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Waiting for the Lady
a glimpse of Burma’s pro-democracy movement
by Marianne Dresser
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The morning flight to Rangoon was blissfully short. An hour and a half out of Bangkok the plane banked to the right. I looked out the window at the lush, green expanse below, giving way to a compact urban grid. And there it was: the golden dome of the Schwedagon Pagoda emerging from a forested hillside overlooking the city. Visible from the air — if you’ve heeded Lonely Planet’s tip and gotten a seat on the right side of the plane — the Schwedagon was a marvelous sight. Even the second time around.
I’d been here once before, in October, 1987. At the time, foreign tourism was tightly restricted by the Burmese government. I rushed through the country on a one-week visa, just long enough for a hurried round-trip between Rangoon, the old upcountry capitol Mandalay, and the temples of Pagan. Yet during that brief visit I’d fallen in love with Burma.
Rangoon was a lively metropolis, refreshingly free of the commercial excesses of Westernization that permeated other Asian cities such as Bangkok and Singapore. The people I met were friendly, warm and gracious, genuinely interested in making contact — despite the difficulties posed by living under a corrupt government that had plunged one of the region’s richest lands into crippling poverty. I heard stories, many of them tragic: a family’s life savings reduced to scrap paper by a sudden devaluation of currency, a teacher-turned-souvenir-hawker barred from the classroom for deviating too far from the party line. People told of these events with smiles and offers of tea.
Nine years later, I was returning — this time to visit a dear friend, Dhammanandi, a Buddhist nun I’d met in Thailand in 1990. She was now living in a remote monastery in Upper Burma. Travel restrictions had eased and the government was now actively encouraging tourism. The more open attitude toward foreign visitors did not extend to everyone, however. Journalists, activists, even relief workers were regularly barred from entering the country. I did not list my occupation as “writer” on my visa application. I did not let on that I knew anything about Burma’s painful recent history.
In the spring and summer of 1988, a few months after my first visit, a fledgling pro-democracy movement flowered briefly, led by a gentle young woman named Aung San Suu Kyi. Bloody repression followed. Those events consolidated power in a brutal military junta, the “State Law and Order Restoration Council,” better known by its suitably ugly acronym, SLORC. The regime summarily renamed the country “Myanmar” and placed Suu Kyi under house arrest in 1989. In May 1990, Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won an overwhelming victory in a national election. But SLORC refused to cede power. Suu Kyi was awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and focused the world’s attention on her country’s struggle. International pressure helped lead to her release in July 1995. Since then, The Lady, as she is known and loved in Burma, has begun rebuilding the movement.
The fallout from these dramatic political shifts made travel to Burma a morally ambiguous affair. The government, in pursuit of foreign capital, was about to launch a huge tourism promotion, Visit Myanmar Year. In response, Suu Kyi made an international plea for travelers to boycott the country. She hoped to stop at least one trickle of the vast flow of dollars into SLORC’s coffers.
I began my third extended trip through Asia in October, 1996, looking forward to revisiting Burma and to seeing Dhammanandi. But during my travels, the situation there worsened. In Chiang Mai, Thailand, I visited another friend, Annie. She had just left her job with a health organization in Rangoon (renamed Yangon) due to steadily increasing harassment. I also met a group of activists and health workers based in Chiang Mai who served the Karen, Shan, Karenni and other refugee communities that clustered in primitive camps along the Thai-Burma border. The workers’ reports illuminated the human face of the suffering caused by SLORC’s policies of forced relocation and corvée labor.
The political situation was volatile. Suu Kyi’s public efforts to thwart the state-sponsored tourism campaign had angered SLORC. The regime might react as it had in 1988, a brutal reprisal on a much larger scale than the events at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Everyone I met in Chiang Mai advised against going to Burma.
Despite my friends’ warnings and my own unease, I wanted to go. I wouldn’t get another chance to see Dhammanandi for years. I agreed to hand-deliver personal letters to a couple of Annie’s friends in Rangoon. And she asked me to track down copies of Burmese-language health materials much needed on the border. I hoped undertaking these tasks would offset some of the harm done by my reluctant collusion with SLORC . . .
