Free The Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham

knowledge of the first five months of the Burmese insurgency. “He took her around Rangoon,” said Bertil Lintner, who subsequently got to know him, “and showed her, ‘Look, this is where people were shot.’ He took her to the site of the so-called Red Bridge incident, the White Bridge incident, Sule pagoda, everywhere that students were killed.” 8 It was a crash course in the political story so far.

    The journalist, poet and political activist Maung Thaw Ka, standing to Suu’s left.
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    And there was to be no respite. Within days of “Butcher” Sein Lwin taking over the top job, he made his intentions clear. Aung Gyi, the ex-general who had shattered the taboo against criticizing Ne Win with his hostile open letters, was arrested, as was Sein Win, one of the country’s most respected journalists. But the resistance, too, was organizing, its efforts given new focus and urgency by the formerly unimaginable hope of returning to multiparty democracy.
    A BBC journalist called Christopher Gunness had flown into Rangoon to cover the ruling party’s extraordinary congress in July and stayed on to try to find out what was stirring behind the city’s shabby walls—because it was already clear that Ne Win’s declaration was not the end of something but only the beginning. “My impression when I arrived was that the situation was extremely tense,” he said later. “People were frustrated and angry and there was a feeling of unfinished business; it was easy to sense that something big was about to happen. But there was a feeling of doom as well. I was enormously depressed by what I heard and what I saw.” 9
    Gunness became the first foreign correspondent to give the world details of the beatings, tortures and rapes that arrested students had suffered in custody, as well as the medical disasters and the plummeting morale among Burmese troops fighting Karen rebels near the Thai border. But his most vital news was not about the past but the future: The students, he reported, were calling for a nationwide general strike on the auspicious date of August 8, 1988—8/8/88 as the date has been known in Burma ever since: exactly fifty years after a general strike led by militant students, including Aung San, against the British in August 1938. The BBC’s Burmese language service had millions of regular listeners in Burma, who depended on it to learn facts the regime preferred to hide. Gunness’s report ensured that on 8/8/88 there would be a good turnout.
    But the students were not sitting around waiting for the big event: The uprising was already under way. “The first serious demonstration actually occurred on the afternoon of August 3,” wrote Dominic Faulder, one of the few undercover foreign journalists to witness it. 10 “It took me completely by surprise as it swept down Shwedagon Pagoda Road towards the city center then turned east going past Sule Pagoda and City Hall, before sweeping round to roar back past the Indian and US Embassies . . . As a display of raw courage it was spine-tingling . . . There were nosecurity forces in sight and no attempt was made to stop the demonstration, which faded into the wet afternoon with astonishing speed.”
    That same day, the junta clamped martial law on Rangoon. But the next day and the day after thousands of demonstrators ignored the restrictions, marching through downtown, while further north in the capital students began digging themselves in close to the Shwedagon pagoda, the nation’s Holy of Holies which had been the rallying-point for anti-regime protests since British days. Demonstrations were now breaking out, not merely in the capital and Mandalay but across the country. And everywhere the protesters’ indignation and hunger for change were met by casual, murderous violence.
    A fifteen-year-old schoolboy called Ko Ko took to the streets of central Rangoon on August 6th along with