The Gore-Booths’ twin sons were a few years older and among their friends was yet another pair of twins, Anthony and Michael Aris. The Aris brothers had in several ways the same variegated international background as Suu Kyi. They were born on March 27, 1946, in Havanna, Cuba, where their father was working for the British Council, with the task of spreading English culture and the English language in the world. Their mother was the daughter of a French-Canadian diplomat. The family moved from Cuba to Peru and finally landed in England.
In the mid-1960s, both Michael and Anthony were studying to become orientalists at the University of Durham in northern England. There they came to know Christopher Gore-Booth, and since the Gore-Booth family’s house in Chelsea seems to have acted as a gathering place for the circle of friends and acquaintances of the whole family, it sometimes happened that the Aris brothers accompanied him up to London. Anthony was the one who first noticed Suu Kyi. “You must see this astonishing Burmese woman from St Hugh’s,” he said to his brother.
Michael fell head-over-heels as soon as he met her, but Suu Kyi’s approach was considerably more wait-and-see. She had not the remotest intention of having a relationship with, let alone marrying, a man who was a Westerner.Many of her friends and relations at home would have strong objections to such a marriage. It is also possible she already realized that it might turn out to be a problem if she were at any time to play a public role in her home country. But still, she fell in love and started quietly spending time with the lanky, rather Bohemian, yet conservatively brought-up and proper student from Durham.
After her finals Suu Kyi stayed for a longer period of time at the Gore-Booths’ home in London. She was given a room in the attic in the large stone house, with her own entrance and her own kitchen. She was able to choose how much time she wanted to spend in the company of the English family. In order to earn a little extra money, she worked as a private tutor to children of the upper class in Chelsea. She also worked for a time as an assistant to the Southeast Asia expert Hugh Tinker at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Tinker had published the book Burma: The Struggle for Independence 1944–48, and it was a great advantage to have an assistant who was personally a part of the history he had chosen to research.
While Suu Kyi was taking her first steps in her professional life after her studies, Michael Aris had already left the country. During his undergraduate education in Durham he had specialized in Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal, and in the course of his work he had come into contact with the researcher and author Marco Pallis, who was the last Westerner to leave Lhasa after the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Pallis had introduced Aris to the court in Bhutan, who had given Aris an offer that no student with his specialization could afford to say no to: he became adviser to the royal family in Bhutan. As a twenty-year-old he thus had a unique opportunity to learn more about the Himalayas and the local history and religion while actually living there. He would have preferred to study Tibet, but in 1967 the vast mountain state was totally closed to foreigners. China had taken a stranglehold and was in the process of destroying the country’s unique traditions. Bhutan was therefore the best possible starting point for Aris. He quickly learned to speak the local language, Dzongkha, and even became reasonably skilled in Tibetan. There, among the green mountains of the Himalayas at the end of the 1960s, he discovered his mission in life and his identity as a researcher. He was going to become an expert on the culture and religion of the Himalayan mountain states.
At the same time Suu Kyi decided to move to the United States. She wanted to continue her studies in order to earn a master’s degree. Once again she was able to take advantage of the family’s extensive international network. In 1969 she was accepted to New York University with Frank Trager as her adviser. Trager was a professor of international relations who had been working for several years on an American aid project in Burma. His book Burma: From Kingdom to Republic had just been published, and he was looking forward to helping Suu Kyi with her studies.
For Aris and Suu Kyi it was clearly not any easier to maintain their relationship when they were now not able to meet at all. But on another plane it suited her perfectly. She wanted to put time and distance between herself and Michael in order to test her own feelings and at the same time assure herself that he was serious. If what they felt for each other was still there after that time, then she was aiming to follow her feelings and not bother about the conventions.
In New York she stayed with Ma Than É, who had moved there after her sojourn in Algeria. They shared a small apartment with two rooms and a kitchen a few blocks from the United Nations’ skyscraper on the corner of Forty-ninth Street and First Avenue. They read, talked, and cooked Burmese food together whenever they got hold of the right spices, which was not that often.
As with all other people who arrive in New York for the first time, Suu Kyi was overwhelmed by the size of the city and the lights, the skyscrapers, the throngs of people, and the sheer number of different cultures and individual expressions. But she did not at all like the bus journeys between the apartment and the university near Washington Square. This was a long time before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” against crime, and Suu Kyi often felt nervous when she had to walk alone in the early mornings and late evenings between her home, the bus, and the university. Therefore she did not hesitate when she was offered the opportunity to work at the United Nations, only a six minutes’ walk from her apartment. “After applications, recommendations, interviews, and the usual delays and difficulties, Suu was in,” wrote Ma Than É in her essay in Freedom from Fear.
