The Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham

incite the crowd to attack him. She had agreed, and she remained true to her undertaking—though perhaps not so true to the spirit of it.
    â€œI would like to say one thing,” she went on, with the first hint of circumspection in her voice. “Some may not like what I am going to say. But I believe that my duty is to tell the people what I believe to be true. Therefore I shall speak my mind . . . At this time there is a certain amount of dissension between the people and the army . . .”
    For the first time in the speech, Suu was open to the accusation of understatement: After all, staff at the hospital where her mother had once worked believed the army had killed 3,000 civilians in cold blood—a far greater massacre than any for which the former colonial ruler was blamed. 36 She could not have been unaware that she was now trespassing on the most delicate and at the same time most vital question confronting the people: not what political system the country might adopt, which after all was a question for the coming weeks and months, but the nightmare of murder and mutilation that the country was living through right now, day after day. It could not be ignored.
    And again her hands moved to the documents she had brought with her, leafing through to the words she needed. Again the great Aung San, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, pointed his dread finger at his sanguinary successor. “The armed forces are meant for this nation and this people,” she read out, “and it should be a force having the honor and respect of the people. If instead the armed forces should come to be hated by the people, then the aims with which this army has been built up would have been in vain.”
    â€œMy first impression was that she was just another general’s daughter,” said Nita Yin Yin May, the British Embassy’s information officer at thetime, “because I’d never met her personally. And then she started talking to the people and I was overwhelmed by her speech. I was shocked: This was the one we were looking for! She was the true leader!” 37 She wiped away tears of emotion at the memory. “I was very much impressed. I thought she was very sincere, very charming, very beautiful, very outspoken. It really hit all of us. It really touched all of us. And then I decided, I’m going to support her no matter what.”
    There was much more: The crowd listened with keen attention and by the end they were chanting her name. She told them of her “strong attachment” to the army, how soldiers had cared for her as a child. She vowed that she would never be a stalking horse for politicians of the past; echoing her father she exhorted the people over and over again to “unity” and “discipline.” She spelled out, naming the hapless Dr. Maung Maung (who was to survive in power for less than a month), her belief that a referendum was not required. “We want to get rid of the one-party system,” she said. There is “no desire at all for a referendum . . . free and fair elections [should be] arranged as quickly as possible . . .”
    General Ne Win was of course not present at this meeting, and it is not known if he was subsequently given a recording of Aung San Suu Kyi’s maiden speech; but if so it is a fair bet that by this point he had switched the machine off, possibly hurling it at the wall. Not only had Bogyoke’s daughter come out of nowhere to make a nuisance of herself; not only did she bear a startling resemblance to the man honored as the father of the nation and of the Tatmadaw. But in pronouncing very particular words uttered by the dead man, she had ripped away what shreds of legitimacy Ne Win and his clique could still lay claim to. It was a declaration of war.

    A silkscreen depicting Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father. It decorated the stage during her debut speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda and is now on a wall in