Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  Their neighbor Nalini Jain recounted in an interview in the 1990s that Suu Kyi was a mother who enforced strict discipline in the home, a discipline that applied to herself as well as the others in the family. The children were expected to eat whatever was served and not to complain about the food. Michael has said something similar, that Alexander and Kim were so drilled to eat whatever was put on the table that they would, without hesitation, have gobbled up a snake if that was what Suu Kyi was serving that day.

  Thanks to the university, the family was able to live well in the house in central Oxford, but basically these were frugal years for them. They only had Michael’s meager researcher’s salary to live on and at the same time two growing children to provide for. The couple never owned a car or a TV set.

  Simultaneously, Suu Kyi was searching for something meaningful to do outside the home. “Suu maintained a house that was elegant and calm,” wrote Pasternak Slater, “but battened down at the back, hidden away among the kitchen’s stacked pots and pans, was anxiety, cramp, and strain.” Peter Carey, who got to know them at the end of the 1970s, has the same picture of Suu Kyi. “She was very meticulous and disciplined, and extremely friendly by nature,” he said in my interview with him. “She loved the life of a wife and mother, but it was also as though she was searching for an objective. Something in which to invest her talents and gifts. She had lost her father very early on, perhaps even lost her country, and she had as yet not found a new mission in life.”

  At the beginning of the 1980s, the most intensive years with small children were over, and Suu Kyi gradually started to consider her possibilities of resuming a professional career. Even when Kim was a newborn, she had worked for several hours a week at the university’s Bodleian Library building in its Burmese section. She had also organized courses in Burmese for the staff there. A couple of years later she and Michael together became the editors of the anthology Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson. After that she began writing herself, and in this way she took a few first steps toward her old dream of becoming an author. In rapid succession she published the children’s books Let’s Visit Bhutan, Let’s Visit Burma, and Let’s Visit Nepal, three countries that she knew well but that were completely unknown to most Europeans. The books are simple, easily understood introductions that neither touch on the political systems of these countries nor take up the violations of democracy and human rights. The subjects are history, culture, and religion.

  During those years around the shift from the 1970s to the 1980s, Suu Kyi also decided to get to know her father better. Aung San had never ceased to fascinate her and to affect her choices in life. “When she was a young mother, living in Oxford, England, she’d occasionally meet former British colonials who had served in Burma at the end of the war. ‘Did they know General Aung San? What was he like? What did he look like?’ One of them said, ‘He did look a little like Yul Brynner,’ which she liked quite a lot,” Peter Carey has said.

  In 1984 Suu Kyi published the book Aung San of Burma in a series on Asian leaders at the University of Queensland Press. It was a short biography of her father. In contrast to her books for children and young people, her text on Aung San is of a political character. Even then, four years prior to her entry into the democratic movement, one notices that she has an ambition to wrench the interpretation of Aung San and thus of Burma’s post-colonial history out of the hands of the military junta. Although she does write about her father’s revolutionary aspect and his experiences of cooperation with Japan, she is above all concerned with emphasizing his pragmatism and the fact that he left the army to shoulder the role of a civil political leader in a democratic system.

  The book gave Suu Kyi a taste for more, and when it had been published she wanted once again to have a go at an academic career. Michael had moved his research to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and now Suu Kyi also applied to attend this college.

  Their various academic projects caused the family to split up yet again. Michael was given an exchange appointment as a researcher in the old colonial town of Simla in India, and Suu Kyi was offered the opportunity of working for eighteen months at the University of Kyoto. The idea was to learn more about the contacts between Burma and Japan during the Second World War, and she also planned to interview Japanese war veterans who had known her father.

  Aung San Suu Kyi had always found languages easy and did her utmost to learn Japanese before her journey out. Author Justin Wintle describes how she transformed the family’s bathroom at 15 Park Town in Oxford into a language laboratory, with Japanese words and sentences taped up all over the bathroom walls, so that she could go in there and review at any time of day. However, it was a time-consuming and boringly repetitive task, much harder than the other languages she had learned.

  When she later ended up under house arrest in Rangoon, she once again took up her language studies, and with the help of books that Michael had sent her, she improved both her French and her Japanese.

  Kim accompanied his mother to Japan and Michael took Alexander with him to Simla. Kim was only seven years old and neither he nor Suu Kyi felt particularly at home in Kyoto. For some unknown reason, Kim had been placed in a school where Japanese was the only language spoken, and he had difficulty in keeping up with the lessons and in finding new friends. There was a school for English-speakers nearby, so the decision appears strange, but the idea seems to have been that he should learn Japanese the hard way.

