Daw Suu's Letter from Burma #34

[carol@xxxxxxx]

Mainichi Daily News, Sunday, July 14, 1996

JULY IS A MONTH OF MOMENTOUS ANNIVERSARIES

Letter from Burma (No. 34) by Aung San Suu Kyi

	It is not a month that seems to inspire poetic outpourings.  Perhaps it is
the in-between ordinariness of July, caught between summer pretty June and
summer glorious August, that fails to stimulate the imagination.  I cannot
recollect a single poem dedicated to July except for an excruciating one I
wrote, as a classroom exercise in my school in Delhi, that began "In July,
month of rain and dust ..."  It is the time of year in North India when the
monsoons have just begun and the dust storms of the hot, dry season have not
yet cleared away.
	But dull, in-between July is a month of momentous anniversaries.  There is
Bastille Day and American Independence Day and the July Conspiracy against
Hitler.  In Burma, too, the month is notable for a number of significant
events in the modern history of our country.  In 1947, on July 19, six
months before Burma was officially declared a sovereign independent nation,
my father and several of his colleagues were assassinated while a meeting of
the Governor's Executive Council was in session.  Four gunmen dressed in
jungle-green fatigues and armed with automatic weapons pushed their way into
the council chamber and opened fire, wiping out seven councillors who were
the foremost leaders of the country, a senior member of the civil service,
and a young aide-de-camp.  It took just a few minutes to perpetrate the deed
that has had an immeasurable effect on the evolution of Burma as an
independent nation.
	The assassinations had been arranged by a veteran politician, U Saw, who
chose the way of violence, rather than the way of the ballot box, as the
primary means for achieving political power.  He had boycotted the elections
of April 1947 in which my father's party, the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom
League (AFPFL), had won an overwhelming victory.  But although he had
neither contested for nor gained the mandate of the people, U Saw thought
that once he had removed those he saw as his arch rivals, he would be called
upon to form a new government.  In the event it was U Nu, the most senior
member of the AFPFL left alive, who succeeded my father.
	Fourteen years after Burma became independent, another event of high
historical significance took place in July.  On March 2, 1962, the
democratically elected government was removed by a military coup and state
power passed into the hands of the Revolutionary Council headed by General
Ne Win.  The students of Rangoon University, with a strong tradition of
political activism dating back to the days of the independence movement, did
not respond favorably to the establishment of military rule.  As unrest
increased in the campus, new university regulations were introduced and in
the first week of July, students began peaceful demonstrations to protest
against these new regulations.  Events took a nasty turn on the 7th of July
when soldiers were ordered to open fire on the students.  The exact number
and nature of casualties on that fatal day still remain in dispute; it was
officially declared that only 16 students had been killed, but there are
claims that the number of dead was well over 100.  The tragedy of Rangoon
University culminated at dawn the next morning: the Students' Union
building, which had been the proving ground for young nationalist
politicians who later led the country to independence, was dynamited by
order of the authorities and reduced to rubble.  Some say the building was
full of students, all of whom were killed in the blast.
	Twenty-six years after the destruction of the historic Union building, the
actions of the students of Rangoon University once again led to an event of
national importance.  As a result of student unrest, the Burma Socialist
Programme Party (BSPP), which had dominated the country for a quarter of a
century, held an emergency congress on July 23, 1988.  It was the first peal
in the death knell of one-party dictatorship.  At this congress, the top
leaders of the BSPP resigned and the outgoing Chairman U Ne Win announced it
was time to decide whether or not the system should be changed to one that
recognized the validity of more than one political party.  The refusal of
the BSPP to put an end to its authoritarian rule triggered off the
nationwide public demonstrations which were the beginning of the movement
for democracy.
	July is an eventful month for me personally as well.  It was on the 20th of
July, 1989, that I was placed under house arrest.  We received the first
intimation of what was about to happen when a neighbor came early in the
morning to tell us that our road was full of troops.  Soon after, U Tin U's
son drove over to let us know that their house too was surrounded and that
his father had been prevented from going out for his usual morning walk.
That was the beginning of six years of detention.
	And it was on July 10 last year that I was released.  When U Aung Shwe, U
Kyi Maung, U Tin U and I met that evening we simple decided to pick up where
we had left off six years ago, to continue our work.  It remains in my
memory as a quiet day, not a momentous one.

* * *
(This is one of a yearlong series of letter.  The Japanese translation
appears in the Mainichi Shimbun the same day, or the previous day in some
areas.)