Free The Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham Page A

thousands of others. He recalled many years later:
    Before 1988 I loved the army. My grandfather and grandmother came from the same part of the country as Ne Win. So when I saw what they did to us protesters I was shocked. At the time we were not demanding democracy. We just wanted our friends to be released from prison.
    As I joined the demonstration I was afraid, but I thought they could not shoot me if I was carrying a picture of General Aung San. So I went into a cinema in the city center and asked them to give me the large framed photo of Aung San that was hanging on the wall. With thousands of others I walked along the road towards Sule Pagoda in the center of Rangoon holding the portrait in front of me. We were all shouting slogans, walking along in the rain.
    We were hoarse from shouting so much and a girl came up offering wedges of lemon for our sore throats. I was holding the photograph so she put the lemon directly in my mouth. Then I said to her, please hold the photograph, I have to re-tie my longyi, so she took the photograph and gave me the bag of lemons to hold. And after I had re-tied my longyi she kept holding on to the photograph while I held the lemons. Then I heard the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire and she was lying on the ground dead and the photograph was full of bullet holes.
    I was so upset by this event that I ran away from the capital and joined the Kachin rebels on the border in the north of the country. 11
    *
    The 8/8/88 general strike would have been a big event anyway, given the incendiary state of the nation. But now it had been trailed on the BBC, no one could doubt that it would be the cue for a mass, nationwide uprising.
    The protest that day began when dockworkers in Rangoon port marched off the job at precisely eight minutes past eight. The movement that had begun with a student fracas in a tea shop had now spiraled out to include the most vital workers in the economy. Hundreds of thousands marched on City Hall in defiance of martial law.
    Throughout the hours of daylight the soldiers and riot police stayed in the background. “Despite its overwhelming superiority of force, the regime is today under siege by its people,” Seth Mydans wrote in the
New York Times
, reporting on the cataclysmic day. “The protests . . . have spread to every major city . . . led by students and joined by large numbers of workers and Buddhist monks, as well as by a cross-section of citizens, including government employees.” 12
    â€œNo one likes this brutal government,” Mydans reported the owner of a curry shop saying. “It has no respect for the people, no respect for human rights. All the people are angry now. All the people support the students.”
    The huge demonstration, matched by similar shows of popular force all over the country, continued all day in a mood closer to a carnival than a riot. “Happy New Year,” Mydans reported one demonstrator shouting to him. “This is our revolution day!” “The euphoric atmosphere prevailed all day,” wrote Bertil Lintner. “In the evening, thousands of people moved to the Shwedagon, where a meeting was being held. Meanwhile, Bren carriers and trucks full of armed soldiers were parked in the compound of City Hall . . . But nobody really thought that the troops would be called out.” 13
    Then at 11:30, after the last of many “last warnings” issued to the protesters over loudspeakers, the army suddenly went into action. “The tanks roared at top speed past [Sule] pagoda, followed by armored cars and twenty-four truckloads of soldiers,” Mydans wrote. 14 “The protesters scattered screaming into alleys and doorways, stumbling over open gutters, crouching by walls and then, in a new wave of panic, running again.” The shooting continued until 3 AM . No one knows how many died. The Butcher had lived up to his name.
    But if the protesters, who remained as amorphous and apparently