The secretary general of the United Nations was at that time U Thant, politically the most successful Burmese of all and in several ways a symbol for what Burma might have been without the civil war, the military coup, and the xenophobic isolation from the rest of the world. U Thant grew up in a small village in the Irrawaddy Delta. His father worked in education and was one of the founders of the Sun, a newspaper that in the 1920s and 1930s supported the idea that Burma should be given a greater degree of independence but should remain within the British Empire. But his father died when U Thant was only fourteen years old, and the family landed in great economic difficulty. Despite this, U Thant succeeded in gaining an education as a teacher, and when he was only twenty-five years old he became the headmaster of one of the schools in his hometown. Alongside this job he wrote a great number of articles and essays, in which he argued for increased independence, just like his father. During his time at university he had come to know Aung San, U Nu, and others in the young nationalist movement. U Nu had worked as a teacher at the school in Pantanaw, and when he became prime minister in 1948, he asked U Thant to come to Rangoon. For a number of years in the 1950s U Thant was the speechwriter, personal secretary, and political factotum to the prime minister.
In 1957 U Thant was appointed Burma’s representative in the United Nations, and he immediately made himself known as an effective and pragmatic politician. His mild, gentle, and in several ways typically “Burmese” manner appealed to most parties in the otherwise very split United Nations. Not to all, however. He acquired enemies, for example, when his negotiations led to Algeria’s independence at the beginning of the 1960s. “It was the job I liked the best,” he later told the author June Bingham, “but it took me a long time to regain confidence from the French.”
Despite that, when United Nations secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in an airplane crash in September 1961, U Thant was selected to be his successor. He had strong support among the African and Asian countries, and the superpowers understood him to be no great threat to their dominance in the Security Council. The Burmese was, quite simply, eminently suitable for the role that President Roosevelt had suggested that the world organization’s secretary general should play: he should be a moderator, not a player in his own right.
But unlike most secretaries general, who had often been recruited on account of their administrative gift
s, U Thant was not satisfied with that role alone. He pursued the policy that the United Nations must be impartial but not morally neutral. In cases where the United Nations Charter and the organization’s fundamental principles are subject to gross violation, one must react, he felt. He was, for example, deeply critical of the United States’ war in Vietnam and offered several times to mediate in the conflict, but President Lyndon B. Johnson declined each time. Perhaps U Thant foreshadowed the debate on human rights and humanitarian intervention that characterized the United Nations several decades later, when the Wall had fallen and a more open international climate seemed to be within reach.
When Ne Win seized power in 1962, U Thant had already been appointed as secretary general, and Burma’s new dictator could not attack him, however much he wanted to. Ne Win detested U Thant, partly because he had been such a close ally of U Nu, and partly because he remained Burma’s most brightly shining star on the firmament of international politics. That role was one Ne Win would gladly have awarded to himself.
There is nothing to indicate that U Thant was directly involved in the decision to give Aung San Suu Kyi an appointment at the United Nations, but it is not unthinkable that he had something to do with the matter. The bonds between the Burmese living in New York were close, and Aung San Suu Kyi often spent time in the company of the secretary general’s family.
But it was also clear that there were two factions among the Burmese in New York: the ones who were critical of the regime and the ones who supported it. The latter had as their base Burma’s embassy and the United Nations delegation appointed by Ne Win. U Thant often invited both groups to Sunday lunch at his home in Riverdale in the Bronx, a house with a large garden and a beautiful view out over the Hudson River. “Other Burmese friends would be there, a convivial company, and Burmese food much to our taste would be served. On special occasions, such as the birthday of one of his grandchildren, the grounds of the house would be decked out to receive the Burmese, and also the heads of many of the permanent delegations to the UN,” remembered Ma Than É.
Aung San Suu Kyi was given a post on the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, and the work assignments were just about as entertaining as they sound. The committee had the task of scrutinizing the budget and costs of several of the United Nations’ most important executive institutions, like the World Health Organization, and the aid programs within the UN Development Programme (UNDP). The committee was independent of both the secretary general and the general assembly. Soul-destroying or not, it gave Aung San Suu Kyi unique insight into the work of the world organization.
In the evenings she involved herself in volunteer work, something that the younger members of the United Nations personnel were at that time more or less expected to do. Suu Kyi did her “social service” at the Bellevue Hospital at the top of First Avenue. The hospital had been founded way back in 1736, and it is today the oldest publicly owned hospital in the United States. Over 80 percent of the patients come from socially vulnerable conditions and do not have comprehensive health insurance. The situation was about the same in the 1960s. Suu Kyi spent many weekday evenings and often one of the days on the weekend at the hospital. She read for the little ones in the children’s wards and sat on night duty by the beds of the elderly. The hospital also takes in many patients with psychological problems, and Suu Kyi acted as a support in the waiting rooms before they got to see a doctor.
Ne Win had now been in power in Burma for over eight years. The economy had collapsed and the civil war had been aggravated by an unwillingness of the regime to negotiate with the ethnic minorities, or even to recognize their right to their own culture. The conflict with Guomintang had been resolved at the beginning of the 1960s, thanks to the Chinese and Burmese forces making a combined attack on its strongholds in the northeastern Shan state. The soldiers had been driven over the border to Laos, where many of them joined the United States’ escalating war in Indochina. Other parts of the GMD forces ended up in northern Thailand, where it is still possible to distinguish a number of villages that in principle are populated entirely by aged GMD soldiers and their descendants.
