Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  It’s obvious that Aung San Suu Kyi’s main influence in her early life, her role model and guide during the years of childhood, growing up without a father, was her mother, Khin Kyi.

  It is sometimes said about Khin Kyi that she did not get married to a man but to a destiny. The opposite is often said about Aung San, that he got married to a woman who had morals and backbone sufficient to hold up his ideals even after his death.

  His ideals, not her own.

  Apart from the fact that this reflects a patriarchal worldview, it is of course both false and true. False in the sense that Khin Kyi had very strong political ideas and pronounced concepts of right and wrong of her own, and they guided her during her very successful professional career. It is also true that she never remarried after Aung San. His significance for Burma’s collective unconscious was far too important for her to “besmirch” it with a new love affair.

  During the whole of the 1950s she toiled away to keep everything going in their daily life. Her working days were long and there was not much time to spend with the children. In that sense she was no different from her deceased husband. They had the same ability to focus on the task at hand and to be absorbed by their work. At the same time she saw to it that the children were given a strict and rather conservative upbringing. Khin Kyi was not the least careful about her children’s appearance. When they had guests at home the children always had to wear their best clothes, well ironed and without flecks of dirt. This is what Suu Kyi related for Alan Clements:

  My mother was a very strong person and I suppose I too am strong, in my own way. But I have a much more informal relationship with my children. My mother’s relationship with me was quite formal. She never ran around and played with me when I was young. With my sons, I was always running around with them, playing together. Also, I would have long discussions with them. Sometimes I would argue with them—tremendously passionate arguments, because my sons can be quite argumentative, and I am argumentative too. I never did this sort of thing with my mother.

  Khin Kyi’s views basically reflected a traditional Burmese outlook on upbringing. Children were expected to manage on their own to a great extent. U Thant, the secretary general of the United Nations and a member of the Burmese liberation movement in the 1940s, has described how his own childhood felt like an endless stream of days when the adults were quite simply not there. The children on the block roamed around as they liked, returning home only to eat, and there was always rice ready in the kitchen.

  Children are also expected to show respect for their elders. They learn early on to bow in front of adults, in the same way that one learns early on to bow in front of the Buddhist altar before going to bed in the evening.

  That Khin Kyi was often busy with work did not mean that the children were alone during the day. The concept of family in Burma in the 1950s was not as broad as in India, for example, nor was it as narrow as the modern nuclear family in Western countries. A household usually consisted of children, parents, and one or several grandparents, perhaps also an aunt or uncle.

  One or more housekeepers lived in the house on University Avenue and also for long periods of time an aunt, as did Khin Kyi’s father, Pho Hnyin, the man who had converted to Christianity during his forest jaunts with the hunters of the Karen people.

  When reading about Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother, one is struck by the fact that she, despite the great geographical and cultural distance, resembles famous Swedish politician and diplomat, later Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Alva Myrdal. Both were born at the beginning of the 1900s and were active during a time when women were starting to help themselves to a more public life. They had the same fields of political interest and both participated in forming the social politics of their respective countries, with a particular focus on women and children. Both had an ability to concentrate fully on their work while at the same time, paradoxically enough, accepting a traditional female role. They allowed their husbands to be the star and adapted a great deal of their lives to fit in with the man of the family, dead or alive.

  To take the similarity between Alva Myrdal and Khin Kyi one step further, it is actually likely that these two successful women met each other when they were both working as ambassadors in India. When Khin Kyi was appointed as Burma’s first female ambassador in 1960, Alva Myrdal had already spent four years in New Delhi. They were both acquaintances of India’s prime minister, Nehru, and moved in the diplomatic circles of the Indian capital.

  Aung San Suu Kyi was fifteen when they moved to India. Khin Kyi wanted to have her daughter close to her, so there was no question of her staying behind in Rangoon. For her big brother Aung San Oo the situation was different. He was seventeen years old and had already been sent to boarding school in England.

  Aung San Suu Kyi and her mother left a country on the brink of total chaos. The government had not succeeded in handling the communist guerrillas, several smaller ethnic groups had taken up arms, and GMD was still a perpetual source of unrest in the distant mountains of the Shan state. In an interview with the Dane Aage Krarup Nielsen, Prime Minister U Nu admitted that there were dark clouds in the otherwise bright skies. The reconstruction of the country had been interrupted on account of the eternal battles. Before the world war the rice exports had been three million tons per year and now they had still not reached more than two million tons. The farmers did not dare to cultivate their lands for fear of plundering and theft. “We can’t fortify every village or protect every stretch of road!” proclaimed U Nu. “But we shall get at them! We know that their battle morale is low and we also know that the guerrilla battles that have flamed up recently are a sign of weakness, the final desperate struggle with their backs against the wall.”

  Despite the fact that the civil war had been going on for ten years since it first broke out, there was still great tolerance in the world at large for the government army’s tough measures against the rebels. The Bamar sometimes compared their history to that of the United States. In the United States it took one hundred years and a civil war before the federal state could be seriously established. Burma had quite simply a historical baptism by fire to go through.

