Obsessed with numerology, Ne Win bizarrely revised the currency in 1987 into tender divisible by his lucky number—9—destroying the savings of millions. Mounting unrest led to his resignation as party chairman in July 1988. In the same year, the Four Eights Uprising, a massive pro-democracy protest, was crushed in a coup that saw a twenty-one-strong military junta—the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC)—take control, led by General Saw Maung. Up to 10,000 protestors, mostly students and Buddhist monks, were killed, causing outrage in a country where the latter are revered as spiritual leaders. The SLORC subsequently instigated a twin program of deforestation—to accommodate mass opium production—and systematic genocide against groups such as the Karen, Karenni, Shan, Kachins (Jingpo), Mons, Rohingyas, Wa and Chin (Zomis). Rape, torture, forced relocation, slave labor and murder have led to over 650,000 people—including 250,000 Karen—being displaced in eastern Burma alone, and around 2 million fleeing to Thailand.
Multiparty elections were allowed in 1990, contested by Aung San Suu Kyi, but humiliating defeat saw the result ignored. The following year Suu Kyi (later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) was placed under house arrest—twice temporarily lifted but later reimposed—for “endangering the state.” A courageous and tireless campaigner for democracy, she is still held today. In 1992 Than Shwe replaced Saw Maung as chairman of the SLORC (later renamed the State Peace and Development Council) and commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw (armed forces).
In 2002, after an alleged coup attempt by his son-in-law and three grandsons, Ne Win died in disgrace, a brief press obituary making no mention of his rule. In 2003, new prime minister Khin Nyunt unveiled a “road map to democracy” but he was replaced the following year by hard-line Soe Win. Two years later, around 100,000 protestors led by Buddhist monks demonstrated in Rangoon against massive fuel-price increases. Close to 3000 were arrested, and at least thirteen monks killed. The same year (2005), work started on a lavish new capital city—Naypyidaw (Abode of Kings)—300 miles north of Rangoon, which included the fortress-like home of General Than Shwe. The city was officially named on March 27, 2006, the annual Armed Forces Day.
Graphic proof of the regime’s paranoia, intransigence and contempt for human life came in May 2008 after Cyclone Nargis struck the country, claiming over 100,000 lives, devastating Burma’s infrastructure and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. For weeks the junta refused to allow relief supplies or foreign aid workers into the country, massively intensifying the suffering and misery of its people. It finally bowed to international pressure but continued to hamper an effective response to the crisis. Yet the regime began to experiment with a thaw, releasing Aung San Suu Kyi and promising elections.
Suu Kyi’s political career began in 1988, when a telephone call summoned her back to Burma to care for her mother, who had just suffered a stroke. “I had a premonition that our lives would change forever,” her husband later recalled. As she nursed her mother in Rangoon (Yangon), Suu Kyi was surrounded by the upheaval at the end of General Ne Win’s twenty-six-year-long dictatorship. When, instead of the referendum he had promised, Ne Win implemented another military coup, in which human rights were further eroded and thousands of unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred on the streets, Suu Kyi started to speak out. So began her road to becoming heir to her father as politician, a path also trod in the region by Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) and India’s Indira Gandhi (1917–84).
Within months of her return to Burma, Suu Kyi had helped to found the National League for Democracy (NLD). In the much-vaunted elections of May 1990, the NLD won by a landslide, gaining 82 percent of the available seats. Suu Kyi, as the NLD’s general secretary, was Burma’s democratically elected leader. But it was a result that Burma’s military government chose to overrule.
Just over a year after her return to Burma, Suu Kyi was, with her NLD colleagues, arrested without charge and placed under house arrest—a situation that has persisted, with breaks, ever since. She was released for five years in 1995 and for another year in 2002. On each occasion, however, the popularity of the nation’s chosen leader, her command over its oppressed people and her inspirational addresses prompted the military junta to re-imprison the woman whose presence and personal sacrifice represent the greatest threat to their dictatorial rule.
In 1989 Suu Kyi stood alone in front of an army unit with its rifles trained on her. She had motioned her NLD colleagues to step aside, presenting herself as a lone and easy target. Under house arrest she endured a hunger strike, refusing to accept any help from the government that had imprisoned her. This rendered her so malnourished that her hair fell out, her heart began to fail, and she developed a condition in which her spinal column began to degenerate. Every time she has been released from house arrest the fearless Suu Kyi has immediately spoken out against the government, calling loudly and repeatedly for democracy and liberation in a tyrannous state that violates human rights more than almost any other in the world.
The presence of one of the world’s most famous prisoners of conscience—and one who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991—became an increasing embarrassment for Burma’s military government. In 1999 her husband died of prostate cancer, denied the chance to visit his wife one last time despite every diplomatic effort. At the cost of untold personal suffering, Suu Kyi refused every government attempt to bribe her with liberty in return for her permanent departure from the country.
“It’s no use standing there wringing your hands saying ‘My goodness, my goodness, this is terrible,’” Suu Kyi once declared when asked how she responded to suffering. “You must try to do what you can. I believe in action.” In 2012, the regime surprised the world by releasing some prisoners and allowing semi-free elections: she was released and elected to parliament—possibly the beginning of a new era in Burma.
ESCOBAR
1949–93
The ingeniousness of my brother was extraordinary.
Roberto Escobar
The most powerful, wealthy and murderous criminal of the 20th century, Pablo Escobar was the paramount Colombian drug lord who became the mastermind and kingpin of the international cocaine trade. He accrued billions of dollars, and in the process was responsible for hundreds of kidnappings and murders. A godfather figure of unrivaled magnitude, and a law unto himself, Escobar threatened the very integrity of the state of Colombia.
Escobar was the son of a peasant and a schoolteacher, and grew up in a suburb of Medellín. He became involved in criminal activities from an early age, stealing cars and even, it was said, gravestones, which he sandblasted before selling them as new. He graduated to minor fraud, selling contraband cigarettes and forged lottery tickets, and then in the late 1960s, as demand for cannabis and cocaine multiplied, he saw an opening in the drug trade.
During the first half of the 1970s Escobar became increasingly prominent in the Medellín Cartel, in which a number of crime syndicates cooperated to control much of Colombia’s drug-trafficking industry. In 1975, a leading Medellín crime lord, Fabio Restrepo, was assassinated, and Escobar soon took over his operation.
In May of the following year, Escobar was charged with organizing a drug run to Ecuador. He tried to bribe the judges who were presiding over his case, but when that failed he murdered two officers who had arrested him and the chief witnesses, thereby ending the proceedings. This became part of an established pattern, a strategy called plata o plomo (silver plate or lead bullet—i.e. accept a bribe or face assassination). He killed many thousands, on his orders or personally, often with astonishing savagery.