But peace there was not. GMD was only a part of the problem, and in the political power vacuum that arose after the flight to Laos and Thailand, other local warlords and ethnically loyal guerrilla groups saw an opportunity of increasing their influence. In order to meet the guerrilla uprising, Ne Win chose to put his trust in the local militia, the so-called Ka Kwe Yes (KKY). The system amounted to allowing the warlords in the Shan mountains full freedom to sell opium and heroin, and in many cases the Burmese Army helped them with transport and protection. In return, the warlords promised to fight against the guerrilla groups that were at war with Rangoon.
The Burma expert Bertil Lintner is of the opinion that there were three reasons why Ne Win chose that solution. First, there was no money in the public treasury to finance a comprehensive, long-term war against the ethnic guerrilla groups. The trade with opium was decisive for supplying the soldiers with weapons, ammunition, uniforms, and necessities. Second, it undermined the Shan rebels’ own possibilities of gaining income from the opium fields if the KKY militia took the trade monopoly into its own hands. Third, it was already clear that Ne Win’s economic politics were a failure. There was a great shortage of all kinds of goods on the markets inside Burma, and the international drug trade became a way of acquiring capital and everyday commodities for the country.
KKY transported the opium to the market city of Tachilek, which is situated on the border between Thailand and Laos, and there they were paid in pure gold—hence the region’s “golden triangle” moniker. Despite the ever more chaotic situation, Ne Win was convinced that his Burmese “socialism” was the only conceivable road. At the same time, relations with Khin Kyi and her family grew frostier and frostier, which even Suu Kyi was made to experience during the time she was living in New York. Ma Than É tells of an episode at the home of U Soe Tin, Burma’s ambassador to the United Nations. He was a liberal person who served the junta in a diplomatically correct manner, but he was also keen on keeping in contact with those of the Burmese diaspora who were critical of the regime. One autumn when the General Assembly had its annual meeting they were invited to his home for a formal lunch. The ambassador’s residence was also situated in Riverdale, but the house was not as striking as U Thant’s. When Suu Kyi entered the spacious rectangular-shaped living room she saw that the sofas had been arranged so that they stood against the walls, with small tables in front of them. U Soe Tin’s wife moved quietly around from table to table serving fruit juice and snacks before she retired to the kitchen to prepare the lunch. Suu Kyi was invited to sit down on one of the sofas where two of the delegates at the General Assembly were already sitting. Ma Than É sensed from the atmosphere in the room that all was not as it should be. After a few introductory courtesies, the leader of the delegation started interrogating Suu Kyi. How did she come to be working for the United Nations, despite the fact that nobody in her home country had given her such an assignment? What passport did she use when traveling to the United States? Was she not aware that her diplomatic passport had expired since her mother was no longer working as an ambassador in India? She was committing an illegal act when using that passport and she must immediately hand it in. During this whole maneuver, the others in the room looked unceasingly and with anxious expressions at Suu Kyi, and they mumbled in agreement as soon as a new accusation was aimed at her. It was clear that somebody in Rangoon, in all probability Ne Win personally, had given them the task of degrading Suu Kyi, but she showed no signs of taking the criticism to heart. She explained calmly and collectedly that she had of course applied for a new passport in London, she had handed in her papers several months previously, but the application had for some reason gotten stuck in the bureaucratic process. She was unable to understand why the whole business had been so delayed, she said, and anyway, all the “uncles” in the room certainly understo
od that one could not travel to another country without any passport at all, did they not?
At that point, Burma’s ambassador in London came to her relief. He confirmed that the application had been handed in and sent to Rangoon for approval, but that it had gotten stuck in the system there. Everyone in the room knew that the bureaucracy in Burma under Ne Win had become extremely corrupt and ineffective, and some of those who had muttered supportively when Suu Kyi had been attacked now started instead to fidget uncomfortably. Through her quiet, simple explanation, the barely twenty-fiveyearold Aung San Suu Kyi had not only gotten out of the question about her passport, but she had also turned the whole discussion into a criticism of developments in Burma.
9
Family Life in a Knapsack
The contrast could not have been sharper between the cosmopolitan life Aung San Suu Kyi had lived when she was growing up and the daily life she would later have to get used to during the years in house arrest. But still she seems to have taken the whole thing calmly when she was isolated in the house on University Avenue in July 1989. Most of those around her had been arrested during recent months. She had learned to live with the risk.
“My only worry was that my sons got back safely to England, especially if Michael was not allowed to come and get them,” she said later.
However, the junta had no plans of stopping Michael. They hoped that he would take both the children and Suu Kyi with him back to Oxford. If Aung San Suu Kyi left the country, they could prevent her from returning. A one-way ticket out from Burma, and they would be rid of that problem.
Michael’s journey at the end of July was given almost greater international attention than the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi a few days earlier. He has written about it in Freedom from Fear. Suu Kyi was still a relatively unknown politician belonging to the opposition in a country that nobody in the West had bothered about for decades. Michael was no celebrity either, but he was a Western academic who disappeared without a trace for twenty-one days in one of the world’s toughest dictatorships. The scenario fitted hand-in-glove with Western media logic.
Aung San Suu Kyi Page 15
