The Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham Page A

looking forward to having them with her again. The house, Michael wrote, was “an island of peace and order under Suu’s firm, loving control. The study downstairs had been transformed into a hospital ward and the old lady’s spirits rallied when she knew her grandsons had arrived.” 13 But the preparations had worn Suu out: “When we first arrived,” Michael wrote in a letter to his twin brother Anthony in August, “the boys said that Suu looked as if she had just been released from a concentration camp! She had really exhausted herself trying to renovate the house before her mother’s return. She has put on some weight and is looking much better.” 14
    The future, though bleak, was now attaining a visible form: Suu would wait out the inevitable, making her mother’s last weeks and months ascomfortable as possible. Her family would keep her company until the boys had to go back to school. What were their plans once her mother had passed away? Would Suu shut up the house, perhaps sell it, and close that chapter in her life forever, severing her closest ties to her homeland? With the boys still at school in Oxford and both Michael and Suu committed to their academic work in England, that would have been the logical, almost inevitable course.
    But then something happened which stunned the nation.
    After the last bout of bloodletting, it seems finally to have dawned on General Ne Win that things could not go on as they were. So on July 23rd—one day after the arrival of Michael and the boys—he convened an extraordinary congress of the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP), the monopolistic political party he had created and through which he ruled the country. Standing on the podium before the thousand delegates, the blubbery-lipped, muscle-bound, imposing but now fading tyrant made the most remarkable speech of his career, transmitted live on state television.
    â€œDear delegates,” he told the hall, “I believe that the bloody events of March and June show a lack of trust in the government and the party that guides it.” 15
    People all over the country watched mesmerized as the man with the power of life and death announced that he was rewriting the rules.
    â€œIt is necessary,” Ne Win went on, “to find out whether it is the majority or the minority that support the people showing the lack of trust . . . The current congress is requested to approve a national referendum . . . If the choice is for a multiparty system, we must hold elections for a new parliament.”
    Burma had been awash with rumors about the state of Ne Win’s mental health ever since the death of his favorite wife some years before. But now this turkey was apparently voting for Christmas: Had he finally cracked?
    The general now handed the microphone to an underling called Htwe Han—who continued to read his boss’s speech, still in the first person. And now came the real bombshell. “As I consider that I am not totally free from responsibility, even if indirectly, for the sad events that took place in March and June,” Htwe Han read out, “and because I am advancing in age, I would like to request party members to allow me to relinquish the duty of party chairman and party member.” As if that was not enough, headded that five other top office-holders, his entire inner circle, the gang who had run Burma for years, would do likewise. “The atmosphere,” Michael wrote, “was electric with hope.” 16
    Yet anybody who interpreted the speech to mean that the protesters would now have free rein were disabused by his final words—Ne Win had taken the microphone back now—which epitomized the crude menace of his style. “In continuing to maintain control,” he said, “I want the entire nation, the people, to know that if in future there are mob disturbances, if the army shoots, it hits—there is no firing in the air to