Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  The junta had trapped the NLD in a position where its members would be losers whatever they chose to do. The party decided to boycott the election and was therefore disbanded as a working political party.

  After NLD’s decision to boycott the election, a group of NLD activists decided to form a party of its own, National Democratic Front, with Dr. Than Nyein as its chairman. The party got only 1.5 percent of the seats in the elections, and when the authorities asked NDF to sign a document admitting defeat, the party leadership refused.

  “I don’t accept the election results because this election was absolutely not free and fair,” said Than Nyein. “According to the election law, after the result is announced, the loser has to sign a document that he or she is defeated. But any candidate from my party did not or won’t sign that. Now we are going to file a complaint against the election results to the Election Committee.”

  Even the regime’s own announcements show clearly that the election was flawed. Right after the election the state-run media stated that 102.9 percent of a constituency in Pegu Division north of the old capital Rangoon had turned out to vote. They later corrected this number. The “correct” should have been 99.57 percent. In a township in western Rakhine state, 104.28 percent of the electorate were said to have voted. USDP even “won” in two constituencies in Kachin state where the elections had been canceled.

  In other words: both the process leading up to the election and the outcome spoke volumes against those who had put their hopes in the junta’s goodwill to actually use the election as the starting point for wider reform.

  Basically, the democratic opposition in Burma considers the new constitution to be unfair. The ethnic minorities are also very skeptical of, not to say hostile to, the new constitution. It doesn’t give them any of the independence in regional member states that they have been wishing for since the 1940s. On the contrary, the new constitution establishes that the most decisive political issues will be controlled by the central government.

  The point is that both the constitution and the election are parts of a plan the junta have been working on for two decades. When the national convention was appointed in 1993, this was exactly its officials’ final goal. Now, over twenty years after the great demonstrations in 1988 and Suu Kyi’s entrance onto the political stage, they have succeeded in tailoring a political solution that will make it possible for them to remain in power and still, on the surface, appear to have changed the system.

  After her release Aung San Suu Kyi was asked by the magazine The Irrawaddy what she thought about the diplomats who had put some faith in the election process. “Well,” she said with one of her trademark laughs, “perhaps this was a good lesson for them.” Interviewed by Financial Times, she elaborated, “Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship, because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it.”

  No political power in Burma nor any diplomat or foreign politician can deny the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi is the natural leading figure of the democratic movement and Burma’s most supremely popular politician. Any doubts about this should have been removed after the release of Suu Kyi. Every oppositional force, even the politicians who had decided to run in the election, made it clear that she is still the legitimate leader of the democracy movement.

  On the other hand, one could say that Aung San Suu Kyi has adopted a new attitude toward the political environment after the elections. Burma is still controlled by the military, but it’s also different from what it was in 2003 when she was put under house arrest. The change in attitude from the international community and the fact that the democracy movement was split before the election creates a different political landscape. In one of the first interviews after her release, she also mentioned the changes in people’s abilities to communicate. She had noticed it in the speech she held outside the NLD office the day after her release. “The first thing I noticed was that there were many more young people in the crowd that welcomed me. Many of them were using cell phones. They were taking photographs with their phones, which I had never experienced before. There was no such thing ten years ago, but it has become quite widespread these days. I think there are more communication lines than before. It is important.”

  These changes were probably the reason for her to talk even more than usual about compromises and the need to “listen to all parts of the Burmese society as well as to the international community.”

  The junta have often used talks with Suu Kyi as a method for propitiating the world at large, and as soon as they have gotten their way internationally they have once again closed the door in the face of the democratic movement. Still, there is possibly something new and more hopeful in the changes we have seen during the summer and fall of 2011. In the talks between Suu Kyi and the regime, in the release of some political prisoners, in the fact that NLD can work openly and reorganize itself as a political force. NLD is once again allowed to work as a political party, and in November 2011 it got permission to run for a few open seats in parliament. Even Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed to run as a candidate, something that had been completely out of the question for the previous rulers of Burma.

  So on one hand changes seem to be happening. Now more than ever. In the late summer of 2011 Suu Kyi herself described the situation as the most positive change in any Asian country since the 1980s. On the other hand, many of these changes happened in Burma before without any real difference, and before the opposite is proved, one must unfortunately assume that the same will happen this time too. The situation among the ethnic minorities is a problem of certain importance. The intensified fighting between the regime’s troops and a number of ethnic guerrillas shows that the problem in Burma is not only focused around the conflict between democracy and dictatorship. It was the ethnic issue that brought down the democracy in the 1950s, and it will be the most important problem for any future government to solve, to make sure that the same isn’t repeated.

  I believe that it is somewhere here, in the futile efforts from the international community and the ongoing problems in Burma, one can find the explanation for why Aung San Suu Kyi has remained such a powerful global symbol for democracy and human rights. If hopes of a more open world carried her into the limelight, then it is the opposite that has kept her there.

