Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  In her day the school was situated in Daryaganj in central New Delhi. The main building had been built of gray-white stone in the colonial style, with tall colonnades and green shrubberies beside the school gates. Suu Kyi studied political science; Malavika Karlekar is of the opinion that it was at LSR that Suu Kyi received her first insight into Mahatma Gandhi’s theories of nonviolence and civil disobedience—the recipes for political opposition she so consistently applied when she stepped forward as the leader of the democratic movement in Burma. According to Karlekar, Suu Kyi did not express any distinct political ideas during her time at LSR, but it was obvious that she thought about and reflected on politics the whole time. “As her father’s daughter she of course acquired opinions in due course. She did not talk about them but it was clear anyway that they existed.”

  There was, however, no political activity. “The only thing that I remember is that we started a campaign to keep the school gates open for longer in the evenings,” says Karlekar, who later became a respected sociologist and the director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies. “We won that battle, but I can’t remember that we did anything else political.”

  Khin Kyi had been appointed as ambassador while U Nu was still prime minister, and despite the fact that she was deeply critical of developments in her home country, she chose to remain at her post even after the military coup in 1962.

  Burma’s transition to a military dictatorship was not in any way unique to the region. In South Korea, Gen. Park Chung Hee had just established the dictatorship that was to last for twenty-six years. Neighboring Thailand was governed by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, and in Pakistan a similar military dictatorship was controlled by Ayub Khan.

  What made Ne Win unique was his extreme choice of path after the coup. To start with, he ordered the imprisonment of the democratically elected politicians. U Nu was locked up at a military base (he was the first to be released four years later). Soon after the coup, Ne Win made a journey to China. He returned after only a few days and declared that he was deeply impressed by what Mao and the Chinese communist party had achieved since the revolution in 1949. In April 1962 he presented two peculiar documents. One of them drew up the guidelines for “the Burmese way to socialism,” and the other had the title “A System to Correct Humanity and Its Environment.” Taken together, these programs were neither particularly Burmese nor socialist, but were mostly an expression of Ne Win’s own prejudices and totalitarian ambitions for power. All companies were nationalized, from the largest manufacturing industries to the smallest teahouses. The popularly elected parliament was abolished, and Ne Win stated that the country would never again return to a system that was influenced by Western ideals. Instead, he started Burma’s Socialist Program Party (BSPP). It was governed by a revolutionary council, with subordinate regional and local councils. All the posts at all levels were occupied by officers, and after some years it was impossible to distinguish in any meaningful way between the BSPP and Tatmadaw, the army. The party became a parallel structure in the machinery of the state, and the members in its highest executive were considerably more powerful than the ministers in the formal government.

  To start with, many Burmese understood Ne Win’s takeover of power as a new transitional solution while waiting for the next democratic election.That was how it had been during the years of military government in the 1950s. But on that occasion civil servicemen and politicians had been allowed to retain their assignments. Now the whole social machinery was militarized, and that made first and foremost the students at Rangoon University protest. They did not intend to keep quiet while their country was being transformed into a military state, and they decided to carry out a peaceful demonstration on the university premises. On July 7, 1962, several thousand students gathered on the university campus, in what was to become their “democratic fortress.” Their protest was almost like a popular festival, with singing and dancing and long speeches inside the student union building. Ne Win responded with the bloody practice that has since been repeated every time large demonstrations have broken out in Burma. The military opened fire against the defenseless students and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds.

  In order to show that he meant business, Ne Win also gave the order to blow up the student union at Rangoon University. Ne Win thus erased one of the foremost symbols of the struggle Aung San had carried out against the British colonial power.

  The junta’s puritanical aspect soon also became obvious. It forbade all Western dances, horse racing, and beauty competitions, and the few nightclubs in Rangoon were closed. Foreigners were not to be encouraged to travel to Burma, and it was only possible to get a visa for a twenty-four-hour visit to the country.

  Most serious of all was perhaps the junta’s program to “Burmanize” the border areas. The ethnic minorities were forbidden to publish newspapers and books in their own languages, teaching in the schools was changed to Burmese, and the minorities’ political structures were crushed. Several of the princes in the Shan state were kidnapped and murdered. A couple of years after the military coup, most of the ethnic minorities had armed themselves, and with that Burma sank with increasing rapidity into total chaos. Even today, although the junta has come to an agreement with most of the guerrilla armies about a cease-fire, there are over twenty armed groups in the Shan state alone.

  The junta also threw out all the Western organizations that were active in Burma, not least that of the Christian missionaries who were working among the ethnic minorities. The last of them, the Swedish American Herman Tegenfeldt, who had worked among the Kachin villagers, left the country in 1966. But many of the Indians and British who had lived in Burma for generations had chosen to flee even before the military coup. “We saw which way the wind was blowing. We managed all right, but those who stayed until 1962 didn’t have the same luck,” says Peter Carey, who was eight years old in 1956, when his parents moved from Rangoon. “Before they were put on a plane out of the country they were plundered of all their belongings. The soldiers ripped off their wedding rings and jewelry and stole their cash.”

  It was perhaps that period of which a close friend of Aung San Suu Kyi’s was thinking several years later, when she urged her on the anniversary of Aung San’s assassination not to grieve for her father’s early death. “In a way it was a blessing for him not growing old,” she said. “He didn’t have to experience the destructive years.”

