She’s hopeful but very wary of predicting any specific outcomes. That’s a lesson every Burmese learns. Over the years there have been so many hopeful moments and so many crushed dreams—the students’ revolt in 1974, the uprising in 1988, the saffron revolution in 2007, and the many times Aung San Suu Kyi has been released, only to be put under house arrest again when she becomes a threat to the military rulers of Burma.
“My hope for the short-term future is that we can continue to rebuild our organization and change more than we have done so far,” she says. “But the only thing I can predict is that we will continue to work very hard. What I hope for is that the rest of the world continues to give us their strong support. That you don’t let yourself be fooled by superficial changes on the political scene in Burma.”
The last comment is aimed at those forces in the international community who have argued that the Burma strategy has to change. Before the elections in November 2010 some foreign diplomats and businessmen active in Rangoon claimed that the elections should be, if not respected, at least accepted by the rest of the world. Further, they argued that anyone who wanted change in Burma had to play along with the junta’s strategy and work more with the parties that participated in the elections than with the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi. The same argument was used against the sanctions championed by the United States and European Union.
During our conversation it becomes clear that Aung San Suu Kyi finds this debate futile. A new parliament has been elected and a supposedly civil government is in place instead of the military junta. But the flawed election process gave 80 percent of the seats in the parliament to the junta-controlled party, Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Only four out of thirty ministers in the cabinet do not have a background as high-ranking officers in the military. And many experts on Burmese politics think that the former junta leader Than Shwe is running the show from behind the scenes.
“I don’t exclude the possibility that some positive things may come out of this process,” Suu Kyi says, “but it’s far too early to change any policies. They can put anyone under arrest in Burma. At any time. So when people talk as if there has been progress in Burma I want them to think about this. We don’t know who will be arrested and for what reasons. That is not the kind of situation you expect to find in a democracy.”
Since then there have been signs of greater openness in Burma. The draconian media laws have been at least slightly lightened, a number of new magazines and papers has started, and Aung San Suu Kyi has several times met with the new president Thein Sein to discuss a possible way forward. She has, even if with great caution and a handful of objections, described it as the most promising change in a Southeast Asian country since the ’80s.
As I write this, the regime has also released around two hundred political prisoners and there has been talk about the release of at least four hundred more. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, NLD, has also been allowed to re-register and run for some seats in the parliament, after being disbanded before the elections in 2010. An adviser to the president even hinted that she herself might be able to run for a political position, something that so far has been a complete no-go for the regime.
“I’m a skeptical optimist,” says Aung Zaw, editor in chief for The Irrawaddy magazine, who for fifteen years has covered Burma issues from the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. Aung Zaw has lived in exile for twenty-three years since the uprising in 1988, and for the first time he felt that there might be an opportunity to go back to his homeland. Not now, but if the speed of change continues, hopefully he will in a few years’ time.
So, even if there are thousands of scenarios in which the future for Burma is black, there are still some signs that things are moving in the right direction.
Aung San Suu Kyi is of course aware of the risks. Every time she has been free or partly free, the military has put her back in house arrest before she has become too powerful for their taste.
“I’m not fearful,” she said in an interview with BBC after her latest release. “Not in the sense that I think to myself that I won’t do this or I won’t do that because they’ll put me under arrest again. But I know that there’s always the possibility that I might be re-arrested. It’s not something that I particularly wish for, because if you’re placed under arrest, you can’t work as much as you can when you’re not under arrest.”
House arrest or not, the only thing one can state with any certainty is that the junta will never be able to get rid of her. She will remain a unifying power for those who desire to see a different Burma, and the junta fears her more than anything else. Thanks to her ability to unite the many political and ethnic groups in Burma, she is and will remain the foremost threat against their prolonged monopoly of power. This is the reason they have kept her under house arrest for fifteen of the last twenty-one years. Her person is so charged with political meaning nowadays that it has even become taboo to say her name. In the streets in Rangoon she is called the Lady. In the state-controlled newspapers she has had several less flattering names over the years and has often been referred to as Miss Michael Aris or “the woman who was married to a foreigner.” This also changed when the dialogue started with the new president. It is still forbidden to publish anything about her that has not been cleared by the Ministry of Information, but she is not being calumnied in the same way.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s symbolic, almost iconic significance stretches far beyond the borders of Burma. She was imprisoned for the first time in 1989, only a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and has since then been a symbol for the worldwide international struggle for democracy and human rights.
She has attained the same status as Nelson Mandela did during the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the similarities between them are many. Both are the most brightly shining political stars in their respective countries. Both have spent a great part of their lives in captivity. Both have also been forced to make enormous personal sacrifices in the struggle for freedom. When Aung San Suu Kyi was first confined to house arrest, her sons Alexander and Kim were sixteen and twelve years old, respectively. Since then they have only met their mother for brief periods of time. During the latest house arrest, they did not see her at all. Her husband, Michael Aris, died of cancer in 1999 without their being able to say farewell to each other. Aung San Suu Kyi has several times been offered the opportunity to leave the country but she has refused, fully aware that she would never be able to return as long as the junta are in power. She would be compelled to live her life in exile, which would mean abandoning her people.