  She has been a reminder of the failure.

  The world became freer after the fall of the Berlin Wall but that liberty was relative. China opened up economically, and investors and diplomats have flocked around the centers of expansion and development on the Chinese east coast. However, there has been no question of any political reforms. The communist party has retained its power monopoly. Dissidents and independent journalists are persecuted and imprisoned. China’s rapid development has established a completely new global system and Burma’s military junta have wanted to surf on the waves of its success.

  Aung San Suu Kyi has always emphasized in her political commentaries that there is a link between politics and economy. She has argued for economic sanctions for reasons of morality but also because that is one of the few powerful weapons left if one does not believe in military violence. However, sanctions only work if most countries agree on the politics of isolation. Over and above this, countries and international organizations have leaned on diplomacy and political leverage, but neither of these has been effective in the case of Burma.

  Asked about it in the early days of February 2011, Suu Kyi repeated the same message she has been delivering for the past twenty years. “The best way is coordination,” she says. “A coordinated approach to the Burma problem. Unfortunately the coordination is quite poor. As you probably know not even the EU has a coordinated view on how to handle the situation.”

  But even though Aung San Suu Kyi is critical of the present lack of coordination, she is still hopeful, in the same way she always is, whether with regard to politics or personal matters. She always seems to be blatantly realistic about the prese
nt and unbelievably hopeful about the future. It’s just a question of being persistent. “One has to see that coordination is achieved by a lot of hard work,” she says. “It just doesn’t happen automatically.”

  What is fascinating about Aung San Suu Kyi is that she still believes that cooperation and dialogue—nonviolence—are effective methods. Her personal background is almost tailor-made for the discourse on human rights that has been conducted since the fall of the Iron Curtain. She stands with both feet in the anticolonial struggle. She has been influenced by the American human rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and Gandhi’s theories on civil resistance.

  She has worked for the United Nations and is the first to highlight the impact of that world organization. She knows that there are no roads to take other than the diplomatic and the political, despite the United Nations’ obvious deficiencies and the inability of the international community to influence the regime in Burma in any meaningful way. And she knows that it may take time. She herself has often compared Burma with South Africa. It took thirty years to do away with apartheid. For many years the system seemed to be totally impenetrable. Then suddenly the change came.

  In an interview with the magazine Vogue in 1995, after the first period of house arrest, she received the question of just how many years she was prepared to sacrifice for the sake of Burma becoming democratic. “That could take a long time,” she replied. “It could take all my life.”

  It’s a fascinating statement, but let’s hope it doesn’t take that long. Let’s hope the failures of Burma are in its past and that Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s name will remind us of success, besides the importance of personal courage and hope in the most desperate of times.

  While I have been working on this book, many people have asked me how she can cope with making such enormous personal sacrifices? Why does she remain in Burma? It is over twenty years now since she was first confined to house arrest. Just consider your own life—what were you doing in the summer of 1989—and you will realize just how many anniversaries have passed.

  Yet the question is wrongly put in a way, since it emanates from the idea that Aung San Suu Kyi’s sacrifice is unique. However, the fact is that history is full of people who have made tremendous personal sacrifices for a greater cause. The Norwegian resistance fighters during the Second World War, the union activists in Latin America, the independence movements within the colonial system, political dissidents in China, refugees all over the world. The difference is perhaps that similar sacrifices have often received greater attention because they have been made by men.

  In the interview with Alan Clements in the mid-1990s, Aung San Suu Kyi said that the greatest difference between herself and her father is the feeling of responsibility. Aung San felt even in his youth that he had a mission that was more important than his own person, and he spent the rest of his life taking responsibility for the calling that he understood he had been given. He literally sacrificed himself for a greater cause. When she was young, Aung San Suu Kyi never experienced the same “calling” to greater missions, but the sense of responsiblity had crept in gradually, and during a number of years in the 1980s she felt an ever greater restlessness. She “was looking for a mission” in her life. That was the reason she offered herself as a candidate when the democratic movement needed her. That was why she left the “little world” and took the great step out into the “big world.”

  Her family had already been separated from one another during certain periods. There was nothing to indicate that her house arrest would last for the better part of two decades. But when she had finally challenged the junta, when she had demanded to be thrown into prison, when she refused to leave the country, then there was no going back, that was impossible. She could not say one day that she was thinking of challenging the junta, then change her mind and travel back to England again. That would have demolished a good deal of her political capital inside Burma, even if she had remained a significant voice internationally. Such a decision would furthermore have been foreign to both her values and her highly principled stance.

  “I missed my family, particularly my sons,” she said after the first sixyear period of house arrest. “I missed not having the chance to look after them— to be with them. But, I did not feel cut off from life. Basically, I felt that being under house arrest was just part of my job—I was doing my work.”

