Dissident

Thunder
How an insurgent movement
of pro-democracy activists—
from underground, in exile,
or in prison—returned to
take Burma’s military junta
by political storm.

Essay by Delphine Schrank

Photographs by Christopher Bartlett

Aung San Suu Kyi, in her

bungalow in Rangoon,
April 1, 1998 (joachim
ladefoged / vii)
A
t about 11 p.m. on March 4 in
Burma, in a barren, barely inhab-
ited metropolis of monumental
architecture and half-built
mansions encased in bamboo scaffolding, a
young political candidate wiped the blood from
his palms onto his jeans and barreled toward
the exit of a hospital.
“This is the real problem of our country,” de-
clared Naing Ngan Lin—aka Nigel—slum kid
turned street hawker turned dissident turned
politician running for a seat in the national
Parliament.
Arms akimbo, a forelock of thick hair falling
out of his Brylcreemed parting, he narrowed his
gaze and surveyed the dereliction of the hospi-
tal in a city called Naypyitaw in searing central
scrublands, all of which the ruling Generals of
his country built from scratch. In 2005, they
made it their shining, new capital. Ever since,
they had touted it as a vision of the future. And
yet at the hospital there was no running water,
no soap, no doctor, and two new patients,
bleeding and unconscious on gurneys, freshly
delivered from his pickup truck. Nigel and his
campaign team had discovered them forty min-
utes earlier by the side of an unlit six-lane high-
way, in a mangle of shouting bystanders and
smashed motorcycle parts.
When crisis hit, Nigel preferred to hold the
problem in his mind and turn it this way and
that before offering a solution. His students
called him “methodical,” more by a wide mar-
gin at least than their other teacher, Thar Thar,
who was at that moment darting back toward
him from three nurses in white headdresses
down the hall, buzzing between the gurneys.
“All they wanted is the addresses,” said Thar,
nom de guerre of Nigel’s friend, co-founder of
a network of democracy activists and a politi-
cal fugitive recently turned de facto national
deputy campaign manager for their party, the
National League for Democracy, or NLD. Elfin
and just dark and protean enough that even in
infancy his mother once confused him with the
family dog’s newborn puppy, he had the zest of
a firecracker whenever adrenaline surged. In
18 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
Burma, in the trenches of the democracy strug-
gle, in a party led by the Nobel Peace Laureate
Aung San Suu Kyi, which had resisted twenty-
two years of relentless repression, adrenaline
surged regularly.
In those moments, Thar’s speeded antics
heightened his penchant for thinking a half-
step ahead of everyone else. As the NLD team
stormed around the lobby, searching for a
doctor, Thar shot back to the nurses, who had
roused to attention with all the urgency of late-
night barflies. To them, he had gently been
suggesting that instead of inquiring about the
names and addresses of the accident victims
and the NLD people who had rescued them
in lieu of ambulances, or instead of staring
blankly at the patients, they probably ought to
think of performing a basic airway-breathing-
cardio check and running their hands over the
bodies to rule out serious injury.
I f Thar had a greater impulse for emergency
first response, it wasn’t for excess of conven-
tional training. As a child, he’d learned from his
father, a family physician whose practice in a
riverside town of bamboo-and-palm thatched
huts regularly involved sewing up poorer folk.
Later, after his father had been hauled away
one rainy night and died in prison; after his
mother had gathered her four sons together
and asked one of them to work for Aung San
Suu Kyi—The Lady, or Auntie, as he would come
to call the country’s most famous dissident—
and after he had stepped forward with nary a
blink and joined Suu Kyi’s democratic politi-
cal party, the NLD, while his three brothers
stayed away from politics, he had matricu-
lated in medical school. But he dropped out
within half a year. One crazy political gesture
in 2000—conscripting a busload of students
to march toward Suu Kyi’s motorcade, which
authorities blocked for days in a slum on the far
bank of the Rangoon River—and forced him to
sign a form promising to revoke politics or quit
university. The decision had been a no-brainer,
a protest against the ruling military junta. He
 The struggle was for democracy: for choice,
human rights, and basic freedoms—ideas all the
more enthralling for having always been denied.
had never—or rarely—looked back. Medical
school would have to wait, he would say later
with increasingly wry implausibility, “until the
struggle is over.”
That struggle was for democracy: for choice,
human rights, and basic freedoms—ideas all
the more enthralling for having always been
denied. But fundamentally, that struggle had
always been rooted in the granular. From un-
derground or under the chronic scrutiny of
intelligence agents and informers, Thar and
Nigel and Suu Kyi and dissidents across Bur-
ma’s pro-democracy movement had fought
through the darkest years of military rule for a
thousand daily practicalities: to earn a degree
without bribing an examiner, to have electric-
ity, to keep the rice paddy land that your family
had tilled for generations, to hold an identity
card if you happened not to be part of the Bud-
dhist majority, or, if you were, to scrap the sys-
tem that required one in the first place. They
wanted—they believed—they had a right to
assemble in groups of more than five; to use
the word “nightmare” if they chose to in the
lyrics of their songs; to paste a poster on a wall
and not face prison for the privilege. Their con-
cerns, the concerns of Burma’s “most passion-
ate dissidents,” Suu Kyi had written recently,
reflected “the sense of freedom as something
concrete that has to be gained through practi-
cal work, not just as a concept to be captured
through philosophical argument.”
Each of them had reached a tipping point,
a personal point of slippage from ordinary
citizenship into a life of dissent: a slow-burn
indignation at the rampant poverty that boiled
into an urge to march straight into the well-
watched NLD headquarters; the mingled out-
rage and exhilaration that came of watching
government servants shoot to kill or block
emergency aid from reaching survivors of a
massive cyclone—then discovering you could
help them yourself. Dissent became a compul-
sion, as a self-taught government-server-hacker
and underground head-banger in Thar and Ni-
gel’s network once explained to me. He took
the pseudonym Minus, but for his remarkably
gangling body, friends preferred to call him
Street Pole. He brandished a USB thumb drive:
“For carrying this, I get seven years in prison.”
T he NLD was born in 1988 as little more
than an expedient alliance slapped to-
gether in the bloody chaos of a crackdown on
a nationwide uprising. What happened then
became a story of the country’s descent into
pariah-land; of one authoritarian system sup-
planting another. What had happened also was
a story of how a spontaneous anti-government
eruption became a movement of dissidents,
how the movement almost died, and how it
didn’t so much survive as push one of the world’s
most repressive governments to the brink of po-
tential change.
“There are countries where elections have
been rigged or hijacked or where the results
have been disputed or denied,” Suu Kyi later
wrote, “but Burma is surely the only one where
the results have been officially acknowledged
in the state gazette, followed by nothing.”
Spearheaded by a band of increasingly stra-
tegic university students, the 1988 uprising
swelled over several months and eventually
succeeded in forcing out a general named Ne
Win, whose twenty-six-year rule had culmi-
nated in a caprice of astrologically motivated
economic paranoia. Ne Win had seized power
in 1962 from Burma’s fledgling, post-colonial
parliamentary democracy, justifying the coup
delph i ne schrank 19
in the name of holding together fractious eth-
nic minorities in the wild hinterlands. He
promptly asserted the mastery of the major-
ity Buddhist Burmese, indefinitely suspended
Parliament, and under a system that he called
the “Burmese Way to Socialism” began steer-
ing the economy from the brightest promise of
southeast Asia—with unparalleled social mo-
bility, strategic centrality, and abundant natural
resources—into a charity case.
The street-carnival atmosphere that fol-
lowed his resignation lasted briefly. Carnage
followed an internal reshuffle. Soldiers fired
into crowds with impunity. Summary execu-
tions followed mass arrests. Plausible estimates
place the number of deaths in the thousands.
