Letters from Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi.

July: A Mouth of Anniversaries

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.