EIGHT MINUTES PAST EIGHT, ON THE EIGHTH OF THE EIGHTH MONTH, 1988
Martin Morland
When I came back to Rangoon as British ambassador 25 years after my first posting, it was astounding how little had changed in 25 years, at least on the outside.
There were virtually no new buildings, none above five stories high. The local currency was officially pegged at about six kyats to the dollar according to the general’s fiat, solemnly moving up and down a decimal point or two, while the black market rate was 50 or more. Men and women all still wore the Burmese sarong and slippers. In Burmese films you could tell the villain because he was the only one who wore trousers.
But people’s lives, particularly in the cities were transmogrified. Religion apart, almost no civilian activities were tolerated. No clubs, no theatres, no publication uncensored. Even a rare show of paintings meant scrutiny by a group of censors, suspicious of hidden political meaning. The colour red was most suspect. No fraternising with foreigners.. A Burmese found talking to a foreigner without official sanction would be hauled in by the military intelligence, the much feared MI, and asked ‘Why have you betrayed your country by talking to a European?’ It is important to register this iron grip on people’s lives, in order to grasp the enormity of the events of 1988.
In 1986, the political scene, too, was like a millpond. Dissent had been eliminated, except in the continued fighting with ethnic and communist insurgents who had been driven out of the central plain into the hills, leaving large areas out of government control, and giving the army another excuse to hold on to power. Meanwhile the economy declined, and Burma, once as rich as any country in South East Asia, was forced to seek special help as one of the poorest countries in the UN.
But within two years an astonishing turmoil would occur. It wasn’t the populace or the students that threw the first stone into the millpond, but the dictator Ne Win himself. If you have run a country as an absolute dictator, whose every whim is law, for a quarter of a century, and things aren’t really going right, perhaps you simply get bored, as well as irritated.
On the fifth of September 1987 at 11o’clock in the morning a piece of paper was thrust into the hand of the Burma Broadcasting Service announcer. He was to tell the country that from that instant all currency notes above the value of a pound were worthless.
With almost all transactions in cash, most people’s savings were simply wiped out. If you had just sold your house or your car- they cost about the same- you suddenly had nothing to show for it but a bundle of worthless paper which it was a serious crime to keep.
Yet the population were so used to being browbeaten by the dictator, to being treated like a battalion on active service - keep them on their toes, you never know where the enemy will strike next - that there was no immediate popular reaction, apart from a rare disturbance by Rangoon university students who were mainly complaining about going hungry over the weekend because the canteen manager couldn’t get credit in the bazaar.
The few tourists in Burma at the time were left high and dry. A dozen Brits turned up at the embassy on the Sunday morning and we took them in until their plane left on the Monday. One of them had sold his last pair of trousers to buy a rail ticket down from Mandalay. Our butler who had been at the embassy for 35 years had seen almost everything but even he looked a bit disconcerted serving him at dinner in a pair of scarlet briefs.
There is no clear thread running between the September ‘97 demonetisation and the extraordinary Rangoon Spring of August 1988. True, there were student disturbances in the first half of 1988, the first for many years apart from the brief spat immediately after the demonetisation, but on past form the dictator could have kept the lid on.
Instead he signalled the possibility of change- which led to more disturbances - by calling an extraordinary congress of the single Party, normally occasions of positively North Korean unanimity and jaw-cracking boredom.
But this time he electrified the country by proposing a referendum on the future political system- single party or multi-party- and then offered his own resignation, adding that his senior colleagues would step down too. This they declined to do, and a particularly bloodstained henchman was appointed President. To this day no-one is sure whether this was all part of his plan. To most people the idea of anyone crossing Ne Win was simply inconceivable.
In any case suddenly the sands shifted, and an extraordinary upheaval began. It would have been remarkable in any country, but in the Burmese millpond it was bizarre. A young BBC reporter, Chris Gunness, who had been allowed into the country as part of Ne Win’s tactic of stirring everything up - normally foreign journalists were refused visas - was told of a plan by students and workers to stage a general strike starting at 8 minutes past 8 on the 8th day of the 8th month of 1988.
More than most media organisations, the BBC is shy of becoming part of the story, but in a country with no free channels of communication it is unlikely that the strike would have erupted all over the country if people had not heard about the plan on the Burmese service of the BBC. Gunness became a Burmese hero overnight.
Despite their being no charismatic single leader, only strike committees and student groups, Rangoon and then the other towns of Burma downed tools, and thousands took to the streets demanding simply ‘democracy,’ transliterated straight into Burmese.
The Rangoon Spring had begun and it lasted for 41 days. For the first few days the army seemed to try to quell the disturbances, which were anonymous and sporadic. Many people were shot and killed, including some in or near the main hospital. Then Ne Win’s successor resigned and the army pulled back.