In the heat of it all, the daughter of the coun-
try’s martyred independence hero had coinci-
dentally returned from her home in England
to tend her ailing mother in Rangoon (now
called Yangon), which was then still the capi-
tal. The daughter initially drew crowds because
her fine-boned face bore striking resemblance
to the father. But her speeches revealed an
eloquence, poise, and intelligence that quickly
established her as the voice of people’s aspira-
tions. Around Suu Kyi collected respected mili-
tary officers, urban intellectuals, Communists,
and students, together with other thousands
who still openly defied military rule.
Eventually under martial law, with Suu Kyi
relegated to house arrest and the then-party
chairman Tin Oo sentenced to hard labor, the
NLD went on to win elections in 1990 in a
landslide. Shocked at the extent of its unpopu-
larity, the junta that had seized power in 1988
as a self-dubbed “State Law and Order Restora-
tion Council” rejected the election results. It
threw the most dynamic leaders of the NLD
and hundreds of other dissidents in jail, banned
all other opposition parties except a few enfee-
bled ethnic versions, and systematically began
suppressing all dissent. Nearly bankrupt when
they seized power, the generals fattened in the
next two decades off sales from proceeds from
gas, oil, teak, precious gems, deep-sea port proj-
ects, pipelines, and hydropower. They poured
the receipts into their arsenal and later into
20 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
giant vanity projects on the billion-dollar scale
of the new capital Naypyitaw, which translates,
in one version, to “abode of the kings.”
T he wider population, meanwhile, spiraled
into penury. University students fled the
cities by the thousand to build a fighting force
in the malarial border states, forging expedi-
ent alliances with the tougher armed ethnic
minorities. For the next twenty years, Suu
Kyi and prominent dissidents revolved in and
out of detention. The abuses against the NLD
never relented, until its will appeared to finally
atrophy.
The education system was deliberately deci-
mated to cull a tradition of anti-government
organizing among students. Identity registra-
tion became a prerequisite for travel, work, or
play. The usual societal dynamics of authori-
tarianism prevailed: fear, self-censorship, se-
rial mistrust. You never knew who might be
watching. You never knew when the knock on
the door might come. Until a mass release on
January 13, about 2,000 political prisoners had
been dispersed across an archipelago of at least
ninety prisons and labor camps, a number that
had doubled with many facing multi-decade
sentences since a short-lived uprising in Sep-
tember 2007. At least one-fifth of that group
were members of the NLD.
S o you would think that after thirteen
years in Burmese opposition politics,
with three of these spent in hiding, Thar had
seen it all. Nigel, too, had long since made a
vocation of breaking through the cowed and
uncritical mindset of Burmese society, which
military rulers had cultivated since 1962. Both
had earned their stripes as activists teaching
subversive political ideas to as many students
as they could recruit. But each fresh encoun-
ter with that mindset and the countrywide
indigence it helped perpetuate still managed
to astound. Nothing, it seemed to them, had
changed—even now, in the midst of a cascade
of reforms that over the previous eight months
“Thar Thar,” a National League for Democracy leader and advocate

delph i ne schrank 21
 Tin Oo, former Commander in Chief of Burma’s Armed Forces, turned democracy advocate

22 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
had begun to suggest a newfound openminded-
ness from the government. The world beyond
had largely lauded the changes as a rare chance
for transition from authoritarian rule. For Bur-
ma’s opposition, they did not so much suggest
the end of the beginning or even the beginning
of the end.
“We are at the beginning of the beginning,”
Thar put it, echoing consensus among dissi-
dents that the sudden loosening of state con-
trols, for being so precarious, came with greater
urgency to push as they could never before.
At the site of the motorcycle accident, miles
from the ecstatically over-lit roundabouts of the
new Burmese capital of Naypyitaw, on a stretch
of road whose edges had already returned to
scrubland, the pickup’s headlights had carved
out of the night. About thirty people, yelling,
talking over each other, walked in circles. As
Nigel heard them out and consulted with his
men, Thar marched straight through the dilly-
dally of onlookers, past scattered metal and a
blood stain, to a police officer craning over the
unconscious motorcyclists with a flashlight,
insisting into the shafts of light that the bodies
cough up the details of their identity cards.
“I work for Naing Ngan Lin, and he is the
NLD candidate for this constituency. We are
taking these injured people to the nearest hos-
pital. If you have a problem with that, phone
him,” Thar said, thrusting his cell phone lit up
with Nigel’s number in front of the policeman’s
nose.
To be clear, Thar worked with, not for, his
friend. Technically, he even worked above
him, troubleshooting and coordinating the
national campaign strategy for all forty-eight
NLD candidates contesting for as many avail-
able seats in parliamentary by-elections on
April 1. The elections, for less than 10 percent
of parliament, were the first the NLD had con-
tested since 1990. They came two years after
general elections that the party had boycotted.
N igel, the forelock of hair resisting crack-
of-dawn applications of Brylcreem, was
the first of the candidates (after Suu Kyi her-
self) that party elders had picked to represent
them in the April by-elections. At thirty-four,
he was the second youngest. He was respected,
passionate, and, as friends, colleagues, and
family members unanimously declared him,
“honest.”
He was also handsome, with an old soul’s
solemnity in his chiseled features and a com-
manding presence that he exuded in the ca-
sual confidence of his stride. A slight paunch
complemented the air of maturity that had im-
pressed the NLD elders; it brimmed over his
jeans and, sometimes, his longyi, the Burmese
sarong he sported often—certainly more fre-
quently than Thar, whose puckish restlessness
and shoulder-length mane, cargo pants, and
T-shirts advertising various heavy metal bands
cast him squarely, from the vantage point of
Burma’s conservative fashions, in the mantle of
rich delinquency. They were, the pair of them,
earth and air, the one strapping, systematic, and
forthright; the other impulsive, volatile, and
hummingbird-lithe. One had worked above-
ground, donning his native poverty as a badge
of authenticity with his students, and now his
constituents; the other had maneuvered from
behind the mask of clandestine life, sleeping in
Internet cafes, shifting with mercurial ease be-
tween identities. Not that sleeping in Internet
cafes had necessarily been less luxurious than
Nigel’s situation. But it wasn’t legal.
Still, however well Thar had cultivated
friendships with half-a-dozen Internet café
managers in his years as a fugitive, he always
made a point of never collapsing over the key-
board. Hounded out of Rangoon by an intelli-
gence agent in May 2009, he had hidden for a
couple of weeks in an upcountry hamlet, fidg-
eted in the seamless landscape of paddies and
mud, and returned to the city in disguise in
the cargo hold of friend’s truck. Forevermore,
his rural home had been off limits. If he went
back, local authorities would have known it
through their network of informants; even if
he escaped arrest, his friends, relatives, and
widowed mother could expect regular bouts
of interrogation and harassment. On no ac-
count would he put a friend at risk for his own
delph i ne schrank 23
sake. Better to vanish into the human sprawl of
old Rangoon, one more carefree punk among
hundreds in the grid of boulevards down by the
river, from the booksellers and deserted jetties
off Strand Road, round ancient Sule Pagoda,
and on towards the offal stalls and one-time
opium dens in the back-alleys of Chinatown.
Sometimes, when the Internet cafés shut early,
at 2 or 3 a.m., he headed out to net recruits
at all-night teashops, the kind that appeared
at twilight, as if by magic, spilling out in an
anarchy of tiny plastic chairs and tables across
sidewalks and into the streets under halogens
hanging off coconuts and betels and strung
from crazily vibrating generators, because in a
city of 5 million, in a country with rivers churn-
ing with hydropower potential, there was still
no electricity.
N igel’s bed, from birth until he married,
with the minor hiatus of losing the place
entirely to Tropical Cyclone Nargis in May of
2008, had been a patch of unadorned floor-
boards in a two-room hut down an unpaved
alleyway in North Okklapa, a slum district
populated by trishaw drivers and street-market
hawkers. He shared his home with eight sib-
lings and his parents, who still exhibited all
the trappings of the mad, inopportune love on
which their brood had been founded and that
they later channeled into politics.
