Free The Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham Page B

leaderless as they had been since the upheaval began, had not achieved the revolution which astrologers had promised and which they had been dreaming of, neither had Sein Lwin succeeded in imposing his will, despite all the bloodshed. The strike continued into the next day. By now the hermit state, till weeks before one of the least-known countries on the planet, was splashed all over the world’s news bulletins day after day. While the regime claimed that only a hundred people had been killed in Rangoon, diplomats put the figure ten times higher, while hospital workers in the capital, who were closest to the butchery, said the true figure was more than 3,000. 15 The US Senate, in a shocking blow to Burma’s
amour propre
, passed a motion unanimously condemning the regime and the killings for which they were responsible.
    Then on August 12th, after less than three weeks in power, the Butcher threw in the towel.
    *
    Aung San Suu Kyi played no part in the demonstrations. 16 “It’s not my sort of thing,” she replied with a touch of memsahib haughtiness when asked why not. One might say, given her presence in the country all this time, and the power of her name, that her absence from the protests was conspicuous. As Bo Kyi, one of the leaders of the students, put it, “When we staged demonstrations in 1988, in March, April, May, June, July and August, at that time there was no Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. But all the time that we were holding demonstrations, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was in Burma . . .” 17
    But she had not closed her eyes to the sufferings of her people. On the contrary, it is clear that she was thinking very hard about what role she could and ought to play.
    Sein Lwin’s stunning resignation prompted dancing in the street. He was replaced one week later, on August 19th, by Dr. Maung Maung, a London-trained barrister, a former chief justice, an academic who had done research at Yale, one of the very few civilians of stature in Ne Win’s circle. But Maung Maung had lost whatever intellectual respectability he might once have claimed when he wrote the official hagiography of NumberOne—which included a sly reworking of the life of Aung San, depicting him as a supporter of Japanese-style fascism and an opponent of democracy. 18 If Ne Win and his advisers imagined that the appointment of this ex-military pseudo-moderate would buy off the protesters’ anger, they were rudely disappointed. It barely bought them twenty-four hours of calm.
    What was now plain was that Burma confronted a gaping power vacuum. And it was during these strange days that a young Rangoon University history teacher met Suu for the first time.

    Nyo Ohn Myint: as a young history professor at Rangoon University, in August 1988, he was one of the first intellectuals to urge Suu to seize the opportunity to lead the democracy movement. He is now foreign affairs spokesman for the NLD-Liberated Areas, based in Thailand.
    â€œI was twenty-six,” Nyo Ohn Myint remembered. 19 Today, still looking barely out of his twenties, he is head of the NLD-LA’s foreign affairs department and lives in exile in Thailand. “I had been a teacher for three years. My colleagues and I were mulling over what part we should play in the uprising. We produced pamphlets and wall posters, stuff like that. Then finally I met her. There were seven of us around the table.”
    So far the only role Suu had conceived for herself was one behind the scenes. For Nyo Ohn Myint that was not enough. “I raised the fact that our movement really needed a leader,” he said. “And she said, no, I have just asked the general secretary of the Burma Socialist Program Party to stop killing the students and other innocent people. That is my role.”
    Nyo Ohn Myint did not leave it at that. “I appealed to her to meet the student movement. She said no. Then I explained the nature of Burmese political culture to her, which is that