  The Burmese Michael Aung-Thwin was also at the University in Kyoto, one of the few people whom Suu Kyi had met over the years who did not speak well of her. They had their studies right next door to each other and spent time there almost daily during the course of a year. Aung-Thwin has said in several interviews that he perceived her as a wandering hub of conflict who was in addition obsessed by her father. “We argued about Burma almost every day and had honest disagreements,” he said in the Web-based newspaper New Mandala in 2009. “So, when I said she was divisive, that’s because she was. It’s no secret. Everyone knew it, we, as well as her Japanese hosts. . . . And she was, indeed, always harping about her father. I would too if my father were as famous as hers. She even tried to convince my daughter how famous her father was by showing her a Burmese coin with his face on it. My daughter was hardly seven and couldn’t give a damn.”

  The political conflicts between them were about their different attitudes toward the military junta and which paths forward were feasible for Burma. Aung-Thwin considered that there was a certain justification for Ne Win’s dictatorship and that Burma’s political system must be coupled with the specific culture and history of the country. Democracy means decentralization, he wrote in an essay a few years after having worked with her, and in Burma, as in many other countries, decentralization means anarchy. Aung-Thwin concluded that many people would prefer military rule if the alternative was chaos.

  He wrote this essay about Burma, but also partly as an argument against the foreign policy of the United States, which often meant forcing its own political and economic system onto other countries without adapting it to local conditions. In Burma the ethnic conflicts and the hierarchical traditions demand the formation of the system in a different way than that of the Western world. It would have been easy to sympathize with that position, if it were not for the problem that he used this criticism to give moral support to the military junta.

  Aung-Thwin’s wife, Maria, was also skeptical toward Suu Kyi: “It was as if she didn’t have a husband. She never once said anything about missing him . . . and actually it seemed that the farther she was from him, the better it was for her, or at least more convenient for what she wanted to do with her life.”

  This quotation has been diligently used in the junta’s propaganda against Aung San Suu Kyi, and it often creeps into articles and short biographies about her. It implies that she came to Burma some years later for reasons other than that of looking after her mother, and it makes her appear as a cold, calcula
ting person who puts her own political ambitions before her family.

  Kim and Suu Kyi stayed in Kyoto for one year, after which they traveled to join Michael and Alexander in Simla. They remained there for almost a year and after that returned to England, where Suu Kyi was to begin in earnest the task of writing her thesis. According to the rules of the university about the length of postgraduate appointments, she would not be able to earn her doctorate before October 1989, but she planned on working fast and to have her thesis completed in the autumn of 1988. Ma Than É, who also lived with them for three months in Kyoto, has described that time as a period of very hard work and great decisiveness.

  There was something restless about Suu Kyi during that period. The feeling that she was searching for a mission, something to which to apply her energy and gifts, grew stronger. Early in the autumn of 1987, Khin Kyi arrived in Oxford to undergo a complicated eye operation. She stayed with Suu Kyi and her family for a couple of months. Suu Kyi was simultaneously applying for a post as assistant professor at the University of Michigan. Peter Carey helped her with her application, and when she was about to post it, she sent him a letter of thanks at the same time. She wrote,

  I’m having a wonderful time experimenting with my new Amstrad 9512—I can’t quite take writing seriously at the moment because it’s just like a game with the word processor! But I must try to be serious— I have just done my application to Michigan and I am sending you a copy together with my copies of my CV and thesis outline. Thank you very much for agreeing to be a referee, Peter. I don’t know if they will consider my application seriously enough to ask you for a reference but it is very good to have the encouragement of people like you and John [her supervisor at the university]. All those years spent as a fulltime mother were most enjoyable and rewarding but the gap in professional and academic activities (although I did manage to study Tibetan and Japanese during that time) makes me feel somewhat at a disadvantage compared to those who were never out of the field.

  She does not seem to have had any greater hopes of being awarded the post, but her application shows that she took her academic career seriously. She was thinking of establishing herself as a researcher in Burmese history and literature. It may well have been so, if it had not been for that telephone call on the evening of March 31, 1988.

  10

  House Arrest

  When she was confined to house arrest for the first time in 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi knew nothing about the future. One cannot prevent oneself from wondering about what she would have thought if she had known that when she would be released in November 2010 she would have spent fifteen of the past twenty-one years under house arrest.

  How can anyone cope with such a sacrifice? How does one manage to avoid getting broken down physically and psychologically?

  For Aung San Suu Kyi the answer has always been integrity and discipline. She has described the strict daily routine she set up right from the first autumn. She got up every morning at half past five and meditated in the faint dawn light. She read. After that she listened for a while to the radio, the BBC, the Burmese transmissions from the Voice of America, and after a time also from the Democratic Voice of Burma, which was transmitted from Oslo. When Michael Aris came for a visit he was somewhat amused by the fact that she was more up-to-date on world news than he was.

  After that she spent some time exercising, eventually on a simple Nordic Track she had succeeded in getting into the house. She had breakfast, listened again to the radio, and then read books and played the piano.

  “I tried to keep the same routines during my latest house arrest,” she told me when I interviewed her in February 2011. “But I wasn’t as strict as I had been before. This time I had two companions in the house, and it would have been dreadful for them to follow my schedule.”

