as the most promising ex-colony in South East Asia, sorrow as that project was hijacked by General Ne Win, sending her mother Daw Khin Kyi into gilded exile as Burma’s ambassador to India when Suu, who accompanied her, was barely into her teens.

If her parentage gave her pride, her youth and adulthood abroad gave her perspective: appreciation of the achievements of India, which had absorbed the colonialists’ culture without sacrificing its identity, and had cleaved to democracy through every temptation of secession and tyranny; budding awareness, during her years as an undergraduate at Oxford, of the values of the European enlightenment and how they fostered tolerance and secularism. Now she had experience of two great democracies from the inside; some years in New York working at the United Nations gave her direct knowledge of a third. And all the while her own country, which had begun its independent life so bravely, was festering away, a pretentious and squalid military dictatorship masquerading – it fooled no one – as a pioneer of something called ‘the Burmese way to socialism’. Ne Win ruled the country through the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), an entity he created from scratch as a way to deflect responsibility for political and economic decisions away from the army and onto civilians, and to avoid becoming the subject of a personality cult, Mao-style. There were elections but no other parties for voters to choose from, so obviating Indian-style democratic chaos. Thus did Burma steer a course between the policies of its neighbours. But the economic disasters of the Ne Win years showed that in politics the Middle Way does not always lead to Nirvana: far from it. By the late 1980s Burma, still in reality a military dictatorship, had stagnated so thoroughly that it applied for and obtained UN status as a least-developed nation, on a par with Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan.

Britain relinquished control of Burma in 1948, but forty years later the Burmese realised they had lost their country again, and that this time it had disappeared into the pockets of military men whose only claim to legitimacy was the proclaimed need to wage endless war on the borders: against the Chinese-backed Communists, against the Shan, against the Christian Karen and Kachin and Chin, against the Muslim Rohingya. The military must stay in power to protect the nation from disintegration: that was the mantra. But the wars were never won but dragged on and on, so there was neither cause nor opportunity for the military to return to their barracks. Burma was in a permanent state of civil war, and this justified every form of abuse and repression.

This was the desperate land Suu returned to in March 1988 when her mother was hospitalised after suffering a disastrous stroke. Suu came back to nurse her. That was the only reason for her return, but by chance it was during these months that the oppressions of the BSPP government provoked the angriest protests yet against its rule, which continued month after month. Suu was the diligent and devoted mother of two sons, Alexander and Kim, then aged fifteen and eleven, the wife of an Oxford scholar, Michael Aris, a self-described housewife with modest academic ambitions – she was in the early stages of a part-time postgraduate degree at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies in modern Burmese literature – and firm domestic roots in the soil of Oxfordshire. Her ideas, never more than hazy, of somehow complementing or completing her father’s work in her native land were as good as forgotten. But Burmese journalists and intellectuals caught up in the revolt appreciated the 24-carat value of her name and bloodline and besieged her with appeals to lend her name to the democracy movement.

After months of resistance and long discussions with her husband, who had brought the boys over for the summer holidays, Suu agreed to speak out in support of the revolt. It was the most momentous decision of her life. Despite her inexperience in public speaking and political engagement, she addressed a huge rally in Rangoon with stunning effect, demanding ‘free and fair elections … as quickly as possible’.¹ She was hailed overnight as the democracy movement’s figurehead – ‘a star is born, something like that’² as a co-founder of the NLD later put it. At this point the protest movement was so strong, and the regime so shaky, that Michael and Suu fancied that the revolution would be all over by the end of the year, and the family reunited in a brave new democratic Burma.

The reality was very different, and the long attrition of her detention, totalling fifteen years, the regime’s cruel and deliberate destruction of her family ties by refusing practically all their visa applications, Michael’s early death from cancer – these sad events were narrated in my previous book, The Lady and the Peacock. The regime expected Suu – in their eyes a frail woman, after all – to crack under the pressure and fly home to her family. Instead they discovered they were up against a force of nature, a person whose commitment to the democracy movement, entered into so late and so apparently casually, was as hard as alabaster. She would not be moved. In the end the regime compromised with her as the only way of rebuilding relations with the West, which had loaded her with honours, including the Nobel Peace Prize, and had come to regard her as an incarnation of political sanctity in the mould of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. The Lady and the Peacock culminates in her final release from house arrest in November 2010.