In another life, another place, Nigel would
have been the kind of driven high-school suc-
cess story who might have gone on to an MBA
and a job in finance. Popular with the ladies
and a karate black belt primed for national
competition, his two early passions had frit-
tered away when one parent, then the other,
was arrested and his six younger siblings were
suddenly without income or food.
Within months, the junta hiked the price
of fuel. Overnight, people could no longer af-
ford to take the bus to work, could no longer
afford to donate to the Buddhist monks who
filed by each morning, bare-pated and in togas
colored raw saffron, gathering donations in
their alms bowls for their noon-time meal.
24 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
When the monks protested—tens of thou-
sands of them in the streets, chanting about
compassion with bowls overturned in symbolic
denial of Buddhist merit to the junta—Nigel
discovered a natural talent as orator (or rabble-
rouser, depending on your perspective), jump-
ing impromptu onto pedestals in pagodas or
on street corners to galvanize civilians. After
the crackdown on what had come to be called
the Golden-Yellow Revolution, or “Saffron” to
foreigners, as the rest of the country hunkered
into spooked silence and government agents
began assiduously to match names to faces on
photographs and hunt down suspected ring-
leaders, Nigel marched straight to the hornet’s
nest that was then the NLD party headquarters.
With agents from Military Intelligence and po-
lice watching from a tea shop just across the
street, Nigel signed up for membership.
T har, three years Nigel’s junior, was
already a veteran. He didn’t tell Suu Kyi
that he was the son of two activists who had
become close friends to her after 1988, never
mentioned that his father had danced with
Suu Kyi as a schoolboy, selected the daughter
of General Aung San when he picked her shoe
by chance from a pile in a formal ball for their
respective boys’ and girls’ schools back in India.
Thar had earned his place in the NLD fair and
square, though unconventionally, on his own
merits. Suu Kyi happened upon an NLD book
club—“death sentence for the writer,” Thar had
jested later—where the high school graduate
exhibited a surprising audacity and precocious
flair for debate. Handpicked by Suu Kyi for the
NLD’s Central Information Committee, he by-
passed the usual Party hierarchy, and had never
since lived down the jealousy.
Thar would not tell strangers that he was a
politician. Dissembling, born of necessity, be-
came his art. To potential recruits, Thar would
offer only that he was a translator, an NGO
worker, a computer game aficionado. At any
rate, you saw a gregarious Tiger Beer drinker
with a generous pocket and a strange ability to
engage you in political conversation. But the
 Few could guess that Suu Kyi called him “Baby”;
fewer still that throughout her final years of detention,
as the junta held her incommunicado, he’d kept her
informed of all his maneuverings; all his attempts to
build and build again a secret battalion of activists.

surface mendacities melted away once he had
you. Once his intense, almond eyes fixed on
you, his ardent tongue let loose and you were
daring to think aloud about the country’s decay.
If he had his way, and he often did, you were
hooked. You were on your way to becoming
Minus, a “second-line” activist who would
heretofore be fully enrolled in their learn-a-
little, teach-a-lot school of dissent.
Few could guess that Suu Kyi called him
“Baby”; fewer still that throughout her final
years of detention, as the junta held her in-
communicado, he’d kept her informed of all
his maneuverings; all his attempts to build
and build again a secret battalion of activists
to hand back to her; that even as a fugitive, he
would steal by night with messages between
her lone interlocutor, her lawyer U Nyan Win,
and other spy-swarmed politicians. Nor would
you know it that Grandpa, U Win Tin, the par-
ty’s eighty-three-year-old grand strategist, had
come to rely on Thar for illicit missions in the
months after the release of the firebrand from
nineteen years in prison. That they became sur-
rogates for the sisters, fathers, children, whom
they could never have or who had vanished or
grown into strangers in their long absences—
all that was immaterial. Thar had wittingly
made himself a vital link between the old and
the new, connecting the know-how from five
decades of opposition to military rule with the
inchoate savvy of his generation, denied the
rudiments of decent education and groping,
in the absence of their elders, for a rebellious
politics all of their own.
Nigel referred to Thar’s methods as “ma-
nipulation.” He sometimes accused Thar of
cultivating closeness to the NLD elders as a bid
for power. Nigel preferred to hold up his NLD
affiliation as a calling card. His brazenness,
at a time when talking aloud of politics made
most Burmese shut like clams, often shook the
fear right out of them. Under twenty-four-hour
interrogation in June 2009, or to disarm the
agents who up until December 2011 still found
it necessary to trail him by the half-dozen on
his daily commute, he had weaponized self-
worth; intelligence agents, he had intuited,
were often honest types, who hated their job
and secretly respected his kind, particularly
when they held strong.
That the pair had managed to work together
for so long owed less to their divergent tactics
than a common vision for the country. It was all
they had going during the years when the ends
seemed a pipedream. As sure as the rubies in
the mines of Mogok, you didn’t do this work for
money or power. Opportunists be wary. If you
wanted the power, or the rubies for that mat-
ter, Thar used to joke, why not join the army?
A s the pickup truck careened down the
highway from the site of the accident to
the hospital, Thar conscripted Nigel to shout
through the casualties’ comas that they were
O.K.; he assured them that they were in good
hands now, they’d make it through. One was a
solid young woman, to all appearances a scion
of Burma’s narrow middle class. The other was
likely a laborer drawn from masses whose pov-
erty hovered near subsistence levels. He had

delph i ne schrank 25
 Nyan Win, former Minister of Foreign Affairs in Burma and national Chief Minister

26 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
alcohol on his breath, bones for hips, and torso
and limbs, beneath the tattered shirt and black-
ened sarong, as brittle as egg shell.
In the hospital, a scrum formed around the
cell phones as the NLD team phoned other
NLD people in three neighboring constituen-
cies, and worked the lines to get a doctor, any
doctor. Pronto.
A fourth nurse, older, with a sour matron’s
expression that seemed to suggest that distur-
bances of this kind at nighttime at a hospital
were not approved by local authorities, stood
behind a reception desk and methodically
tapped her ledger with a wooden ruler. “Name?
Address?” she called out, as NLD team mem-
bers blitzed past.
It was pushing toward midnight. Just under
a month remained until the April 1 elections.
Thar had a red-eye bus to catch for a crack-
of-dawn meeting with the campaign manager
in party headquarters 250 miles due south in
Rangoon. Nigel—himself running for office
in Naypyitaw—had a final check on the stage
that his team was building against the clock in
the middle of a parched field just outside the
capital for a much-anticipated campaign stop
tomorrow by Suu Kyi. Perhaps somewhere be-
tween they could all think of dinner. The day
had begun at sunrise for Nigel; at 7 p.m. the
previous night for Thar.
But no one was leaving until a doctor
showed up.
T wo days before the elections, a reporter
asked Suu Kyi to rate Burma’s progress
toward democracy—on a scale of one to ten.
“We are trying to get to one,” snapped the
leader of Burma’s democracy movement. She
spoke at a press conference on the grounds of
her lakeside villa in Rangoon, a deceptively
elegant exemplar of colonial-era Art Deco in
peeling gray paint where the unchallenged
leader of Burma’s democracy movement had
spent fifteen of the previous twenty-three years
under house arrest.
There was a time when the lawn, now mani-
cured and rimmed in an explosion of tropical
flowers, was a wilderness of unkempt, hip-high
grasses. There was a time when, cut off from
postal deliveries, she had so little cash for food
that she began to sell off the furniture: museum
pieces in their own right if only for their asso-
ciation with her father, Aung San, assassinated
in 1947 six months before the independence
from Britain that he had so deftly negotiated.
But the challenge today was less tragically pur-
gative. For nearly two hours, until she almost
collapsed with the heat exhaustion that had
nagged her as she zigzagged the country on
her campaign tour, Suu Kyi stood under a blis-
tering midsummer sun firing back witticisms
and shrewdly diplomatic rejoinders to an un-
precedented gathering at 54 University Avenue
of reporters, diplomats, and international elec-
tion observers.