At the same time activists all over the world have become involved in her cause. Artists and musical groups such as Madonna, U2, and REM have dedicated songs to her. Nobel Prize winners such as Václav Havel and Desmond Tutu have supported her in their writings and political campaigns.
Despite all the attention, campaigns, newspaper articles, and television programs, Aung San Suu Kyi has for most people remained just a symbol, a mirror that can reflect almost any dream or hope. So who in reality is the woman behind the image? Which are Aung San Suu Kyi’s driving forces and what is it that makes her so interesting to the world at large? In what way is she significant when it comes to the possibility of Burma’s breaking free from the grasp of the dictatorship? What is it that makes her continue the struggle against the junta, year after year, despite the enormous strain?
When I finally left the NLD head office, I realized I had been very lucky. Since Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest during most of the years I have followed the developments in Burma, a meeting with her seemed unlikely. This time, however, it wasn’t. It felt strange to meet someone I seemed to know so well, but only from my interviews with her friends and colleagues and her own writing. I’m not the right person to judge but I think it worked out pretty well: much of what people have told me over the years was confirmed, not contradicted, by my personal i
nteraction with the Lady.
This is not a complete biography of Aung San Suu Kyi. Such a project would have required her own participation from the start. The major part of this book was written during her house arrest. My interview with her in 2011 was a way to learn her views of the situation in Burma and her own plans for the future. As a matter of fact she has not talked much about her background after her release. Her schedule has been full of more urgent events, and her focus is on the politics of Burma and the democracy movement.
Aung San Suu Kyi is of course sixty-five years old now, but in all probability she has many years left as an active politician. If the military power falls, she will be of decisive significance for a free and democratic Burma. Hopefully, that chapter in her life remains to be written.
This is a story about Aung San Suu Kyi and about Burma, though it doesn’t start with either of them. It starts in May 2009 with a fifty-three-year-old American man who decided to take a swim in Lake Inya.
2
The Swimmer
God had appeared to him in a dream and given him a mission. Visions of great clarity had streamed through John’s head. He had seen himself swimming across a dark lake and clambering ashore near a house of white stone. Sheltered by the darkness, he had stood by a door. Behind it there was a woman whom he was to save from being murdered.
The dream was easy to interpret. He had been at that spot only a few months earlier but had been turned away, so now he was compelled to make a new attempt. If he refrained, he would never be able to live with himself. Only two years earlier he had dreamed that his son Clint would die in a motorcycle accident. On that occasion he had not paid any attention to the warning, and when Clint perished in precisely such an accident a few weeks later, his grief was exacerbated by the fact that he could have prevented the tragedy.
The period after the accident had been dark and dismal, and he was not intending to make the same mistake again. That was why he now lay on his stomach in a drainage pipe on the outskirts of Rangoon. His clothes were covered with clay and water. A couple of minutes earlier there had been a close call. Two armed guards in green uniforms had walked by on the track leading around the lake. They passed him just at the opening of the drainage pipe so he had flung himself flat out into the muck and crawled forward in the way he had learned in the army more than thirty years ago. The pipe was around fifteen feet long and it gently sloped downward. The water level rose the closer he got to the mouth. It only took a couple of minutes, and then he was immersed in the cool waters of Lake Inya. There was a sudden splash when his two fully packed plastic bags broke the surface of the water; otherwise, there was silence.
He started to swim, but realizing that he could touch bottom, he took a couple of steps forward instead. He felt impeded by the clumsy flippers made out of hard corrugated cardboard that he had taped around his sandals a few minutes earlier.
Just then both soldiers caught sight of him. Or rather they caught sight of the plastic bags that bobbed up and down on the waves, hiding his head. One of the soldiers picked up a stone and chucked it toward him. It hit the surface a few centimeters in front of his face. Then there was another stone, and yet another. They were aiming at the target, as though they were trying to sink the plastic bags, and they seemed not to understand that a middleaged Westerner was behind the floating objects. Slowly he tried to move the bags in time with the waves, and then suddenly the soldiers appeared to get bored. They turned and went away. He had pulled it off.
It took him a good while to reach his goal. Sometimes the water got deeper and he had to swim. When he saw the house with its white stone façade stained by damp, he knew that he had made it. He waded the last few yards with the plastic bags hanging loosely by his sides. He was tired and thought to himself that he was making terrible noise. But the darkness was impenetrable and none of the guards in front of the building could see him. Some steps led up to a veranda. On the last occasion when he had been there the house staff had turned him away. He had not been allowed to enter and therefore not been able to deliver his important message. All he had done was to hand over some books about the Mormon Church. He wondered sometimes whether the woman in the house had read them and whether she had understood anything of the message.
It was as he had assumed: the veranda door was unlocked. He opened it slowly, carefully, and then suddenly he was standing inside the house. In the dark room he could see two women staring at him. They looked astonished, almost shocked.
The time was five o’clock in the evening on May 4, 2009, and John Yettaw had just realized his dream. He had made his way into Aung San Suu Kyi’s house by Lake Inya in Rangoon.