  This view would turn out to be basically wrong. As in all societies characterized by war, the military successively reinforced its power, and the 1950s were marked by continual clashes between the civil government and the commander in chief of the army, Ne Win. With the civil war as a bloody background, the army devoured an ever greater proportion of the national budget, and the generals began step by step to dominate the greater part of the business sector. This started in 1951 when the army-owned Defence Services Institute opened a grocery shop in Rangoon. The idea was that army personnel should be able to buy goods that were otherwise hard to come by in Burma with its war economy; the concept was somewhat like the shops for the higher-level state employees in the former Eastern Bloc. Many officers and soldiers soon realized that they could buy more goods than they needed and sell them on the black market. Before long eighteen similar shops had opened. After that the army opened a bookshop that at first was just to sell goods to soldiers but which soon started selling paper, books, and pens to civilians too. The next step was a newspaper, Myawaddy, that was owned by the army and that was given the task of “balancing” the press that was otherwise fairly critical of the government. The newspaper became successful and was able to offer higher salaries to journalists, four-color printing to advertisers, and simple entertainment to the readers. At the end of the 1950s, the army owned building companies, shipping companies, chains of shops, and one of the country’s leading import companies.

  Parallel with the economic expansion, Ne Win built up an army that was loyal to him, as well as an effective security police force and a network of informers. He made use of what he learned both from the British security police and from the feared Japanese military police during the war period. He had shown great interest in the Japanese army’s intelligence activities and methods of torture as far back a
s 1941 during the thirty comrades’ military training camp on Hainan, and as commander in chief of the army with his power continually increasing, he had the opportunity of exploiting the knowledge acquired during that time.

  Toward the end of the 1950s it was quite clear that the situation in the country was in the process of becoming too much for U Nu to cope with. The war did not come to an end, and in the autumn of 1958 the democratically elected prime minister gave up and handed over power to a military government under the leadership of Ne Win.

  The takeover of power was quite undramatic, and the population of central Burma supported the measure, generally speaking. They still had confidence in the army and many were of the opinion that military rule for a short time was the only way to come to terms with the country’s problems. For the ethnic minorities the changes were more dramatic. Ne Win changed the balance of power between Rangoon and the border regions. For the first time in history the regions belonging to the ethnic groups were to obey the same laws as the central regions of Burma. Local political leaders in the Karen, Shan, Chin, and Kachin states lost their power and had no right to make decisions about the budgets of the regional states in the same way as they had earlier.

  Military rule was supposed to be a temporary solution for six months, but not until February 1960 were democratic elections held. The AFPFL won by the same simple means as before and U Nu was able to be reinstated as prime minister.

  At this point U Nu made two crucial mistakes. Before the elections he had promised that Buddhism would be the national religion in Burma. After the elections he partly backed down on this, but by then the damage was already done. The ethnic minorities that had joined the union according to the Panglong agreement did not trust the central government and had no plans of remaining in a federal state that denied them freedom of religion. After that, U Nu came to an agreement with China about a border conflict that had been going on for several years. The agreement meant that a number of Kachin villages ended up on the Chinese side of the border. Both the Kachins via the Kachin Independence Army and groups of Shan rebels declared war against the central government in Rangoon.

  In order to save the situation, U Nu called a meeting of representatives of the ethnic groups who wanted to see a peaceful solution to the country’s political problems. They were assembled at a seminar in Rangoon at the beginning of March in order to draw up a new federal constitution that was to safeguard the independence of the border regions even more explicitly than before. However, that measure created a deep fissure in his own party, which consisted mainly of Bamar, and it caused the military with Ne Win at their head to turn openly against him. Before the seminar was over Ne Win had seized power in a coup d’état.

  8

  Suu from Burma

  Aung San Suu Kyi grew up in a completely different political climate from that of her parents, and also under more privileged circumstances. They seemed to have been aware even as teenagers of which path they were going to choose in life: that they would contribute to the struggle for independence. For Aung San Suu Kyi, there was not the same obvious mission in life nor the same external need to make a decision early on.

  “He was a better person than I am, and I’m not just saying this because I want to appear modest. My father was one of these people who were born with a sense of responsibility, far greater and more developed than mine. From the very moment he started going to school, he was a hard worker, very conscientious. I wasn’t like that. I would study hard only when I liked the teacher or the subject. I had to develop my sense of responsibility and work with it.”

  This self-portrait is not, however, in total agreement with the person whom her friends and acquaintances describe from the 1950s and 1960s. Malavika Karlekar, who attended the same school and shared a class with Suu Kyi during the years in India, says that Suu Kyi was a person with very strong self-discipline right from the beginning. This was even visible in her posture when she was sitting down, not to mention how she carried herself and spoke. She also showed great self-discipline in her studies. Karlekar described the class as being populated by insecure teenagers at first. However, during her time in India, Suu Kyi developed from being a shy girl into a self-confident woman, from having been an almost self-effacing schoolchild into a person with strong and unshakeable convictions, according to Karlekar.