The press conference was a marker of a
certain kind of triumph. Twenty-two years
since Suu Kyi’s party won its landslide vic-
tory, the NLD had again scored a historic coup.
Through sheer participation, it had succeeded
in turning a legal technicality in a constitu-
tion whose legitimacy it did not recognize into
the most significant and well-watched act of
political theater in Southeast Asia’s recent his-
tory. The government had eased up on visas
to foreign journalists for the occasion, and
hundreds had poured in for a front-row seat
or an undiminished view of the sylphlike icon.
Would the parliamentary elections of April 1,
2012, prove free and fair? Would an enigmatic
military-civilian hybrid government that had
in the final weeks of 2011 and early 2012
wowed the world with its fast-paced reforms
readily concede even a few seats to the popular
might of a party it had brutally repressed since
1990? Only eighteen months shy of her latest
stint of house arrest, would it really deliver a
perch in government to The Lady? The pros-
pect quavered as an ending to Burma’s shame
if not exactly worthy of Hollywood’s most bit-
tersweet, then at least of a velvet transition last
seen under the guidance of Suu Kyi’s spiritual
forebear, Vaclav Havel.
But the NLD’s greater achievement, even
before voting day, was a double whammy: excit-
delph i ne schrank 27
And then came the hat trick. On the heels of swelling popular
opposition that had simmered for years on the fringes of an
armed insurgency, the Thein Sein government suspended a
proposal for a $3.6 billion, Chinese-backed hydropower project.
ing the passions of a people long since inured to
politics. It also began transforming itself from
the rigidly hierarchical fossil it had become
in the previous two decades into the byword
for democratic government that it had always
promised to be.
By late March 2012, to be cool in Burma
was to join the party with a rap-song theme
set to a colonial-era revolutionary poem, “Wake
Up, Myanmar!” To be cool was to support the
party whose offices were tucked into private
bamboo-and-thatch homes, down mud lanes
lined with banana trees, in villages devoid of
running water and electricity. To be cool now
was to tie across your forehead, ninja-style,
a strip of cloth with the sign of the NLD—a
fighting peacock flaming gold against a scarlet
backdrop—that only months before had been
a ticket to prison.
By late March 2012, too, a new generation
of dissidents had bubbled to the surface: a toxic
alliance of activists who had honed their skills
in exile, in prison, or underground. Ragged,
informal networks of activists could operate
now in the light of day, and the infusion of vis-
ibility and relative legality had intensified and
accelerated their ambitions.
I n the litany of national power reshufflings,
this one offered slim pickings. “This is our
test, for the 2015 elections,” said Thar’s boss, U
Nyan Win, meaty and freckled with sleepy eyes
that belied his capacity for a good legal tussle.
He had been Suu Kyi’s personal lawyer and the
longtime party spokesman before taking on
campaign management. “We need experience
under this commission law. There are many
28 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
limitations and we are trying to—practically to
know about this. Practically, we want to know.”
Limitations and irregularities ahead of April
1 and the elections had become U Nyan Win’s
bread and butter. There were problems with
the voter lists, candidate disqualifications,
venues for rallies denied, blocked outright, or
relegated to the middle of remote fields. There
were defacements of posters and localized
smear campaigns, including one accusing Suu
Kyi of whoring with a foreigner—her late Brit-
ish husband. There were predictable bribes of
electricity or roads to entire villages, and spo-
radic threats of eviction or arrest for those who
refused to vote for the military-backed Union
Solidarity and Development Party, or USDP.
U Nyan Win, who had almost singlehandedly
fought to salvage the party’s legal standing after
its forced dissolution on May 6, 2010, had just
the right credentials for the current battle—
an improvised, legal push-and-pull between
the government and the opposition, in which
the government would concede just enough
to the NLD to be seen abroad as conducting a
fair election. The NLD, preternaturally sensi-
tive to foul play and just as aware that the lifting
of Burma’s pariah status depended on how it
fared, would fight back at every turn.
Only 48 Parliamentary seats out of 659
were up for grabs, as representatives moved to
other appointments in the government, vacat-
ing seats that they had held since general elec-
tions in 2010. That vote had been the first since
1990. With Suu Kyi still under house arrest,
with no desire to be complicit in the nullifica-
tion of the 1990 results, and with no indication
that the new elections or the new constitution
it enshrined was anything more than a sham
intended to mask military rule with a civilian
face, the party had officially boycotted.
The decision had been vindicated by cred-
ible allegations of massive and widespread
cheating. Thar and Nigel had been among the
dozens of activists who had trained for months,
and then trained others, in election monitor-
ing. They infiltrated polling stations and burst
their data in real-time to sharp-toothed exile
media.
The new constitution had been put into
law in 2010, pushed through in a fraudulent
referendum in May 2008, days after Cyclone
Nargis killed 138,000 people and eight months
after the brutal snuffing out of Saffron. Among
its clauses, it gave the military full prerogative
to re-take the reigns of power in the event of
any vaguely defined state of emergency. It also
gave the military an inviolable majority with
a 25 percent bloc of seats for men in uniform.
The rest were largely handed off to members of
the Union Solidarity and Development Party, a
repackaged version of a mass social apparatus
previously called the Union Solidarity and De-
velopment Association that the junta had de-
pended on to bribe, bully, and crush all dissent
while entrenching tentacles of loyalty deep
into society. The cabinet was handpicked from
among forcibly retired generals or their notori-
ous business cronies. At its helm sat President
Thein Sein, a freshly retired brigadier general
previously known to Burmese simply as “Num-
ber 4.” Nos. 1 through 11 comprised the latest
configuration of the junta that had spent two
long decades compounding the effects of Ne
Win’s twenty-six-year tyranny.
But not long after the cobbling together
of the first parliament in decades, reforms
began. By the parliament’s second sitting in
August 2011, an artifice of awkward legislative
procedure had yielded to genuine draft legisla-
tion on national injustices and problems. Re-
forms treated, inter alia, the right to form labor
unions, the nefarious consequences of having
six national exchange rates, and electoral laws
that had deliberately excluded anyone with
a criminal conviction, which meant Suu Kyi
and other members of the NLD. The nine par-
liamentarians from the National Democratic
Force, a hardy voice for democracy that had
splintered from the NLD in 2010, introduced
draft after draft, including a vitally relevant
land reform bill, and found that they could
earn a hearing. They began to develop a so-
phisticated plan for the complex woes of the
country’s economy.
And then came the hat trick. On the heels of
swelling popular opposition that had simmered
for years on the fringes of an armed insurgency,
the Thein Sein government suspended a pro-
posal for a $3.6 billion, Chinese-backed hydro-
power project that would have destroyed the
source of the mighty Irrawaddy River in Kachin
state, near the Chinese border. Within weeks,
it followed up with a landmark ceasefire hastily
signed with the Karen National Union, pausing
the oldest and most intractable of Burma’s half-
dozen ethnic minority insurgencies. A day later,
on January 13, the government finally sprung
hundreds of prominent dissidents from more
than ninety prisons and labor camps. Never
before had Suu Kyi roamed free alongside the
ringleaders of uprisings in 1996, 1998, 2007,
and especially of 1988.
The clincher for the NLD had been a pri-
vate meeting between the president and Suu
Kyi, whose repeated calls for dialogue and rec-
onciliation across the years had largely been
met with silence. Both declared the encounter
substantive, and Suu Kyi told her deputies that
she had faith in the president’s sincerity. Partly
to endorse the liberalizing process and partly
to take advantage of the new political space,
she would lead the party back into the parlia-
mentary process. Even with less than a tenth
of seats, even if victory for the NLD could
see Suu Kyi enter a parliamentary “gilded
cage” in which her popular power would be
drowned out in a quicksand of severe constitu-
tional constraints, the terms of the democracy
struggle in Burma had irredeemably changed.
A twenty-three-year face-off between a mili-
tary government and the party would return
to the realm of law. Now they would fight from
inside the system.
