Letters from Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi.

Strange Siege

As I have remarked often enough, life is certainly not dull for dissidents in Burma. But sometimes a little bit of dullness does not come amiss. In fact it provides a measure of welcome relief, time in which to stand and stare for at least a few minutes a day.

The National League for Democracy decided to hold an All Burma Party Congress on the eighth anniversary of the day when it was founded, the 27th of September. Now one might have thought that such an event, which is part of the normal routine of any political party, would not have caused the authorities to do more than perhaps cock an inquisitive eyebrow and set the military intelligence running around busily gathering information. One would not have imagined that they would be rocked to the very soles of their military boots. Well, one would have been wrong.

On the evening of the 26th, we received information that once again, as at the time of our proposed conference for NLD Members of Parliament in May, the authorities were rounding up those who were to attend the Congress. Around half past 9 at night, army trucks started going past my house and later, a police car or two went along the already cleared street with sirens blaring. It was all rather tedious and we went to sleep. Waking up at 5 o'clock in the morning, the unusual silence told me that our road had been blocked off. It was not altogether a surprise.

At 8 o'clock, U Tin U, one of our deputy chairmen, was let through and he told us what had been going on outside. Our helpers, who had been scheduled to arrive at 4 o'clock to start cooking the meal that we would be offering to monks as a prelude to our Congress, had been prevented from entering the street. After some negotiation, two of our NLD women members were allowed in to take charge of the huge pots of curry that had already been half prepared the night before. Soon after, our chairman U Aung Shwe and our other deputy chairman U Kyi Maung also arrived.

I learned that a number of NLD members who had come for the Congress were at the road junction not far from my house where barricades had been placed to prevent people from entering the street. At about 10 o'clock we decided to walk over to them and to tell them to go to the NLD headquarters. Walking along a street deserted except for security troops was not a new experience for me. It happened again and again during my campaign trips around Burma in 1989 and 1990. And last April, too, on Burmese New Year's Day, we had walked down our street when it was emptied of everybody except security personnel and members of the Union Solidarity and Development Association armed with surreptitious batons, with which they had been instructed to beat any members of the NLD who penetrated the barricades.

This time also the USDA were present, a couple of busloads of them milling around in the public garden at the top of the road for a purpose that we found hard to discern. When we reached the road junction, our party members who had been made to go to the other side of the street came over to ask us what we wanted them to do. We told them to go to our headquarters, and were just about to go back home ourselves when an army officer came to ask us to disperse. It was a typical over-reaction, unnecessary and quite senseless, as the crowd around us was made up largely of security personnel, uniformed as well as in plain clothes.

That afternoon, after the religious ceremony to commemorate the founding of the NLD had been completed, U Aung Shwe and I went out to see how things were at the party headquarters. We found that the road where the building was situated had also been closed off. That very evening, the landlord was illegally forced to annul the lease and to remove the NLD signboard from the building. The authorities had obviously decided to take all possible steps to prevent us from carrying out the legitimate work of a normal political party.

Now, nearly a week after the 27th, the road to my house continues to be blocked off. But U Aung Shwe, U Kyi Maung and U Tin U come over every day and we carry on with our work. "It is always still at the center of the storm," U Tin U remarked. And certainly there has been great calm in my house even as the authorities have been arresting hundreds of our supporters, making wild accusations against us and trying to force the landlords of our party offices to remove NLD signboards.

There is the proverbial silver lining to these storm clouds of increased official repression. The state of semisiege provides me with an opportunity to take a rest from the gruelling timetable that I normally follow. I do not have to rush through my meals, and I have even been able to spare an hour a day for walking round and round the garden: a wonderfully relaxing and invigorating form of exercise in which I have not been able to indulge for years. This strange interlude should serve to make me fighting fit for whatever challenges we may have to face in the future.