  People often say this. Even the young Aung San Suu Kyi is described as a person with self-control, integrity, and strong moral convictions. This was probably an effect of her mother’s upbringing but also of the strict rules that applied in the schools she was sent to. And in that way her first school in India, the Convent of Jesus and Mary School, was no exception. The school was Catholic and for girls only. Teaching was carried out mainly by nuns, and discipline was rigorous. The school had been founded in 1919 by a religious order, and it was situated behind the Sacred Heart Cathedral in central New Delhi. A number of well-known Indians had attended the school, among them one of Sonia Gandhi’s daughters. Suu Kyi started there in 1960.

  It was in India that Aung San Suu Kyi first became closely acquainted with Ma Than É, an older woman who for many years was to play an important part in her life as mentor and role model. Ma Than É was born in 1908 in Burma. Before the Second World War she had been a famous singer in Rangoon, and when Aung San and Khin Kyi started to get to know each other in the summer of 1942, they often listened to her recordings.

  Ma Than É fled from the country due to the Japanese occupation. She lived for a time in India but later moved to San Francisco, where she worked for the United States Office of War Information, which later came to be known as the Voice of America. After the war she ended up in London where she met Aung San, who was there to negotiate Burma’s independence with Clement Attlee. In one of her texts she has given a graphic description of those cold January days in 1947. Aung San and others in the delegation had meetings with the British government officials during the day, and in the evenings they made an effort to meet as many Burmese living in London as possible. They gathered at the Dorchester Hotel around a “feebly glowing electric fire,” eating Burmese food and singing traditional songs together. Some of the delegates intervened with songs they had learned during their cooperation with the Japanese during the war. They discussed the 1930s and the anticolonial struggle, and one of the men told of the Japanese training camp on Hainan. The war itself was not mentioned. It was a sensitive question since most of the exiled Burmese in London, including Ma Than É, had supported the British during the Japanese occupation.

  When reading her story, one almost gets the impression that Aung San fell in love with her. They seemed at any rate to have developed warm feelings for each other, and just before the journey back to Rangoon, Aung San asked whether she would not accompany them back to Burma. She declined, and immediately afterward she was given a post at the United Nations. During the 1950s, after Aung San had been murdered, she often visited his widow and the remains of the family in Rangoon. Suu Kyi was then still a child and called her Aunt Dora, after the name that Ma Than É had been given when she attended a mission school in the 1910s.

  When Khin Kyi and her daughter moved to New Delhi, Ma Than É was working at the United Nations information office in the city and they began to see each other more regularly. “This was a wonderful opportunity to explore and understand the country of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Her father had been here and met and consulted Nehru, with whom he came to a close understanding,” Ma Than É wrote in an essay published in Freedom from Fear about her friendship with Suu Kyi.

  Khin Kyi saw to it that her daughter was always fully occupied during the years in India. Apart from school, Aung San Suu Kyi attended courses in Japanese flower-arranging, learned how to play the piano, and took riding lessons. Even so Aung San Suu Kyi still seemed interested most of all in sinking into an armchair and reading. She often received books from her father’s friend U Ohn, who worked as a journalist in London and was at one time also ambassador to Mosc
ow. On every visit to New Delhi he brought new books for Suu Kyi, in Burmese and English.

  Khin Kyi was also particular about maintaining and transmitting the traditions of her homeland to her daughter. One of the things she took upon herself as new ambassador was to organize the renovation of a Buddhist center on the outskirts of New Delhi. After that, Aung San Suu Kyi often visited this place together with her mother, to meditate and to attend Buddhist festivals.

  On a few such occasions her brother Aung San Oo also came to visit them from his boarding school in London. He and Suu Kyi acted as hosts at the receptions in the ambassador’s residence. But even then it was noticeable that the siblings did not get along with each other. Aung San Suu Kyi wanted to live up to her mother’s, and perhaps also her father’s, expectations. She behaved correctly, spoke correctly, and gradually acquired the right education for being able to carry on the work her parents had started. Aung San Oo was not as interested in his social heritage. He had already begun to adapt to a more Western lifestyle and did not plan on returning to Burma.

  After eighteen months at the Convent of Jesus and Mary School, Aung San Suu Kyi progressed to Lady Shri Ram College (LSR). Sir Shri Ram, an Indian industrialist, had founded the school in memory of his wife in 1956. He wanted to create an institution for higher education for women and also to give the school an international character. According to the LSR website in 2010, the school aims at “nurturing and creating women who are equipped to be world citizens. Women who take pride in their culture and heritage but also have a cosmopolitan understanding of the world today and a sensibility that celebrates diversity.”

  If this description weren’t so pompous, it would have been quite suitable as a personal description of Aung San Suu Kyi.