When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  Following the attack, Suu Kyi was returned to detention, then placed back under house arrest under far stricter conditions than had been imposed in the past. Her phone line was cut and her post stopped. In May of that year, days before her house arrest was due to expire, she was arrested and charged with breaking its terms, which forbade visitors, after John Yettaw, a United States citizen, swam across Inya lake and refused to leave her house. In August 2009 she was convicted, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, later reduced to eighteen months under house arrest.

  Finally, in 2010, Suu Kyi was released. In November 2015, the first openly contested elections in twenty-five years were held, and Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory. A clause in the constitution prevented her from becoming the president, but she is now state counsellor, a role analogous in power to prime minister, a title her father held before his assassination in 1947.

  Throughout this to-and-fro of detention, the world has been watching. Aung San Suu Kyi has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The occasion of this essay was her award of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament. The award, named after Andrei Sakharov, the Russian nuclear physicist who faced state persecution for his advocacy of civil rights, took place in Suu Kyi’s absence in Strasbourg. In 1991 it was published as the title work in a volume of her writings.

  It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. Most Burmese are familiar with the four a-gati, the four kinds of corruption. Chanda-gati, corruption induced by desire, is deviation from the right path in pursuit of bribes or for the sake of those one loves. Dosa-gati is taking the wrong path to spite those against whom one bears ill will, and moga-gati is aberration due to ignorance. But perhaps the worst of the four is bhaya-gati, for not only does bhaya, fear, stifle and slowly destroy all sense of right and wrong, it so often lies at the root of the other three kinds of corruption. Just as chanda-gati, when not the result of sheer avarice, can be caused by fear of want or fear of losing the goodwill of those one loves, so fear of being surpassed, humiliated or injured in some way can provide the impetus for ill will. And it would be difficult to dispel ignorance unless there is freedom to pursue the truth unfettered by fear. With so close a relationship between fear and corruption it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife corruption in all forms becomes deeply entrenched.

  To begin with the four Burmese types of corruption is not just a colourful opening, although it is also that. One of Suu Kyi’s weaknesses as a political figure in Burma has always been that she was seen as a foreigner coming back from a long spell abroad to reclaim her birthright. A similar example of the way this can be exploited by political opponents has been documented by Michael Ignatieff in Fire and Ashes. After many years as a celebrity academic in Harvard and Cambridge, Ignatieff returned to Canada, where he became the leader of the Liberal Party. The adventure ended in electoral disaster, and chief among the reasons was that the Conservative Party denied Ignatieff what he called ‘standing’ in his own country.

  This had always been a vulnerability for Suu Kyi. When, in 1988, she returned to Burma to nurse her ailing mother, she played no active part in demonstrations against the junta, but that August she was persuaded to speak, at a rally at the Shwedagon Pagoda, the symbolic heart of Burma. Introduced by a Burmese film star, Suu Kyi spoke solemnly about the desire of the people for a multi-party democratic system of government before turning to the real subject of the day, which was herself. She confronted the questions about being married to a foreigner and having lived abroad. She concluded: ‘Another thing which some people have been saying is that I know nothing of Burmese politics. The trouble is that I know too much.’

  Suu Kyi uses a number of techniques to gain standing in her essay, and this is the first. Root it in a native idiom. Make the founding metaphor of the essay something that requires a Burmese education and sensibility. The central idea is fear and its intimate relationship with freedom. Suu Kyi therefore makes bhaya-gati the most important form of corruption, embodying and opening the way for the others. Fear is the currency of tyranny. It is through the fear of reprisals that the regime’s power is maintained. The fear is, in part, physical; hence courage is required.

  With this device Suu Kyi distinguishes between good and bad political power. Power is the currency of politics but it can be spent well or badly. Self-flagellating critics in the West are apt to pretend they live in corrupt states, by which they tend to mean only governments they do not like. To live in Burma was to encounter the reality of a corrupt state, and the agent that corrupts is not power but fear. This is also, of course, a neat way of saying, clearly and yet still by implication, that the regime governs by fear, and that regime therefore could not be more corrupt. In situations of political oppression and adversity much has to be said by implication and allusion, in allegory or metaphor. It would be dangerous to spell out the implications. A metaphor requires the listener to rewrite the speech’s meaning as he or she listens, or in this case reads.