Thus did a meager 7 percent stake allow
delph i ne schrank 29
Burma, at last, a collective exhalation. A two
decade-old face-off between a military govern-
ment and the party would return to the realm
of law. Now they would fight from inside the
system.
T har had arrived in Naypitaw at 3.30 a.m.
that morning from Rangoon. He came
with nothing more than the clothes on his back,
a short-sleeved linen shirt and black slacks, and
a thin, black briefcase that he touched reflex-
ively throughout the seven-hour journey.
Inside the briefcase was a speech that Suu
Kyi was to deliver within days. Coming from
the leader whose ability to articulate the peo-
ple’s hopes had for over two decades presented
the greatest threat to military rule in Burma—a
woman whose every gesture since her release
from house arrest on November 13, 2010, had
conjured awed attention from the masses and
much of the world beyond—the pages in his
briefcase might as well have been spun gold.
It fell to Thar to play delivery boy, pleading
Suu Kyi’s case should the members of the com-
mission quibble, then return to Rangoon with
the censored version. Only since last January
had editors of Burma’s 100-odd private journals
been able to pass Suu Kyi’s image through the
Press Scrutiny Board. Someone would have to
pore over every word of the speech, someone
higher even than the commission’s chairman,
a retired lieutenant general who compulsively
rolled four fat gold rings with green and red
rocks the size of knuckles.
A t dawn, Nigel threw a pan of well water
over his face and carefully parted and
tended his hair. He kissed his squirming two-
year-old son, squeezed his wife’s thin shoul-
ders, and sped off from his local campaign
headquarters. A two-story concrete shell with
an outhouse and a well, which a local purveyor
of bottled fizzy drinks and other dust-covered
trinkets had donated to Nigel for the campaign,
the building hunkered among a neighborhood
grid of huts and shacks patched together from
30 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
bamboo, corrugated iron, and concrete. Its
signpost, giant and red, faced out over the road
to the construction site of a mansion belonging
to no less than arguably the most powerful man
in the country—the commander-in-chief of the
Burmese army.
Today, March 4, it wasn’t yet time for cam-
paigning door-to-door, delivering speeches
or taking tea, cross-legged, in the huts of his
constituents. It wasn’t yet the moment for re-
inventing the wheel, improvising and landing
on a campaign strategy rooted less in deep eru-
dition and rather more, rather enormously in
fact, on the freewheeling, participatory tactics
that he and Thar had come of age honing and
perfecting in their various attempts at building
activist networks. Today he had only to prepare
for The Lady’s visit.
He didn’t need her endorsement, he in-
sisted. He almost didn’t want it. “This time,
in my opinion, is an opportunity for the youth
leaders,” he said. In his head, he toyed with
tweaking his stump speech to ask farmers if,
given the choice, they would honestly buy an
old cow. When it was suggested to him that
this might sound disrespectful, he burst into
his signature giggle, curiously juxtaposed with
the gravitas in his gaze. “I respect the elders but
I don’t do what they say when they make mis-
takes. I am not a slave to tradition,” he said. “I
always tell them: you have to respect the elder,
but you should do what you want, you should
have your belief. I have my belief.”
Nigel dashed off to an Internet café; to a
print shop pumping out a giant campaign
poster depicting the young candidate smiling
over the shoulder of Grandpa, the party’s wiz-
ened and nationally celebrated strategist; onto
the middle of the field, where his team was
hammering and sawing together their stage to
music blaring from a megaphone that some-
one had positioned in the branches of a gnarled
tamarind tree.
He took a call from a monk who offered
information that a sympathizer of Nigel’s op-
ponent from the USDP was planning an arson
attack as a diversion from Suu Kyi’s impending
visit. The conspirator had allegedly hatched the
Soe Win, Burmese dissident and former Prime Minister of Burma

delph i ne schrank 31
 Angie Lay, a Youth Assistance Leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma

32 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
idea in the monastery, out of a myopic miscal-
culation of the monk’s sympathies or some
latter-day confidence in his fear-mongered si-
lence. Nigel took the information and gleefully
phoned it in to local Burmese law enforcement,
with a giggle and a twinkle-eyed appreciation
for the palpable irony of a dissident suddenly
employing the services of the very intelligence
apparatus whose agents had only weeks before
monitored him from teashops and on board the
buses of his daily commute.
Nigel stopped at his local political office to
pick up some campaign pamphlets. Finally, he
headed down a banana-tree-lined path in one
of his constituency’s villages. Children kicked
up dust as they ran past goats and chickens.
Leaves hung limp in the mid-afternoon swelter.
The only sign of something afoot were the mo-
torcycles stuck with NLD flags parked outside
a bamboo house held up by slender stilts. As
Thar chucked a clementine at a scrawny boy,
then stretched out in the pickup to snooze
off the effects of the previous night’s red-eye,
Nigel and eight members of his team pow-
wowed for an hour in the house in the cool
shade of a mud-floored room. An old man,
withered as a walnut, dozed in a bamboo chair.
An old woman chuckled softly as she stirred a
bubbling pot of curry over burning coals. The
team had less than twenty-four hours to com-
pile lists of eligible voters from twenty-seven
villages and present them to the Election Com-
mission. The mistakes, as they pored through
a thick mound of government-sanctioned ver-
sions, were legion: here were people who didn’t
actually exist, there were people who weren’t
registered; some had moved to another con-
stituency, others had died a few years back; and
then there were the migrant laborers whose
home was somewhere else entirely.
The motorcycles sped off, scattering chick-
ens out of the way.
T he brick-and-mortar face-off of Nigel’s
campaign headquarters could have been a
symbol for the country’s current juncture: The
NLD, party of the people, poor as its fly-infested
outhouses, yet rising once more to challenge
the entrenched might of senior military offi-
cers whose monopoly on all aspects of power
had, for five decades, helped ensure Burma’s
ranking among the poorest, most corrupt, and
repressive countries in the world.
Time and the harshness of circumstance
had denuded the NLD to its essence, to an idea
of future democracy predicated on defiant, or
quixotic, hope. “We were not in the business of
merely replacing one government with another,
which could be considered the job of an opposi-
tion party,” Suu Kyi wrote of the NLD in a lec-
ture broadcast on the BBC on July 5, 2011. “Nor
were we simply agitating for particular changes
in the system as activists might be expected to
do. We were working and living for a cause that
was the sum of our aspirations for our people,
which were not, after all, so very different from
the aspirations of peoples elsewhere.”
O n March 5, a haze of coal dust hung over
the evening rally. The red orb of the sun
dissolved through the soot into a crenellated
landscape of rising concrete. Laborers covered
in white dust trucked down the vast highway,
past a fenced-in slum of flimsy straw huts in
a grid of alleyways all hung with laundry. Be-
side a teashop where business this evening
was booming, young men in white T-shirts
bearing the green lion logo of the USDP—the
military’s party—played football, indifferent
or feigning indifference to the onslaught of
trucks and hundreds of motorcycles pouring
toward them, each bearing the red of the Na-
tional League for Democracy: red flags, red
logo, red sticker.
Foreheads were covered in bandanas, faces
stuck with stickers, open-backed trucks and
SUVs bedecked in giant red, laminated signs.
Over the arid, Ozymandian immensity of Nay-
pyitaw, the flag of the National League for De-
mocracy, party of subversive dissidence, on this
day flew proud. With Suu Kyi in town, the NLD
was suddenly the party to beat.