This volume describes what happened next.

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There was never in history a country called Burma until the British declared it to be one. It was a colonial invention, in the same way that India was. China, as the Chinese often like to remind us, has a history as a unitary state going back thousands of years. By contrast what we now call Burma was, like India, a patchwork of competing petty kingdoms until the colonialists with their modern weapons and big ideas came to call.

It is a mysterious country, even now. Hundreds of miles south of Rangoon it tails off into a group of tropical islands with the idyllic appearance of the Maldives. In the far north it comes up against the wall of the Himalayas and borders Tibet: there are Tibetan villages here, where they follow Tibetan-style Vajrayana Buddhism, not the Burmese version, and where the sad, dwindling remnant of the Taron, the only known race of Asian pygmies, was discovered.³

The Taron were – or are, if any of them remain alive – one of the smallest and most obscure of Burma’s huge and baffling array of tribes. Following the scheme of the colonial British, those obsessive pigeon-holers, the Burmese government accords 135 recognised ethnic groups within the grander scheme of eight ‘national ethnic races’, of which the Burmans, also known as ‘Bamar’, are much the largest. But these classifications were open to challenge even when the British made them, and today they are extremely problematic. Tribe was defined by mother tongue, but in an appendix to the census of 1931 entitled ‘A Note on Indigenous Races in Burma’, J. H. Green wrote, ‘Some of the races or “tribes” in Burma change their language almost as often as they change their clothes … Races are becoming more and more mixed, and the threads are more and more difficult to untangle.’⁴

This rainbow of racial groups may have presented a fascinating problem to British ethnologists and administrators but to Aung San and his colleagues, taking up the task of ruling a democratic Union of Burma, there was nothing academic about the challenge: their task was to make the newly independent nation work; yet the condition of Burma at independence bore less resemblance to, say, the United Kingdom, than to Britain after the departure of the Romans, with Celts, Angles, Saxons and Norsemen battling for land, gold and resources. No sooner were the British gone than the so-called Union started to fall apart, with groups like the Karen in the east fighting to secede, and the China-backed Communist Party doing its best to smash the whole flimsy edifice.

It is therefore not surprising that, after ten years of this, the army stepped in; first at the invitation of Prime Minister U Nu, then in 1962, of its own accord and by force. The British had held Burma together by force; the Burmese army would do likewise. But while it suited the mercantile needs of the colonialists to rule Burma as a ragbag of races, the Burmese army saw its task as welding the nation into a single unit under Burman domination; a resumption, in other words, of the predatory behaviour that preceded colonisation, but with the benefit of modern weapons and the justification of standing proud as a nation-state among other nation-states.

The attempted Burmanisation of the non-Burman portions of the country describes the past fifty years of the nation’s history, and it is fair to say that it has been a fiasco. The discrete bits of the country remain as stubbornly distinctive as ever but united with the Burman population in one respect: their hatred of the army. According themselves many of the privileges of the recently departed colonialists, the army today finds itself at least as thoroughly despised as the British were, perhaps more so. The massive turnout at the November 2015 election, and the almost equally massive mandate given to the National League for Democracy, was in one respect a peaceful way for the nation to chant, in unison, the rallying cry of the great colleague of Suu, U Win Tin, who died in 2014: back to the barracks!

The great achievement of Suu’s epic struggle against the military is this: that after twenty-seven years she has succeeded in uniting Burma under her leadership as it has never been united in its history, neither before independence nor since. The figures for the election of November 2015 speak for themselves. The NLD gained a total of 405 seats in the two houses of the Union Parliament, in the capital, Naypyidaw (if we include the 15 seats won by its Shan ally, the Shan NLD). All the other ethnic parties between them won only 55 seats. Despite the fact that Suu is herself Burman and has faced criticism since 2010 as representing the new face of the Burman ascendancy, the ethnic rainbow doesn’t see it that way. Her party also dominated in the regional assemblies, winning three-quarters of all seats and twenty-one out of twenty-nine posts for ministers of ethnic affairs.