  Public dissatisfaction with economic hardships has been seen as the chief cause of the movement for democracy in Burma, sparked off by the student demonstrations [of]1988. It is true that years of incoherent policies, inept official measures, burgeoning inflation and falling real income had turned the country into an economic shambles. But it was more than the difficulties of eking out a barely acceptable standard of living that had eroded the patience of a traditionally good-natured, quiescent people – it was also the humiliation of a way of life disfigured by corruption and fear. The students were protesting not just against the death of their comrades but against the denial of their right to life by a totalitarian regime which deprived the present of meaningfulness and held out no hope for the future. And because the students’ protests articulated the frustrations of the people at large, the demonstrations quickly grew into a nationwide movement. Some of its keenest supporters were businessmen who had developed the skills and the contacts necessary not only to survive but to prosper within the system. But their affluence offered them no genuine sense of security or fulfilment, and they could not but see that if they and their fellow citizens, regardless of economic status, were to achieve a worthwhile existence, an accountable administration was at least a necessary if not a sufficient condition. The people of Burma had wearied of a precarious state of passive apprehension where they were ‘as water in the cupped hands’ of the powers that be. ‘Emerald cool we may be/ As water in cupped hands/ But oh that we might be/ As splinters of glass/ In cupped hands’. Glass splinters, the smallest with its sharp, glinting power to defend itself against hands that try to crush, could be seen as a vivid symbol of the spark of courage that is an essential attribute of those who would free themselves from the grip of oppression.

  Hereby hangs a major argument, to which we shall return in chapter 5, and Suu Kyi makes an emphatic case on one side. It is often argued that democracy is a luxury that poor nations cannot afford. Better to settle the knife-and-fork questions first. The people do not want liberties, the argument runs, because liberties get nobody fed. What they want instead is that the basics of life should be catered for, even if that is achieved through enlightened despotism.

  At the time that Suu Kyi was writing the question of democracy was urgent, and not just because the generals of the Ne Win regime had denied the outcome of the 1990 election. The Soviet empire had just crumbled and fledgling democracies were emerging from its ruins. Suu Kyi counters the Asian values argument with a universal riposte. The regime in Burma was, in fact, unable to provide economic prosperity. But that, says Suu Kyi, is not the sole source of dissatisfaction. Life under a totalitarian regime is meaningless, she argues. Even the wealthy businessmen could find no satisfaction in a state that was not accountable to them and that did not recognise their rights to hold it to a
ccount. Democracy and indigenous values flow together freely.

  Václav Havel pointed out, in his introduction to the collected edition, Freedom from Fear, that Suu Kyi had written that ‘it is a puzzlement to the Burmese how concepts which recognise the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of human beings, which accept that all men are endowed with reason and conscience and which recommend a spirit of brotherhood, can be inimical to indigenous values’.

  The memorable metaphor at the end of this passage also contains a profound point about the nature of popular power. The promise that a despotism makes is that life will be simple. It is reduced to the task of economic management. If there is food on the table and material satisfaction, then the job of government is fulfilled. If the water flows through the cupped hands all is well. Suu Kyi says, in lyrical verse, that this is not enough. Democracy will be difficult at times, even as splinters of glass in the hand are painful, but it is desirable all the same. The splinters of glass are, at the same time, a form of defence, a point to which Suu Kyi will return.

  The effort necessary to remain uncorrupted in an environment where fear is an integral part of everyday existence is not immediately apparent to those fortunate enough to live in states governed by the rule of law. Just laws do not merely prevent corruption by meting out impartial punishment to offenders. They also help to create a society in which people can fulfil the basic requirements necessary for the preservation of human dignity without recourse to corrupt practices. Where there are no such laws, the burden of upholding the principles of justice and common decency falls on the ordinary people. It is the cumulative effect on their sustained effort and steady endurance which will change a nation where reason and conscience are warped by fear into one where legal rules exist to promote man’s desire for harmony and justice while restraining the less desirable destructive traits in his nature … The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation’s development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance and fear. Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and to uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society. Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means and an end. A people who would build a nation in which strong, democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear.

  There are two points at work in this passage that sit rather uneasily together, yet are united in the contradictory character of Aung San Suu Kyi herself. The first point is that democracy is more than a legal framework, it is a living culture. It requires commitment, desire and participation from the people for it to work. Ask not what your country can do for you. But this seems to contradict, or at least to exist in tension with, a claim that Suu Kyi has made earlier in the essay, namely that democracy is the recognition of a universal spirit in human beings. Now she is demanding a revolution of the spirit which, it seems, needs to be cultivated in action.

  There is more than a hint of autobiography in this passage. Suu Kyi had endured cramped and unpleasant conditions but, unlike dissidents like Mandela and Sakharov, she had been free to go at any point, although she would not then have been allowed to return. The psychological cost of displacement from her family must have been acute. At first Suu Kyi received letters and food parcels from home, until Khin Nyunt, the junta’s intelligence chief, found that one contained lipstick and a Jane Fonda workout video. They were photographed and disseminated by the state media to show the luxury in which Suu Kyi still lived. After that she refused all deliveries and stopped eating. In 1999, when her husband was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, he was denied a visa to visit her. When Suu Kyi refused to leave Burma the authorities cut off the phone line between them. The regime had already revoked the Burmese passports held by Suu Kyi’s sons. So it is important for her to feel that a saint can be made from a sinner who refuses to give up. Suu Kyi’s courtship letters to Michael Aris, written before they were married, offer a portent of this: ‘I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.’