  This time she also found herself preferring to read poetry rather than prose.

  “Maybe it’s something to do with age,” she said in an interview with Financial Times. “I have discovered some rather beautiful bits by Tennyson. I used to think he was an old fuddy-duddy, but it’s not quite like that. Some of the poems from The Princess are quite beautiful.”

  Most things during house arrests were the same, though, for example the fact that she was denied access to the telephone. At the beginning of the first arrest back in 1989, a soldier had marched into the house, cut the telephone line, and carried off the telephone, so she was unable to talk to her friends or family. However, Michael Aris had obtained the right to send her parcels and was able to supply her with a steady stream of books. She read political books in the mornings and fiction in the afternoons. After a number of years, she acquired a copy of Nelson Mandela’s recently published autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Mandela’s story about life under apartheid and his prison years on Robben Island inspired her and helped her keep up her courage. She was able to link together her knowledge about the resistance to apartheid in Great Britain in the 1960s with her own highly concrete experiences of imprisonment and oppression.

  During the initial period of her isolation, she often worked in the garden, particularly in the mornings before the sun became too sweltering. She took care of the lawns, the garden beds down by the lake, and the lilies growing along the walls of the house. However, after a while she no longer had the strength. The grounds surrounding the house are extensive. They accommodate a small woody area and two buildings apart from the main house, and the climate in Burma assists nature in its conquest within a few months. Soon a joke began to circulate in Rangoon: the junta is trying to silence Suu Kyi by allowing the jungle to grow so thick around her house that no human being could possibly either enter or leave. A kind of Sleeping Beauty legend, though without a prince coming to break the enchantment.

  Michael and her sons had returned to Oxford at the end of August, just before term began. Several days later they received a message that the boys’ Burmese passports had been retracted. In contrast to Suu Kyi, both Kim and Alexander had had dual citizenship, which made it possible for them to travel to Burma without special visas. Now they would be denied the right to return to their mother in Rangoon. The junta counted coldly on the fact that if Aung San Suu Kyi did not want to accompany her family to Oxford, and if they were not allowed to visit her, her longing for the boys would in the end become so strong that she, too, would choose to leave.

  However, the travel ban only concerned Kim and Alexander to start with. Michael was permitted to return to Rangoon late in the autumn. “The days I spent alone with her that last time, completely isolated from the world, are among my happiest memories of our many years of marriage,” he wrote in Freedom from Fear. They carried on long conversations with each other and celebrated Christmas together. “It was wonderfully peaceful. Suu had established a strict regime of exercise, study, and piano which I managed to disrupt.”

  In the meanwhile, the junta rejected Suu Kyi’s candidacy to the election in 1990. They had made an addendum to the constitution that forbade a person who was married to a foreigner to run as a candidate in a general election. The NLD thus had to enter the election without its most important leader, and the junta assumed that this would take the sting out of the democratic movement. But once again they made a gross mistake about the strength of the popular dissatisfaction.

  The election was to be held on May 27, 1990. Before the election day, the SLORC displayed a striking openness. For months they had done all they could to crush the opposition. They had stopped people from attending political meetings, threatened and imprisoned activists, and carried out hardasnails propaganda in the state-owned mass media. The university and the higher secondary schools had been closed so that the students would not be able to assemble and organize oppositional meetings. Yet the NLD and almost ninety other parties, several of them from the ethnic minorities, were still permitted to act freely for a few days before the election. International media and observers were allowed into the country, and to judge by reports, there was not much to indicate
that the SLORC was considering manipulation of the election results. Hopes had increased in January the same year, when Gen. Saw Maung had said that Tatmadaw and the junta were not thinking of nominating the next government—that would be the task of the people via their newly elected parliament. Despite the obvious suppression of freedom to hold meetings and the violations during the election campaign, his statement had given the voters the impression that their votes could make a difference. As many as 73 percent went out and voted on election day, an unusually high rate of electoral participation in a country that had not carried out an election since 1960. And despite the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi’s candidacy constituted a block, the NLD won an overwhelming victory. The party received 80 percent of the seats in parliament. The parties of the ethnic minorities, all allies of the NLD, took home 14 percent. The junta’s party, the National Unity Party (NUP), received almost 20 percent of the votes, but since they applied the British election system with majority elections in one-person constituencies, this only gave them a few seats in parliament.

  The people had made a monumental statement against the military junta. Aung San Suu Kyi had not only succeeded with her election campaign during the months she was free to act politically, she had also received broad support for her nonviolent perspective. On the day of the election only a few outbreaks of violence were reported from the thousands of polling stations around the country. A closer analysis of the results showed that the NLD had won in regions where the military and their families were in great majority. Only a small number of them had given her their support publicly, but protected by electoral anonymity they had voted for the NLD anyway. Even the soldiers and their officers wanted a new regime in Burma.