That is the scale of her victory. How are we to understand it?

Like the Burma Socialist Programme Party which preceded it, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) which ruled from 2010 was a Frankenstein creation, the handiwork of the army, with no political roots in the population. It rigged the 2010 election, when Suu was still in detention and the NLD did not compete. But in the free and fair contest of November 2015 it won only 42 seats, one-tenth as many as the NLD.

The USDP’s ranks were dominated by former army officers, and like the BSPP its job was to do the army’s bidding while deflecting from the army the political flak that resulted. The fate of these two parties, both dubious inventions, was the same: twenty-seven years apart, they were both mortally wounded, and the army humiliated.

The difference this time is that the army has back-up protection in the form of a constitution, endorsed in a rigged referendum in 2008, which guarantees and perpetuates its predominance: a central role in government, a major stake in parliament, and if all else fails the right to declare martial law and take over directly. This constitution is fiendishly difficult to amend. And it bars anyone whose husband or child has a foreign passport – someone like Suu, for example – from becoming president, which is where executive power resides.

In other words, after the debacle of 1988, when Burma came closer than at any time before or since to a revolution, the army evolved a strategy for clinging to power by making the central organs of state siege-proof. It guaranteed that even if they failed to win the election they would still be substantially in charge.

The 2015 election was thus seen by the Burmese less as a contest between political parties than a battle between the people and the army. The people were united behind a single leader – but the army had bunkers to retreat to. In the event of a landslide victory for the people, the army in its constitution-bunker would remain in control.

That was the situation after the election results were published, and it presented Suu, the unchallenged winner, with a predicament. Would she try to flush the army out of its bunker or leave it where it was? Would she go all out for a constitutional revolution, however difficult that might be, which would culminate in sending the troops back to their barracks? Or would she seek an accommodation with the army, ruling with their consent and accepting their interference?

The danger of the second option is that she could find herself hobbled by the generals, tainted by their continual meddling in government, watching her precious political capital dwindle as her mantle of democracy heroine became tattered. There were already signs of that happening after she became an MP in 2012 and worked alongside former military figures, and on one or two occasions stunned protesters by coming out in support of the army’s position. To go further down that road would be to risk frittering away all she has worked for, with such sacrifice – the people’s trust.

The danger of the first option is impasse. As mentioned, the 2008 constitution is siege-proof. It was made in such a way as to be very hard to change. If Suu determines that no other reforming work can be done until the constitution is changed, Burma could find itself seriously stuck. That, too, would damage her reputation, both at home and abroad.

Whichever choice she makes – or if she is ingenious enough to find a third way, avoiding the perils of both – her personal and political resources will be tested as never before.

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In the five years after her release in 2010, Suu grew from being a heroine who was largely unknown except for her suffering and courage to a fully fledged politician, but one about whom many people had serious doubts. That evolution is in large part the story this book tells; and the failings and limitations she revealed in the eyes of her former supporters in the West – her failure, in particular, to live up to her reputation as a champion of universal human rights – are closely examined.

The story has a twist in the tail: if Western commentators, including this one, came to have misgivings about her, it turns out that the people of Burma did not share them. Buddhist, Muslim and Christian, Burman and non-Burman, urban and rural, rich and poor, they overwhelmingly backed her. For the people who really matter, in her first five years of freedom she did not put a foot wrong.

It is hard to believe that some of the quirks and foibles that I and others have identified will not present problems as she moves to exercise power over her 53 million people. She does not delegate. She has no obvious successor. She has shown no interest in or capacity for sharing power in the party: it’s all about her. Her party’s manifesto is a string of vague good intentions.

But who knows? She has astonished everyone, friends and enemies, for a long time, by her resilience and determination. Now she stands on the brink of achieving her great goal, she may do so again.

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SUU KYI FREE