The Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham Page B

“The Medical Association followed suit. The street marches multiplied, with banners identifying the state organization marching. By early September every ministry had joined in. Even the beggars had their march. On the last Sunday before the army struck back even the police band went over to the side of the people and played outside City Hall.”
    It was the same all over the country. In the little town of Phekhon, in the Shan States in Burma’s disputed northeast, a student recently returnedfrom Rangoon called Pascal Khoo Thwe was caught up in the excitement; like many others, it was to determine the course of the rest of his life. 4 He wrote many years later:
    When Aung San Suu Kyi made her great speech . . . on August 26th, she instantly became our leader and inspiration. In the evenings we would listen to the BBC and hope for guidance from our goddess. We formed committees for security, for the food supply, for information, for connecting the different ethnic and religious groups.
    Although I busied myself with all this, I knew there was a pompous and officious aspect to it. It also had a dreamlike quality. Only weeks before, to speak in open opposition to the regime would have been unthinkable. Now the whole of Phekhon was talking about the future, about what sort of constitution Burma should have, about the place of the minority peoples. People who had been silent for twenty-six years now wanted to shout, or at least endlessly to debate.
    Burma was approaching a state of anarchy, but for a while it worked the way anarchists have always claimed society should naturally work once the state’s machinery of repression is sent to the scrapyard, in messy but euphoric harmony. The army had pulled back to barracks and was nowhere to be seen. The feared and hated riot police, the Lon Htein, was likewise invisible. Ministries and government offices had simply closed; the Burmese state had shut down. And the vacuum filled up with people doing their own thing. A young woman called Hmwe Hmwe who had joined the democracy movement in Rangoon traveled to Mandalay to help coordinate strike centers there, traveling by van and pickup truck. 5 “Since everybody was on strike, there was no train service or other regular transport and it was difficult to buy petrol as well,” she said. “But spirits were high and we attended meetings all along the way. We slept in the strike centers and there was one in every town we passed through. The people had taken over the local BSPP offices and government premises and managed their own administration . . . There was feverish activity everywhere: people printing leaflets, making posters, publishing their own local newspapers and preparing meetings, rallies and demonstrations.”
    Older systems of authority re-emerged to fill the place of those that had vanished. Bertil Lintner wrote:
    In Mandalay, the young monks’ organization . . . had resurfaced. 6 The monks organized day-to-day affairs like rubbish collection, made sure the water supply was working and, according to some reports, even acted as traffic policemen. The maintenance of law and order was also in the hands of the monks—and the criminals who had been caught were often given rather unorthodox sentences. One visitor to Mandalay in August saw a man chained to a lamp post outside the railway station who shouted all day, “I’m a thief! I’m a thief! . . .”
    Yet the appearance of a vacuum of power was itself illusory. The military regime was rocking, it is true; its pseudo-civilian governing apparatus was crumbling. But in the months and years to come, proof emerged of a controlling mind behind what was going on during the weeks of freedom—the same cynical and ruthless military mind that had ruled the country for the past generation.
    On the same day that Aung San Suu Kyi gave her maiden speech at the Shwedagon, truckloads of troops poured into central Rangoon and removed 600 million