Posters appeared attacking the regime. One poster I saw put up by the Astrologers’ Union blamed everything on Ne Win’s favourite astrologer for giving him bad advice. In a superstitious nation Ne Win was notoriously so. Then the Rangoon Bar Association took its courage in both hands and issued a signed protest calling for change. The Medical Association followed suit. The street marches multiplied, with banners identifying the State organisation marching.
By early September every Ministry had joined in. Even the beggars had their march. On the last Sunday before the Army struck back even the Police Band went over to the side of the people and played outside city hall.
In Mandalay, the second city, the monks took over the running of the town, directing traffic and administering justice.
Newspapers and news-sheets multiplied. Even the Working People’s Daily defied the party line and started printing real news. And every day the demonstrations went on.
It was a carnival, but with sinister go-ings on in the wings. The marchers naturally got very thirsty. There was a scare that army agents were poisoning the water supply and half a dozen unfortunate scapegoats were caught and publicly beheaded.
There was also a good deal of looting, egged on by the army. Early in September there were disturbances and jailbreaks from Rangoon Prison and from prisons round the country. Rangoon Asylum let all its inmates go.
The army’s game-plan, if they had one, seemed to be to encourage disorder. The army would open up a warehouse to let looters in and then go in and shoot a few once they were ensconced. There was a German aid project with a warehouse full of agricultural machinery. The German project head observed soldiers in uniform systematically looting it .The army evidently hoped that things would get so out of hand that the people would have had enough and beg the old regime to come back.
The trouble was that they didn’t. The city of Rangoon, and indeed the whole country, ran disturbingly smoothly without Big Brother. Instead a few servicemen in uniform began to join the marchers. This I believe is what triggered the army’s
brutal return on 18 September The other thing that happened was that after 25 years of obscurity Burma hit the international press. I spent hours briefing them on the telephone, with the Military Intelligence’s recording machine no doubt whirring quietly in the background. An enterprising Chinese night-club owner in Bangkok produced well-forged Burmese visas for a handful of foreign journalists. One day the telephone rang and it was the Daily Mirror. Robert Maxwell, the Mirror’s proprietor, had noticed there was trouble in Burma and proposed to come and sort it out. I said that it might be difficult to get a visa. The only outcome was an editorial in the Mirror which managed in a few pungent paragraphs to castigate all parties concerned - the British ex-colonial power, the students, the military. So much for parallel diplomacy.
To this day no-one to my knowledge has discovered how the uprising was led and controlled at the outset. There were several student leaders who assumed noms de guerre, to avoid identification, and to confuse the MI further several took the same name, Min Ko Naing, or conqueror of the King.
Once things were well under way, senior figures from the past staked their claim to take over the movement - former politicians and military officers who Ne Win had sacked for being too able or too uppity. The most venerable was U Nu, Prime Minister before the 62 coup, who tried to reconvene the parliament which had been suspended 25 years previously.
But the real star that burst into the firmament was Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of General Aung San the martyred hero of Burma’s independence, who unusually for a Burmese took her father’s name as part of her own.
On 26 August she addressed a crowd of several hundred thousand on the slopes of the great Shwe Dagon Pagoda and staked her claim as her father’s daughter to bring freedom to Burma. The Oxford housewife tag was never an accurate one - Suu had done various responsible administrative jobs in the West and in Japan, but she took to politics as if she had been waiting for the day, as perhaps she had.
Then and later the regime tried hard to blacken her name because she had married a foreigner. Being married to an Englishman didn’t seem to go down as badly with the Burmese as the MI hoped, so they spread the word that her husband Michael Aris was really Indian, the least popular race with the Burmese.
Once later, while campaigning for her party, The National League for Democracy, she was asked by a village matron why she had married a foreigner. Her reply was at once sincere and astute. "Well mother," she said, "if I had stayed in Burma I might have married one of your sons. But I was living abroad, and you know what young people are like, they fall in love."
On Sunday 20 September, suddenly the ball was over. The Burma Broadcasting Service which along with Ne Win’s house and a few other critical points had been kept under tight government control, started broadcasting martial music. The head of the army, a notably unmemorable figure, announced that to prevent chaos and save the country from disintegration the army in the form of the State Law and Order Restoration Committee assumed power. It is said that all armies prepare for the last war but the Burmese army was preparing to meet a threat which they had met and overcome nearly 50 years before.
Battalions were brought in from active service against insurgents in the hills, and soldiers opened fire remorselessly on the crowds. A whole group were gunned down outside the American embassy, whose satellite dish the marchers fondly believed was transmitting television pictures of demonstrators back to the West. No-one knows how many were killed in Rangoon alone. Defence Attaches tried to count by calculating the capacity of the Rangoon crematorium. Certainly hundreds, probably thousands.