The crowds here, at the evening rally, were
fewer than the hundreds who had danced and
delph i ne schrank 33
Trucks piled thick with supporters dancing, singing,
and clapping had pulled up from Rangoon, from
Twantay, from hundreds of miles across the country,
zigzagging in tow to Suu Kyi’s convoy.
jiggled to the beat of NLD songs in the field
where Suu Kyi had come to endorse Nigel that
afternoon. Viewers in Nigel’s constituency
had waited for hours for Suu Kyi to appear
in her convoy. They squatted under parasols
or squinted back at the sun from ruts of hay-
strewn cracked earth, as close to the stage as
they could manage. NLD agents dispensed
little paper NLD flags. Impromptu restau-
rants and fruit stalls sprang up. At one table,
a sun-leathered farmer leaned over a mug of
fresh-ground sugar-cane juice and waxed lyri-
cal about the marriage of Suy Kyi’s father and
mother. Trucks piled thick with supporters
dancing, singing, and clapping had pulled up
from Rangoon, from Twantay, from hundreds
of miles across the country, zigzagging in tow
to Suu Kyi’s convoy as she ricocheted from one
constituency to the next. They came, and came
again, because:
“I remember 1990.”
“The speech never gets old, never.”
“We want democracy.”
Suu Kyi, a fusillade of white roses in her
hair, began hoarse, her voice overworked from
her punishing countrywide schedule of pub-
lic engagements. But seconds in, after she had
cracked a first broad smile, her voice honeyed
and she mellowed into a relaxed camaraderie
with her massive audience, as if each among
them were an old friend. Beside her stood
Nigel, wearing his traditional pinni jacket and
longyi, solemnly nodding to salient points in
her speech, the picture of a young man playing
by the rules in an old man’s game. She slapped
his shoulder; the crowds cheered.
34 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
N o one—not even the elders—expected
victory from all of the relative newbies
running for NLD in all four constituencies in
the capital of Naypyitaw to win. There was
Nigel, green as an unripe mango; Sandar Min,
a strong-willed forty-four-year-old entrepre-
neur with more university degrees than Thar
and Nigel combined, and a track record of
student activism that had landed her in prison
twice after 1988. Min Thu too had been an
’88 student and a political prisoner, released
on January 13, and the only candidate in all
the country to face a slingshot attack, which
had briefly felled a young member of his se-
curity. Least favorable, at least in Thar and
Nigel’s informal polling, was Zayar Thaw, the
party’s youngest candidate at thirty-one and
a nationally celebrated rapper and musician,
whose notoriety had turned political when he
co-founded a shadowy dissident youth group
called Generation Wave. For that, he too had
eventually landed in jail.
Even in their scarcity, the forty-eight con-
stituencies represented the country’s spec-
tacular geological variety, the breadth of its
multifaceted emergencies, and the depth of re-
cent changes. They crisscrossed Burma’s great
central plain and climbed to the foothills of the
Himalayas near China, where fighting between
the Burmese army and armed insurgents from
the Kachin hill tribe had, according to UN re-
ports, displaced 55,000 people since June 2011.
They plunged into a southern dagger of land
that bordered Thailand to the east and, to the
west, the Andaman Sea, highlighting an envi-
ronmentally controversial Italian-Thai venture
to build a billions-dollar deep-sea port near an
industrial “Special Economic Zone.”
N LD offices, shuttered for years, had in
recent weeks, sprung up anew in private
homes in villages and towns across the coun-
try. Fear, depending on the place, had evapo-
rated. Even the drunks of Rangoon knew they
could chase the police away if they threatened
members of the party that was again taking the
country by storm.
Thar and the campaign team found them-
selves dashing between rival groups, attempt-
ing to defuse tensions as old-timers competed
for prominence with new members, and both
groups with an insurgent third—activists who
had for months or years operated underground.
In Twantay, a potters’ town in the Irrawaddy
Delta, the upstarts had set up shop just oppo-
site the dilapidated storefront of the veterans,
sticking it bluntly to what they perceived as
twenty years of inaction. Incompetents! Op-
portunists! Lily-livered double agents! Against
each group stood accusations and acrimony:
The first had let the party die, the second were
fair-weather activists, and as for the third—if
they were so adept at secrecy, who was to say
they weren’t playing for the other team?
In the critically decisive Kawmhu, where
Suu Kyi herself was running, Thar pretended to
defer to the authority of a former NLD security
man who seemed particularly taken with his
past service, then schemed with a lawyer who,
he deciphered, had better contacts, and greater
willingness to think beyond the past to educate
the population ahead of voting day.
Suu Kyi, tasked with intervening in in-
stances of particular recalcitrance, proved
herself rather more Solomonic. To each their
right to join the party, she had said. For now,
they needed red meat followers. They could
deal with structural issues later, if, and when,
they made it into government.
Nigel played the rivalries off each other. In
Naypyitaw, to get anywhere at all, you needed
wheels, which meant you needed fuel beyond
the weekly rations, which meant you needed
money—and plenty of it. Two camps from sep-
arate wards happened to compete over which
would earn the right to open the official NLD
office. Each group conveniently included sev-
eral wealthy members who plied the candidate
with services in an ever-intensifying race to
outdo their opponents. Nigel, whose material
possessions barely filled a trunk, had come to
rely on the kindness of Naypyitaw’s rival NLD
activists, for everything.
A
“ pril 1 was the busiest day of my life,” said
U Nyan Win.
Sunrise cracked across Rangoon as people
were already streaming toward polling sta-
tions. In the war room, on the second floor
of the NLD headquarters, the campaign team
had set up seven phones. They rang without
interruption from minutes before polls opened
at 5 a.m. until dusk. Thar, whose cell phone
had long before become the NLD’s unofficial
after-hours hotline, had taken calls through-
out the night. He spent the morning beside
his three-girl research team and several senior
Uncles, passing news from across country to
Nyan Win, whose furious hand penned one of-
ficial letter after another to the election com-
mission. At each increment, Thar discreetly
phoned the information to his savvy, sometime
whiskey-drinking mate, “U Min Min,” for in-
stant dissemination on his Facebook page; it
quickly became the day’s must-read for 4,000
and climbing “friends” from across Burma’s
transnational sliver of wired political insiders.
The rest played catch-up: exile media outlets,
the icons of ’88, Generation Wave, and all the
groups that had proved their activist credentials
in recent years tensed beside phones, comput-
ers, and makeshift citizen call-in centers. After
the fraudulent referendum of 2008 and then
the fraudulent election of 2010, the entire op-
position braced for another massive deception.
The crisis hit by mid-morning. A litany of
complaints poured in claiming that the names
of the NLD candidates were waxed over on
hundreds of ballots. Nyan Win fired off a legal
rebuttal for urgent delivery to the commission
in Naypyitaw, but there was no fax machine in
the office, no functional fax in the hotel of the
Chinese tourist who Thar had conscripted to
help a few days earlier, no fax anywhere.
delph i ne schrank 35
 Thar considered for a moment. Then he
phoned Nigel.
“What? I can’t hear you! What’s that? I’m
busy!” Nigel was somewhere between polling
stations, furiously circling in a round-robin
to oversee his 200-odd NLD volunteer poll-
ing representatives. Just yesterday, they had
crammed into his campaign headquarters,
spilling out the door and down the steps, for
a final pep talk and a question-answer session
with a Rangoon legal advisor.
“You’re busy only for your constituency!”
Thar shouted back, “I’m busy for the entire
country!” With a final impassioned plea, Thar
persuaded Nigel to dash to an Internet café,
print out Nyan Win’s letter, then screech
down the highway for hand delivery to the
commission.
But as soon as polls closed at 4 p.m., and
the counting began promptly, one basket at
a time, international election observers who
had been invited in too late to witness the full
campaign were quick to offer their verdict on
the day: “clean,” “pretty smooth,” “transparent.”
Minor fudges on ballots and voter lists were
understandable, they said, in a country with
nineteenth-century infrastructure and the ma-
chinery to match. But these did nothing to mar
an election that on polling day at least had been
shockingly, remarkably, free and fair.
As 4 p.m. hit, Nigel headed for his local elec-
tion commission and as his polling agents rang
in the results, he marked them down on a scrap
of paper that he later folded up and held in the
breast-pocket of a new shirt, starched white
and collarless, that he had purchased for the
occasion late the night before from the local
convenience store.
