Free Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times by Rosalind Russell Page A

humidity-wrecked hair would be tamed and smoothed for just a few dollars.
    I drove down the stony track that led from our house, turned right at the small, family-run shop that sold handmade cotton dresses, past the newly built, ostentatiousmansion named Paradise where water flowed in silent, flat panels over its granite surrounding wall, then alongside the wooden kiosks selling instant noodles, bananas and cigarettes, to the shady junction where the trishaw drivers snoozed under the outstretched arms of a banyan tree. I indicated left on the main road and drove by Bahan High School No. 2, deserted for the holiday, the national flag hoisted on a pole in the playground. My route took me down Shwegondine Road, past what had been pointed out to me as the headquarters of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, housed in a rundown terrace between two furniture shops. After years of harassment, and with hundreds of its members, including Suu Kyi, imprisoned, the party rarely held meetings and its offices were usually padlocked and deserted. But today a crowd of people was gathered outside, men and women wearing red armbands, most with heads bowed, looking uncomfortable, frightened even. It was the first gathering of any kind I had seen in Rangoon. I parked the car and walked towards it.
    I was approached by a benevolent-looking man with opaque, pale brown eyes and neatly combed grey hair. He introduced himself as U Hla Thein, a member of parliament (I was confused, surely there was no parliament?), and steered me through the overspill of NLD supporters on the pavement. The crowd of about seventy was mostly quiet; their very presence, in front of the plain-clothed military intelligence officers across the street, was their statement, and a stunningly brave one. ‘Aren’t you scared?’ I asked U Hla Thein. ‘No,’ he said with a smile. ‘We don’t care.’ Inside the gloomy shophouse, with its damp, peeling walls, it was hard to believe I was in the offices of a political party that could, or should, have been running a country of sixty million people.
    In May 1990, when Aung San Suu Kyi was already in detention at her home, Burma held its first general elections for thirty years. No one was sure what the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) was expecting, but it seemed the governing generals believed that even after all these years of slow degradation, the people of Burma, subservient for so long, would duly vote in the military’s proxy party. That wasn’t what happened. Suu Kyi’s NLD won the election by a landslide, and the junta, shocked, simply refused to cede power. Parliament was never convened, but candidates like U Hla Thein, elected in their constituencies, continued to introduce themselves as MPs, as he did to me, more than eighteen years later.
    We tried to squeeze forward through the mass of bodies. ‘Are you a diplomat?’ someone asked. ‘Er, yes,’ I replied. I was ushered to a plastic chair near the front.
    Sitting in front of the NLD central executive committee, comprised mostly of elderly men, I was now stingingly self-conscious, worried about my opportunistic fib and also what I was wearing – a sleeveless top and flimsy, almost see-through skirt, certainly not diplomat’s attire. Worse still, there were several enthusiastic photographers pacing around snapping everything – were they NLD activists, from the media or even intelligence agents? To be photographed in this pariah place would be a nightmare. I crossed my legs and hunched over with my elbow on my knee and my hand shielding my eyes, as if trying to block out the glaring sun.
    The speeches had already begun. U Hla Pe, a member of the executive committee, read dryly from a written speech calling for political prisoners to be released and for the junta to review a new constitution which enshrined the military’s role in any future elected government. A woman in the audience, her greying hair pinned back,