The end was tragic. But no-one who lived through those six weeks of freedom, after 25 bleak and featureless years of dictatorship, will ever forget them. Even for a mere observer they were the most intense days of my life.
Such was the terror of the army and of the dreaded MI that resistance was snuffed out almost overnight, a night of continual gunfire we listened to, tucked safely away in diplomatic premises. Student leaders fled to the hills. Civil servants were systematically purged. The people were to be punished, with a nation-wide curfew that went on for over a year, among other things.
The situation was as Berthold Brecht once described another kind of dictatorship:-
‘The Government let the people know that the people had very much disappointed them, and thus lost the Government’s confidence; and that the people would have to work very hard and behave very well in order to regain the confidence of the Government.’
All that remained was the promise of opening up the economy, which has proceeded erratically, and the promise of multi-party elections, with no date, and no precise terms of reference. After a quarter century of a single party system, the government in effect said ‘You want democracy? We’ll give you democracy and you’ll see what a mess it is. Multi-party system? The more the merrier. But you wont be allowed to campaign or hold mass meetings. Any gathering of more than 4 people at a political rally is forbidden’
The regime did everything in their power to encourage people to set up new parties. Anyone who formed a party was given all sorts of goodies- special petrol rations and a telephone. Over 200 sprang up. The old Burma Socialists Programme Party, the only party permitted for 25 years, traded under a new name and was allowed to keep all its premises and funds, which should have given it a huge advantage.
Presumably Ne Win calculated that either multiparty democracy would be discredited by confusion and quarrels when many parties won seats, or the Burmese would vote for the devil they knew.
What no-one reckoned with was the blazing attraction of Suu and her National League for Democracy. Until she was locked up in her own house in July 1989 – imprisonment that lasted six long years – she toured the country and addressed enormous crowds, disregarding the ban on outdoor meetings.
Once she braved a direct threat to shoot her if she walked down her planned route. As a junior officer gave his troops the order to take aim, his superior ran up and countermanded it; whereupon the junior tore his badges of rank from his own uniform and threw them on the ground, saying what use are these. The whole country learnt of this incident within 12 hours from the Burmese service of the BBC, thanks to some fast footwork.
Remember that the internal media reported nothing of the election campaign except for the old official party’s activities and bizarre in the midst of preparations for a multi-party election- a series of diatribes about the dangers of democracy.
When a date for elections was finally fixed for May 1990, to give plenty of time for the SLORC as they hoped to knock the stuffing out of Suu ’s NLD party by systematic persecution of its candidates, the smart money in Rangoon was on a rigged election and a victory for the old single party reconstituted, which had indeed ordered the champagne for a victory party. Not a bit of it.
The count, astonishingly, was scrupulously fair on the day, and the results were announced from each polling station, to avoid accusations of tampering with the ballot boxes. Even in polling stations inside army cantonments Suu Kyi’s party got a majority, and country wide won 82% of the seats. Burma has always been a country of surprises.
But the next step was less of a surprise. The SLORC, as the regime was now called – the State Law and Order Restoration Council – after a long delay in confirming the result simply refused to implement it. Suu Kyi remained under house arrest and half her top party colleagues were put in prison.
But she and her party simply refuse to give up, and with her Nobel Peace Prize she is an established world figure. The so-called market economy instituted by the SLORC is very much of a curate’s egg, and a pretty odd curate at that. The country is flooded with cheap Chinese consumer goods and a lot of Chinese immigration. Thai and other firms have ripped out the teak by clear felling and hoovered up the fish. There is very little local value added. The new hotels are half empty. The stand off with the NLD continues.
As dictatorships round the world collapse, it seems incredible that the Burma Army should cling on to total control of the country, and at the same time by their ineptitude fail to bring economic improvement.
Look at other governments in the region which started from military regimes, which have seen the army remain politically powerful, but have allowed a reasonably free civil society and a healthy economy to flourish . If only Burma could start down that road.
Above all there remains the iron clampdown on any form of dissent, with the MI and their legion of informers quietly stamping out wrong thoughts let alone wrong actions. Tourists visiting Burma for the first time find it hard to believe that this is a military dictatorship, since there are few soldiers to be seen in the cities, and none of the screaming police cars you see and hear in London. The army’s control is so strong they can afford to stay in the shadows.
Against this background of Orwellian discipline Suu Kyi stands out, from the point of view of the SLORC, like a tarantula on a piece of angel food, to quote Raymond Chandler. She is simply not afraid, in a country where the government relies on fear to keep control.
She and her political party, swimming against the tide, still remain the best hope for Burma. Half the army voted for her in the 1990 elections, so the generals cannot sleep all that easily. Burma is a country of surprises and if ever there was a lady not for turning, she is it. At the same time she is perfectly prepared to have a proper dialogue with the army that her father founded. That must be the way out.
