A defining moment for the new Burma, and for Suu Kyi herself, came when she visited Salingyi Township, in Sagaing Division, in 2013. A typical township of the rural areas of central Burma, Salingyi was afflicted by a problem all too common throughout Burma: the eviction of farmers from their lands to make way for mega-projects or big business in the name of economic development. Suu Kyi played a role that would lead to a situation without precedent in the country: people in Salingyi would protest against her – and they would do so spontaneously, without being organized or coerced to do so by the military, as had happened on occasion in the past.
The inhabitants of the dusty villages of Salingyi have been mostly farmers for generations, but life in the township has been dominated in recent years by the gigantic Letpadaung copper mine, the biggest in the country. The mine was opened in 1978, but it was greatly expanded when it began to be operated by the Canadian company Ivanhoe in 1996. In 2010, Ivanhoe yielded to pressures from foreign activists denouncing the human rights violation of the military regime, and withdrew from the project. After that, Wanbao Mining Ltd, a subsidiary of Norinco, a Chinese arms manufacturer, stepped in.16 Since then, the exploitation of the mine is a joint venture of Wanbao and the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd (UMEHL), a vast conglomerate owned and run by the Tatmadaw. None of these deals were made in a transparent manner. Nobody had bothered to consult the local population, and the government had evicted hundreds of farmers from their lands in the mid 1990s using laws from the British colonial era. The situation had become even worse after Wanbao bought the project and continued to develop and expand the mine, evicting more farmers for little or no compensation.
In November 2012, many villagers, led by local Buddhist monks and activists, staged a series of protests against the project. The police repressed the protests with brutality, shooting protestors and even using white phosphorus, burning the skin of many of them. In the new Burma, where the media had freedom to report on such incidents, the brutality provoked a scandal.
Aung San Suu Kyi was now a member of parliament, after her party had won some seats in a by-election in April that year, and was invited by President Thein Sein to head a Commission to investigate the incident and the mine project. She accepted the role. The report issued by the Commission in March 2013 failed to demand accountability for the police brutality or the use of white phosphorus, simply recommended improvements in police training.17 The Commission recognized that the mine was bringing little benefit to local villagers, but it argued for the continued expansion of the project, albeit recommending an increase in the compensation handed to the farmers and more thorough environmental assessments. The argument in defence of the project was that it was in Burma’s national interest to continue operations in the mine, as halting them would discourage foreign investors from doing business in the country.18 An abstract ‘national interest’ seemed to override the concrete interests of the very same individuals who were members of the nation.
After the Commission issued the report, Suu Kyi visited the area to talk with the villagers. She was received by the farmers with a hostility she appeared utterly unprepared to confront. She was heckled and shouted at by villagers who were unwilling to listen to her explanations of why a project that was damaging them so much should continue. At some point she took refuge in her car while angry villagers shouted at her. Looking from the window, she seemed completely puzzled. ‘We had so much hope on her, but her report is like a death sentence’, said a woman, crying. The villagers might have refused to understand an argument based on a ‘national interest’ that seemed to exclude them; or perhaps they understood it only too well – but it was clear that she had not understood their position. She had called for compensation for the farmers, but she appeared unable to grasp that they were fighting for their land, too – for an environment to which they felt deeply attached, and where their lives had a meaning for them. Reportedly, she asked in exasperation: ‘Why do they want the mountain?’19
I visited the area a few months later to witness the impact of the mine for myself. The situation was tense, and during the day the police were ubiquitous in the area. But the farmers were protecting the activists organizing the protests, forming patrols and preventing the security forces from searching for them in their villages at night. The deleterious impact of the mine was visible even on the very skin of some of the people I met. Ma Myint Myint, a fragile forty-two-year-old woman, suffered painful open sores all over her body after taking showers with water polluted with acid. In a country with an abysmal public health system, she was too poor to afford treatment in a private hospital, so she had to endure the pain using only an ointment that barely alleviated it.
The area around the mine included a barren yellow landscape, on which farmers who had previously cultivated the land were now forced to eke out a living extracting and processing low-quality copper in small improvised mines. They were receiving the crumbs of a project that was worth millions of dollars. One of them was Ko Nyo, a forty-eight-year-old man living with his wife and two children. He used to make the equivalent of US$150 a month when he was a farmer, and had also been able to produce some food for his family. He had been evicted from his land a couple of years before, and making copper was providing him with the equivalent of only US$90 per month.
The compensation given to those who received it was completely insufficient, according to the young lawyer acting on behalf of the farmers, Saw Kyaw Min, as it was based on a valuation of the land made during the colonial period, more than seven decades before. Given this harsh reality, and the fact that Suu Kyi seemed to have sided with the companies and the military, all the farmers expressed deep disappointment with her. They felt they had been betrayed and were now alone in their struggle. The only person I talked to at the time who said he was not disappointed with Suu Kyi was Thein Aung, a fifty-three-year-old farmer who told me that he ‘had never believed in her to feel any disappointment now’. These sentiments were far from universal among the Burman majority, but a crack had now been opened in Suu Kyi’s hitherto untarnished image.
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The transition was supposed to be a pact of three elites: the military, the pro-democracy opposition led by Suu Kyi, and the leaders of the ethnic minorities.20 The pact between the first two would be surprisingly successful – but not so much the pact with the third. In any case, the terms of such a transition were dictated exclusively by the military, which had designed a bullet-proof constitution and still wielded great power. The reaction of Suu Kyi to such imbalance of power was to try her best to reassure the generals that she and her party posed no threat to them. Since her release from house arrest, Suu Kyi had mostly engaged in playing politics in the opaque corridors of power in Naypyidaw, making tours abroad that mostly served to legitimize the transition in the eyes of the Western powers, rather than listening to the grievances of the Burmese population, whose support she probably took for granted. Even the outspoken Win Tin criticized this aloofness from the public, and it became increasingly easier to find Burmese saying that she was not close enough to the people.21 She went as far as to assure the ‘cronies’ (a handful of extremely rich businessmen who had amassed huge fortunes during the junta period through their contacts with the generals) that she would not threaten their position, merely asking them to ‘act fairly’ and ‘work for others’.22
In the name of ‘national reconciliation’, Suu Kyi renounced two important weapons she had at her disposal to extract concessions from the generals – her popular support at home, and the influence she wielded on foreign powers like the United States, at a moment when the government was keen to develop closer relations with the West. Such a strategy reveals Suu Kyi’s deep distrust of participatory politics. Recalling her attitude to the protests against