  Her family, the two sons and the marriage with Michael Aris, has always been an important part of the story of Aung San Suu Kyi. One of the most touching moments after her release in 2010 might have been when Aung San Suu Kyi met her youngest son, Kim Aris, at the international airport. It was a couple of days after her first speech. Kim had applied for a visa as soon as it became clear that the junta would actually release her. It was denied for several weeks, but Kim was waiting in Bangkok for an opening in the junta’s policy. Ten days after his mother’s release he finally got the papers and took the first flight to Rangoon, barely an hour’s trip by plane over the Karen mountains in eastern Burma.

  It had been more than ten years since they had last seen each other, and just before walking into the airport terminal, Aung San Suu Kyi said, “I’m very happy.” Tears welled up in her eyes when they first looked at each other, and then she slipped her arm around his waist. The two posed briefly for photographers, and Kim Aris took off his green jacket and in front of the airport security and the public bared his right arm, where he had a tattoo of a red flag with a fighting peacock and a star—the symbol of the NLD.

  His mother looked at it for a second and smiled. Later she declared she was grateful the junta gave him a visa. She also said she had been close to her son during all those years.

  “I don’t feel that I’ve been apart from him. I never felt apart from him.”

  SOURCES AND SUPPORT

  To a great extent, this book builds on interviews with people who have met, worked with, and gotten to know Aung San Suu Kyi through the years. Many of them have asked that they remain anonymous—in certain cases because their participation would be dangerous for themselves, in other cases out of concern for Aung San Suu Kyi. I have let them remain anonymous, and in some cases I have changed names and places in order to avoid divulging their identities. I would, however, like to mention the following people by name: Debbie Stothard, Nyo Ohn Myint, Ann Pasternak Slater, Peter Carey, Jenny TunAung, Moe Zaw Oo, Moe Myat Thu, Zin Linn, Lian Sakhong, Sein Win, Malavika Karlekar, Clas Örjan Spång, and Jan Nordlander. For reading and support during the time of writing, I would like to thank Annika Nordgren Christensen, Jonas Ljung, Bertil Lintner, and Martin Gemzell.

  Regarding newspapers, I have systematically searched the digital archives first and foremost of the Bangkok Post, The Nation (Thailand), The Irrawaddy, Far Eastern Economic Review, the Times of India, Washington Post, Associated Press, The Independent, and New York Times.

  An endless amount has been written about Aung San Suu Kyi, but as an effect of her isolation there are only a very few real biographies. I have benefited greatly from Justin Wintle’s book Perfect Hostage, the most thorough of the biographies, especially the descriptions of Suu Kyi’s childhood and time in Oxford. Barbara Victor’s The Lady has also been an important source, as has Bertil Lintner’s Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle for Democracy. Freedom from Fear, the collection of texts that Michael Aris compiled in 1991, is still the most personal description of Suu Kyi. When it comes to her own words, Alan Clement’s The Voice of Hope is the only really thorough text, along with her own articles in Letters from Burma.

  During the years I have been writing about Burma, dozens of reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations have passed across my writing desk. Some of them are direct references in this book and I will refrain from including them all in the list of sources. Taken together I have mainly used the following written sources:

  Ad hoc commission on the Depayin massacre. The second preliminary report. Euro-
Burma office, 2004.

  Aung San Suu Kyi. Aung San of Burma: A Biographical Portrait. University of Queensland Press, 1984.

  ———. Freedom from Fear: And Other Writings. Edited with an introduction by Michael Aris. Penguin, 1991.

  ———. Letters from Burma. Penguin, 1995.

  ———. Let’s Visit Burma. Burke Books, 1985.

  ———. The Voice of Hope: Conversations with Alan Clements. Seven Stories Press, 1997.

  Aung-Thwin, Michael. Parochial Universalism, Democracy Jihad, and the Orientalist Image of Burma: The New Evangelism. Pacific Affairs, 2001.

  Bingham, June. U Thant: The Search for Peace. Knopf, 1966.

  Chee, Soon Juan, Järnfjäril. Om Aung San Suu Kyi och Burmas skitiga historia. Silc förlag, 2006.

  Clements, Alan. The Next Killing Fields. The Real Story Series, 1990.

  Havel, Václav, and Desmond Tutu. Threat to the Peace. A Call for the UN Security Council to Act in Burma. UN, 2005.

  Houtman, Gustaaf. Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 1999.

  Krarup Nielsen, Aage. De gyllene pagodernas land. Bonniers, 1959.

  Lintner, Bertil. Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle for Democracy. Asianet-work, 2007.

  ———. Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948. Silkworm Books, 1999.

  ———. Outrage: Burma’s Struggle for Democracy. Kiscadale Publications, 1990.

  Maung Maung. Burma and General Ne Win. Religious Affairs Dept., Rangoon, 1969.

  Maung Myint. The International Response to the Democracy Movement in Burma since 1962. Center for Pacific Asia Studies, Stockholms universitet, 2000.

  Naw, Angelene. Aung San and the Struggle for Burmese Independence. Silkworm Books, 2001.