The Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham

Author:Peter Popham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2012-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

HEIRS TO THE KINGDOM

1

ALONE

ON the day they placed me under arrest,” Suu told an American journalist who visited her at home in 1995, “this garden was still quite beautiful. There were lots of Madonna lilies, fields and fields of them, and frangipani, and fragrant yellow jasmines, and gardenias, and a flower from South America that changes its color as it matures and is called ‘yesterday, today and tomorrow.’”1

But after she was detained Suu did not want to look out on flowers any more, and she did not want their scent in her nostrils.

On July 21, 1989, a SLORC spokesman announced that Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo, the NLD chairman, were to be confined to their homes for a minimum of one year “because they have violated the law by committing acts designed to put the country in a perilous state.” They had been detained under the new rules enacted earlier in the year permitting summary justice by the military without recourse to the courts.

That was bad enough. But all Suu’s closest comrades, the forty-odd men and women, including her friend and companion Ma Thanegi, who had spent Martyrs’ Day at her home together as the army once again clamped the capital in an iron grip, had been taken off to Insein Jail. Only she and Tin Oo had been left on the outside.

Suu demanded to be taken to join them in prison. When the regime refused, she went on hunger strike. She would eat nothing, she said, unless they agreed to her demand and put her in jail with the rest. In the meantime she would take only water and fruit juice.

Alex, now sixteen, and Kim, eleven, were with her at home—Michael had sent them on ahead while he attended to essential business following his father’s death—but now they found themselves spectators to a battle of wills that had nothing to do with them, and that they must have struggled to comprehend.

When news reached Michael of his wife’s detention, he set out to join his family as quickly as he could. Fortunately he already had a valid Burmese visa in his passport, so he was able to leave almost at once, informing the authorities that he was on his way. But when he landed at Rangoon’s Mingaladon Airport on July 24th, he discovered that he had arrived in the thick of a major crisis.

“As the plane taxied to a halt,” he wrote, “I could see a lot of military activity on the tarmac. The plane was surrounded by troops . . .”2 Aris would not have been human if he had not been a little apprehensive: The assassination of Filipino opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr., shot dead on the tarmac of Manila’s airport as he returned from exile, was only six years in the past. But no violence was offered him. Aris was escorted away by an army officer, forbidden to make contact with the British Embassy, and told that he could join Suu and the boys if he agreed to abide by the same terms of detention as Suu.

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