  Suu Kyi will also have felt fear, as well as sadness. Soon after she committed to the cause, she toured Burma to meet devotees of her new party. She was by no means welcomed everywhere. In the town of Danubyu in the Irrawaddy Delta, she defied an order to leave and walked alone down the middle of the street. She was, in effect, daring the line of soldiers ahead of her to open fire. The captain on duty was quite prepared to shoot but Suu Kyi kept on walking. It was only at the last moment when a senior officer arrived and stood the soldiers down that Suu Kyi’s defiance did not lead her into deep, perhaps even fatal, danger.

  This essay is every bit as uncompromising. It is definitive in its claims for the virtues of democracy over the vices of tyranny. It is of a piece with Suu Kyi’s political strategy. Even some of her allies urged her to compromise a little, perhaps by granting the junta some of the treasure it had hidden, but she always refused. The junta responded by placing her under house arrest.

  Always one to practise what he preached, Aung San himself constantly demonstrated courage – not just the physical sort but the kind that enabled him to speak the truth, to stand by his word, to accept criticism, to admit his faults, to correct his mistakes, to respect the opposition, to parley with the enemy and to let people be the judge of his worthiness as a leader. It is for such moral courage that he will always be loved and respected in Burma – not merely as a warrior hero but as the inspiration and conscience of the nation. The words used by Jawaharlal Nehru to describe Mahatma Gandhi could well be applied to Aung San: ‘The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth, and action allied to these, always keeping the welfare of the masses in view.’ Gandhi, that great apostle of non-violence, and Aung San, the founder of a national army, were very different personalities, but as there is an inevitable sameness about the challenges of authoritarian rule anywhere at any time, so there is a similarity in the intrinsic qualities of those who rise up to meet the challenge. Nehru, who considered the instillation of courage in the people of India one of Gandhi’s greatest achievements, was a political modernist, but as he assessed the needs for a twentieth-century movement for independence, he found himself looking back to the philosophy of ancient India: ‘The greatest gift for an individual or a nation … was abhaya, fearlessness, not merely bodily courage but absence of fear from the mind.’ Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one’s actions, courage that could be described as ‘grace under pressure’ – grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.

  Here is Aung San Suu Kyi’s main technique for gaining standing. The survival of dynastic politics, turning democracy into hereditary monarchy, is one of the oddities of our age. Suu Kyi invokes the memory of her father, Aung San, whose charm, flair, and talent for exquisitely timed changes of side saw him progress from student communist and anti-colonial to Japanese-trained guerrilla, then to British ally and negotiator (with Attlee) of Burma’s independence.

  Burmese politics never recovered
from the loss of Aung San. In the early 1960s, the latest in a series of sickly governments was first dominated, then overthrown in a coup by Aung San’s former deputy, General Ne Win, who was soon nationalising industry, stifling the press, expelling foreigners and shooting protesting students in the name of something called the Burmese Way to Socialism. The failure of this programme was important to the rise of Aung San Suu Kyi. Under General Ne Win, the once fertile and mineral-rich country of Burma had been turned into a shabby backwater. A demonetisation in 1987 had wiped out the nation’s savings without any compensation. In December of that year the UN declared that Burma was one of the world’s ‘Least Developing’ countries.

  Suu Kyi quite naturally positions herself as the heir to her late father’s never-completed nation-building. In her speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda, Suu Kyi had said that ‘this national crisis could in fact be called the second struggle for national independence’. Since Ne Win’s coup, Burma’s development, education and influence had all fallen. The regime had no feats to exhibit so it fell back on force and its claim to his anti-colonial legacy. Coming back to reclaim the mantle of her father stripped the generals of any right to associate their way with his. Suu Kyi’s implicit comparison, in the Shwedagon speech, of the generals to the British colonisers her father had fought to displace changed her life for ever and did so in a contest about the meaning of her father’s work and the rights of ownership to that work. There was also a rupture between Suu Kyi and her father. Unlike Nelson Mandela Suu Kyi had always rejected armed struggle. When her mother Khin Kyi accepted privileged exile in Delhi as Burma’s first female ambassador, the teenage Suu Kyi met the Nehrus and became acquainted with the lives and writings of Tagore and Gandhi. Placing grace under pressure as the most important response to fear is to side with the gentler resistance. Her father had not always eschewed the gun, whereas Suu Kyi’s prominence and reputation as a dissident rests on her quiet stoicism in the face of military intransigence.