F or all the tension he had exuded the day
before, on March 31, Nigel might as well
have been have been playing marbles. Rumors
landed that his military-backed opponent had
bribed an entire village with electronic trans-
formers, and that day handed a hefty $8,000
wad to each of twenty-five young men—for no
purpose more fathomable to Nigel and his team
36 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
than to hire them as thugs. He knew already
that he would win. His wife and parents too
shrugged away the notion that they should man-
ifest any emotion beyond relaxed confidence.
Tomorrow, his father would proudly wipe
away a tear as he thanked the universe aloud for
the gift of watching his son take on the political
promise that his own generation had failed to
fulfill. His mother would smile knowingly at
her third child, whose starry destiny she had
trusted to unfold ever since he had first ap-
peared to her in a dream when he was still in
the womb: fully grown and dressed in white,
heroism and goodness personified.
They had headed to the late-night “hyper-
mart” in search of stamps or Post-its or some-
thing expensive and papery that Nigel couldn’t
quite name but knew he needed for his official
accounting. No one had recognized the candi-
date as he and his family tripped past row upon
row of shining cans and fat bottles and plastic-
wrapped riches. The exoticism of the place diz-
zied them. Never before had they encountered
such abundance.
“This is a shop for thieves,” said his father,
shaking a fat dragon fruit from a fridge display
with a price tag large enough to cover a hefty
meal for a family in North Okkla. Much discus-
sion centered around the frozen meat before
they settled on a small packet of papaya salad
for dinner that night. Only later, as he passed a
clearance shelf stocked with longyis and white
shirts, did it occur to Nigel that he could use a
fresh set. His stock of the traditional Burmese
wraps, all three of them, were worn through
and dirty. For a freshly elected Parliamentarian,
they simply would not do.
The next day, he stood beside the legal advi-
sor come from Rangoon, waiting to match the
results from his polling representatives with
those of the official election commission. Vil-
lage one: 386 to 192. Village two: 318 to 217.
Village four: 580 to 281. And so his victory, in
all but two polling sites, began.
B ack in Rangoon, few tempted fate with
marble-playing tranquility. No one, not
 Tomorrow, Nigel’s father would proudly wipe away a
tear as he thanked the universe aloud for the gift of
watching his son take on the political promise that his
own generation had failed to fulfill.
even the veterans of 1990, had ever imagined
anything like it.
By 6 p.m., the gentle civility of the first few
visitors to the party headquarters had swelled
to a street party themed in NLD red. The roar
that greeted the announcement of Suu Kyi’s
victory must have shaken the bells atop the
massive gold dome of nearby Shwegadon Pa-
goda. By 9 p.m., the dancing and hooting in
the sea of red had spilled down the neighbor-
ing blocks with such abandon that Tin Oo, the
old commander-in-chief of the army who had
co-founded the NLD in 1988, muscled his way
out of headquarters and shouted that Suu Kyi
was calling for discipline and self-restraint.
By 11 p.m., with hundreds of supporters still
pouring toward the uptown party outside the
NLD office, Nyan Win decided it was time to
disappear. If the NLD team was seen to have
incited as uninhibited a rally, the army had
every right to accuse them, to borrow the usual
parlance, of disturbing the general peace and
security of the state. To the surprise even of its
own members, the party had won everywhere
except the ethnic Shan stronghold of Lashio,
near Thailand. For all their exhilaration at
the victory—even in the four constituencies
of Naypyitaw! even in constituencies that
were predicted to vote military!—they could
not risk tripping any wire that might provoke
1990 redux.
The team slipped out—through the crowds,
one by one, ducking into the car of Han Thar
Myint, the more wiry and guarded of Suu Kyi’s
two NLD deputies. He dropped them off each
in turn and on their rattan mats or mattresses
by midnight they had crawled, exhausted,
humbled, and vindicated.
T o outsiders, everything had changed.
The United States, along with much of
the Western world that had long held Burma
in financial and diplomatic exile, began easing
sanctions in earnest. With sufficient foreign aid
and investment, the country, to many, seemed
on course to join the economic might of the
wider region.
But hardened dissidents saw a long and
difficult road to the next general elections:
in 2015. The people’s response had been less
a rally than a “silent demonstration,” accord-
ing to Ko Ko Gyi—explosive words from a
key dissident strategist who knew something
about demonstrations, lost his ripest years to
a prison cell for fomenting the two biggest
demonstrations the country had seen. Even
Grandpa admitted shock. “Really,” he said, “we
didn’t expect that much.” Khin Maung Swe’s
pro-democratic NDF party had fielded eleven
candidates. In the surge of attention and sup-
port toward the NLD, the NDF had a crisis of
money, a crisis of media coverage, a crisis of
defections. It lost everywhere. Yet he had no
regrets. Democracy, however you called it, had
earned itself a mandate.
The broadened political space had opened
the floodgates to general defiance. The cen-
sorship offices still shut down news stories on
subjects such as the monkhood, the effects of
the fighting in northern and still politically out-
lying Kachin state, or the corruption among the
tycoons whose closed-door deals with the se-
nior generals and counterparts across Asia had
locked down much of the country’s resources
for an indefinite future. Still, journalists ig-
nored reprimands from the Press Scrutiny
Board and published anyway; factory workers
delph i ne schrank 37
 Ko Ko Gyi, a former political prisoner and among the new leadership
of the National League for Democracy

38 V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
held days-long strikes for better pay and con-
ditions, secretly nudged on with food and pay
from dissident groups; and popular opposition
swelled against various dam and oil projects,
empowered from the success of the campaign
to suspend work on the hydropower project at
the mouth of the Irrawaddy.
“They cheated in 2010, they want to be seen
as neutral in 2012. But no one can say they will
be neutral and independent in 2015,” said Phyo
Min Thein, a forty-three-year-old former po-
litical prisoner who won a seat for the NLD in
Lhegu constituency. “Sanctions will be lifted,
they will be a legal government, then in 2015 a
question will appear. That is, in 2015, the NLD
will win. Clearly, it will win. But the question
is: Will they give up the power at the time?”
Names were still recorded, photos still
snapped, and some of the toughest laws had
yet to vanish, even layered under new reforms:
including prohibitions on free association, on
registering with local authorities when you
slept overnight away from home; on commu-
nicating with vaguely defined “illegal groups.”
“Old habits die hard,” said U Ye Htut, direc-
tor general of public information at the Minis-
try of Information, by way of explanation. Even
as President Thein Sein’s agenda hardened into
undeniable reform, the government’s motives
remained enigmatic. “People say we can see
the light at the end of the tunnel,” Grandpa had
said. “But we are still in the tunnel.”
T he first hiccup came fast.
Suu Kyi, reading over the constitution
one more time in anticipation of attending the
next week’s parliamentary session, noticed a
clause that required new parliamentarians to
swear an oath in which they would promise to
“safeguard” the constitution. For a party that
had stumped on a trio of pledges—rule of law,
internal peace, and amending the constitu-
tion—agreeing to stand by that wording could
backfire. Changing the constitution without a
Research support for this story was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
75 percent Parliamentary majority was in any
case technically impossible.
With Thar beside him, Nyan Win shot back
to Naypyitaw. No time for a bus, they hired a
cab. Short of a concession from Thein Sein, the
new parliamentarians would boycott their first
session.
The move might have been a brilliant gam-
ble. Suu Kyi and the NLD could do no wrong
as Thein Sein hovered on the verge of return-
ing Burma to the fold of acceptable nations.
“The NLD Stumbles Out of the Starting Bloc,”
cried one column in Mizzima, an influential
online exile journal that had formerly operated
out of New Delhi but whose publisher, an old
’88 activist, had lately opened an office back
in Burma in a decisive symbol of conciliation.
The political stalemate divided supporters, and
froze cold some of the foreign observers who
had been salivating about the impending end
to sanctions, which meant a free-for-all into
the country’s virgin markets. Once again, they
suggested, the NLD had proven its political
ineptitude.
In the end, the NLD backed down.