It is still unclear what John Yettaw, a fifty-three-year-old Mormon from the state of Missouri, hoped to achieve by his visit to one of the world’s most famous and respected political prisoners. When he clambered out of the waters of Lake Inya that night in May, Aung San Suu Kyi had been under house arrest for fourteen of the last twenty years, and during the past six years she had been almost totally isolated from the outside world. Only a few people had met her: two domestic servants (they were the women who had met John Yettaw at the door of the veranda), her doctor, a contact person in the democratic movement, and, on rare occasions, representatives from the international community.
It is possible that Yettaw saw himself as the hero in a drama in which Aung San Suu Kyi would regain her freedom. In the two black plastic bags he was carrying among other items two black chadors—Muslim headdresses that cover the body from head to knee. Yettaw seems to have been planning on disguising himself and Aung San Suu Kyi in this garb, and then leaving the house via the main entrance. He does not seem to have reflected on exactly why the guards would accept two Muslim women from nowhere suddenly coming out of the house where Burma’s most well-guarded political prisoner was to be found.
He was allowed a few hours’ sleep on the floor in the hall, and as soon as darkness had fallen, he was transported away and let go, only to be seized the day after outside a shopping center in central Rangoon. The security services had clearly been keeping a watch on him and had only been waiting for the right moment. Shortly afterward Aung San Suu Kyi and her two domestic servants were also arrested.
To the military junta, Yettaw’s little swim was like a gift from the gods. Aung San Suu Kyi’s latest house arrest had begun in May 2003 and was due to expire only a few days later. According to Burmese law, the junta would be unable to detain her without first having her sentenced in a court of law. Releasing her was unthinkable. Burma found itself in far too sensitive a situation and the military junta’s entire possession of power was at stake.
Barely two years earlier, in the autumn of 2007, the demonstrations of the Buddhist monks known collectively as the saffron revolution had focused the eyes of the world on the junta’s violations of power. These huge public protests broke out after the junta had scrapped petrol, gas, and other fuel subsidies, which doubled fuel prices overnight. People suddenly had to invest their entire monthly income in fuel. However, at that point the unrest had been seething just below the surface for several years. Despite the efforts of the junta to open up the economy to the world at large, significant sectors had remained under the iron control of the state. All exports and imports require licenses, which entail masses of paperwork and corruption. The rice market is totally in the hands of companies that are directly or indirectly controlled by the junta. Trade with neighboring countries is rendered more difficult by the wretched state of the roads and railways, and many of the most vital everyday commodities are in shortage.
In other words, there were strong breeding grounds for the protests of September 2007. For several weeks the whole world followed the tens of thousands of monks who went out in the streets in protest against decades of power abuse, and the whole world was appalled when the junta quickly and efficiently crushed the revolt. The violence led to massive international protests. Both the United States and the European Union increased their sanct
ions against the country, and for the first time ever the crisis in Burma was placed on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. Up until then China and Russia had blocked all attempts to put more intense pressure on the military junta. The Security Council demanded that a stop be put to the violence and that a dialogue be initiated between the junta and the opposition.
But even if the junta seemed superficially prepared to have talks with Suu Kyi, nothing happened in practice. The demands of the United Nations were principally met with arrogance and silence, and the world organization had no chance of carrying the question any further.
Barely a year later, on May 2, 2008, Hurricane Nargis slammed the Burmese coast. Vast areas of the densely populated Irrawaddy Delta were inundated by the waters. In retrospect, it is almost touching to read the Western media’s reporting on what would later turn out to be an extreme natural disaster. Even in Rangoon, which was far from the most severely hit regions, trees had been dragged up by their roots. Whole blocks had been on the point of collapse. Even 54 University Avenue, Suu Kyi’s home by Lake Inya, had had its roof torn off by the storm gusts.
Nonetheless, both the Burmese authorities and Western media played down the damage. On May 5, the UK newspaper Daily Mail reported that “at least 350 people” had been killed by the hurricane. Three days later, Western mass media reproduced the junta’s own figures, which stated that about 8,000 people had perished. Some weeks later the truth leaked out. The toll had risen to at least 145,000 dead, and more than 2 million people had been made homeless.
The military junta realized that a natural disaster of this magnitude might result in significant political consequences, and they did all they could to conceal the extent of the catastrophe. First, they refused to accept international assistance in the rescue work, then they accepted assistance but did not admit any foreign rescue workers. The military appropriated a great portion of the aid for its own use and handed out food and money as “loans” to the suffering population. Other portions of the aid were used as propaganda by the junta, which tried to steal the credit for supplying food, tents, and medical equipment. They finally admitted that their own resources were inadequate and allowed aid organizations into the country. By that time the death toll had mounted even higher, and yet even then the aid workers were not given access to the worst-hit regions. The junta were scared to death that the need for foreign aid might be construed as weakness. The population must be given the impression that the junta had provided the aid, they believed; otherwise, the disaster might lead to a popular revolt.
Aung San Suu Kyi Page 2