Weeks later, on June 16, Suu Kyi stood be-
fore assembled luminaries in Oslo, Norway,
delivering a belated acceptance speech for the
Nobel Peace Prize awarded to her in absentia
twenty-one years earlier: “Without faith in the
future, without the conviction that democratic
values and fundamental human rights are not
only necessary but possible for our society,
our movement could not have been sustained
throughout the destroying years. Some of our
warriors fell at their post, some deserted us, but
a dedicated core remained strong and commit-
ted. At times when I think of the years that have
passed, I am amazed that so many remained
staunch under the most trying circumstances.
Their faith in our cause is not blind; it is based
on a clear-eyed assessment of their own powers
of endurance and a profound respect for the
aspirations of our people.”
We are at the beginning of the beginning.
delph i ne schrank 39
 contributors
Chuck Leavell’s piano and keyboard has been heard
alongside Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, George Har-
rison, The Allman Brothers Band, Blues Traveler, Mar-
tina McBride, John Mayer, and many other prominent
artists. He has also authored four books, most recently
Growing a Better America (Mercer, 2011), which explores
smart growth. A conservationist, sustainable develop-
ment advocate, and tech entrepreneur, Leavell and his
wife live on their award-winning tree farm, Charlane
Plantation, in Bullard, Georgia.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tu-
pelo, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo, 2008), and In Medias Res
(Sarabande, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First
Book Award. The recipient of an NEA fellowship, she
lives and teaches in southern California, where she is
a novice harpist. She received her M.F.A. from Brown
University and her Ph.D. in English from the University
of California, Berkeley.
William Logan’s next book of poetry will be Madame X
(under contract to Penguin) will be published in the fall.
His five books of criticism include Our Savage Art: Poetry
and the Civil Tongue (Columbia, 2009). He is a regular
critic for The New York Times Book Review and The New
Criterion. Logan is Alumni/ae Professor of English at the
University of Florida.
John Dramani Mahama is a writer, historian, journal-
ist, former member of Parliament and minister of state,
and sitting vice president of the Republic of Ghana. His
essay in this issue is an excerpt from his memoir and
first book, My First Coup d’Etat: And Other True Stories
from the Lost Decades of Africa (Bloomsbury, 2012). He
lives in Accra with his family and is working on his sec-
ond book.
Charlotte Matthews is the author of two full-length
collections of poetry: Still Enough to Be Dreaming (Iris,
2007) and Green Stars (Iris, 2006). She was recently a
featured poet at NPR where her work received recogni-
tion. Matthews is a professor at Hollins University and
at the BIS program at UVA.
Jason Motlagh is a multimedia journalist and film
producer whose awards include the 2010 Digital Na-
tional Magazine Award for Reporting for “Sixty Hours
of Terror,” published on the VQR website. He was, until
recently, Time magazine’s Kabul correspondent and
is a regular contributor to The Economist, the Wash-
ington Post, Frontline/World, and Al Jazeera English.
viii V Q R | s u mmer 2 0 1 2
James Nachtwey has been a contract photographer
with Time Magazine since 1984. One of the founding
members of the photo agency VII, he devotes himself
to documenting war, conflict, and critical social issues
across the globe. He has received numerous honors such
as the Robert Capa Gold Medal (five times), the World
Press Photo Award (twice), Magazine Photographer of
the Year (seven times), the International Center of Pho-
tography Infinity Award (three times), the Leica Award
(twice), and the Bayeaux Award for War Correspondents
(twice). He is a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
Edith Pearlman’s most recent collection of stories, Bin-
ocular Vision (Lookout, 2011), won the 2012 National
Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was a finalist
for the 2011 National Book Award. She is the winner of
the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short
Fiction and is the author of three previous collections:
Vaquita (Pittsburgh, 1996), Love Among The Greats (East-
ern Washington 2002), and How To Fall (Sarabande,
2005). Her stories have appeared in The Best American
Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from
the South, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.
Robert Young Pelton is an author and filmmaker
known for overcoming dangerous obstacles in order
to chronicle history-shaping events. In addition to his
work as Contributing Editor at National Geographic
Adventure, Pelton has worked for Discovery Channel,
National Geographic Channel, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and
other major media networks. Pelton is best known for
his book Robert Young Pelton’s The World’s Most Danger-
ous Places (HarperCollins, 2003).
Corey Rich is a visual storyteller focusing on the out-
door lifestyle. He captures both still photographs and
videos for the creation of multimedia projects for edito-
rial and commercial clients. His editorial work includes
assignments for National Geographic Adventure, Outside,
Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times Magazine.
Commercial clients include Anheuser-Busch, Apple,
Nike, and The North Face. His first book is My Favorite
Place: Great Athletes in the Great Outdoors (Chronicle,
2006).
Delphine Schrank is a contributing editor to VQR and
The Washington Post’s former correspondent in Burma.
She is currently writing a book, The Rebel of Rangoon.
Her reporting and photography from southeast Asia,
Europe, and Africa has also appeared in VQR, The At-
lantic, Mother Jones, and Time. She has been awarded
 contributors
fellowships from the International Reporting Project
and the East-West Center, and most recently received
a grant from the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund.
Janna Malamud Smith is a writer and a psychothera-
pist. She has lectured widely and has published nation-
ally and internationally in newspapers, magazines, and
journals. Her first two books, Private Matters (Addison
Wesley, 1997) and A Potent Spell (Houghton Mifflin,
2003), were both chosen as “Notable Books” by The New
York Times Sunday Book Review. Her third, My Father is a
Book (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), was selected
as a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a New
York Times Editor’s Choice. Her fourth book, An Absorb-
ing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to
Mastery, will be released in September 2012 (Counter-
point). Her essay in this issue of VQR is adapted from
An Absorbing Errand.
Willard Spiegelman is the editor-in-chief of the South-
west Review and the Hughes Professor of English at
Southern Methodist University. He writes for the Lei-
sure & Arts pages of The Wall Street Journal. His most
recent books are Imaginative Transcripts: Selected Liter-
ary Essays (Oxford, 2008) and Seven Pleasures: Essays on
Ordinary Happiness (FSG/Picador, 2009).
Kathryn Starbuck’s first poetry collection is titled Grief-
mania (Sheepmeadow, 2006), and her newest collection,
Assignment Afghanistan
A ground-breaking series of multimedia reports
by Elliott D. Woods
To document the experiences of U.S. Troops fighting
in Afghanistan, Elliott Woods has spent months in the
field—writing essays, taking photographs, shooting
video, and collecting raw audio. Now this innovative
website gathers that work into a growing body of
multimedia stories and interactive features.
Visit assignmentafghanistan.org and sign up to
receive new stories as Woods reports them.
Sex Perhaps, is forthcoming. Poems from the new collec-
tion have been published (or will soon appear) in Poetry,
The New Yorker, The New Republic, Ploughshares, AGNI
online, Southwest Review, among other journals. Some
are anthologized in The Best American Poetry. She is at
work on her third book of poems. Along with Elizabeth
Meese, Starbuck edited two volumes of poetry by her
late husband George Starbuck.
Jim Tilley has been published in Southwest Review,
Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, and New Or-
leans Review, among other journals, and has been fea-
tured on Poetry Daily and on the PBS News Hour’s art
blog. He has won Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for
Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize.
Elliott D. Woods is a contributing editor to VQR. His
VQR-sponsored website Assignment Afghanistan received
the 2011 Digital National Magazine Award for Multi-
media Package. His essay, “Digging Out,” from the Fall
2010 issue, was nominated for a 2011 National Maga-
zine Award in Reporting, and received the Staige D.
Blackford Prize for Nonfiction. His essay, “Hope’s Cof-
fin,” from the Summer 2009 issue, received a citation
for the Madeline Dane Ross Award from the Overseas
Press Club. His other essays and photographs have ap-
peared in or are forthcoming in GQ, Granta, Mother
Jones, and Time.
winner of the National Magazine Award for multimedia package
contr i b u tors ix
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