  Khin Kyi endured being an ambassador for five years after the military coup, but then it became morally impossible for her to represent a government she neither believed in nor respected. In 1967 she moved back to the house on University Avenue in Rangoon. She resigned from her public commissions, and during the last twenty years of her life she spent her days looking after the garden, reading, and immersing herself in religious matters. Ne Win understood the signal. He and Aung San had never been able to agree on anything, and there is evidence that Aung San even warned his party comrades in the AFPFL not to give Ne Win too much power over the armed forces. When Khin Kyi cut off all contact with the regime, he took revenge by imposing a forty-thousand-kyat back tax on her. Normally speaking, diplomats were released from tax during the time they were working abroad, but the junta chose to make an “exception” for Khin Kyi, who had to borrow money right and left from family members and friends in order to pay it back.

  When her mother retired, Aung San Suu Kyi had already been living in England for two years. She had moved there in 1964 to study at St Hugh’s College in Oxford. At that time there were ten male students to every female student at the very traditional university, and St Hugh’s was one of five colleges reserved especially for women. “I noticed her straightaway,” says Ann Pasternak Slater when I reached her over the phone in England. Pasternak enrolled at the college on the same day as Suu Kyi. “I saw her on the opposite side of the room when I was at some reception or other for new students and I thought, ‘God, what a lovely person! I must get to know her!’”

  W
hen speaking to people about Aung San Suu Kyi’s time in Burma after 1988, they always return to the fact that she demanded a great deal of those around her, since she demanded a great deal of herself. “Privately as well as politically she is driven by the conviction that people with privileges also have special responsibility, and that one must live up to that responsibility,” said a Burmese activist who worked with her in the 1990s. Those who met her in Oxford confirm this. When she was in her twenties, it is true that she did not moralize over her friends, but she was of the opinion that many of them took their studies too lightly and wasted their years at university.

  “Suu’s tight, trim longyi and upright carriage, her firm moral convictions and inherited social grace contrasted sharply with the tatty dress and careless manners, vague liberalism and uncertain sexual morality [of others],” wrote Pasternak Slater in her essay “Suu Burmese.” The title comes from the nickname she gave Suu Kyi. When they both got to know each other, she already had several English friends called Sue, so the new Burmese acquaintance simply had to be called Suu Burmese.

  The rules at St Hugh’s were as strict as they had been at Suu Kyi’s previous schools, with the crucial difference that the female students at Oxford did all they could to break them. The students were compelled to be back at home before ten in the evening, so many of them often sat on their beds and talked and drank hot chocolate until late at night. Most of them also made little excursions out to see friends or boyfriends, and they stole back over the stone wall to the dormitory in the early morning hours.

  This was something Aung San Suu Kyi did not do. She took great care of her traditional upbringing while also being far too curious not to try what a number of her Western friends used to talk so much about. After two years she decided, for example, that she wanted to see what it was like to climb back into St Hugh’s late at night. She asked an Indian male acquaintance whom she trusted completely to take her with him to a restaurant, so that he could later help her over the wall when it was time to go home. “No infringement of university regulations could have been perpetrated with greater propriety,” wrote Pasternak Slater.

  On another occasion Suu Kyi decided that it was time to find out what the fuss about alcohol was really all about. For social and religious reasons she had refrained from drinking beer, wine, or spirits. But she did not like the thought of saying no to something without knowing what she was talking about. So one evening at the end of her first year she bought a miniature bottle of sherry or possibly dessert wine, and along with two Indian friends she retired to the shabby ladies’ restroom. “There, among the sinks and the cubicles, in a setting deliberately chosen to mirror the distastefulness of the experience, she tried and rejected alcohol forever,” Pasternak Slater remembered.

  With sex it was completely different. When it came to that she was already convinced: she would never have sex with anyone other than the person she married. “Everyone was on the hunt for boyfriends,” according to Pasternak Slater, “[and] many wanted affairs, sex being still a half-forbidden, half-won desideratum. . . . To most of our English contemporaries, Suu’s startled disapproval seemed a comic aberration.” When one girl asked whether Suu really did not want to go to bed with anybody, she replied, “No! I’ll never go to bed with anyone except my husband. Now? I just go to bed hugging my pillow.”

  This did not mean that Suu Kyi was without feelings. She spent much time with the Indian students, and at the beginning of her studies she fell in love with one of them. But her interest was not returned and their contact never developed into a relationship. “One did catch a glimpse of her persistency in that case,” says Pasternak Slater. “It was clear from the start that he wasn’t interested in the same way as she was, but she refused to give up. She held on to it for much longer than anyone else would have done.”

  When she applied to St Hugh’s she had chosen to study philosophy, politics, and economics, which was a common combination of subjects among the Indian students at the university. But Suu Kyi really longed for something else, and after her first year she applied to change her course and study to be a forest warden instead. She considered that a practical subject would make it easier for her to return to Burma and do something for her country. But Oxford did not appreciate students’ changing their minds about their academic direction, and they rejected her application. When she had passed her examination, she made a new attempt and applied to an English course, but she was not accepted there either.

  Many of Suu Kyi’s student comrades were politically involved. It was an era when radical internationalism was about to establish itself in Europe and the United States. The world had opened up, the colonial systems were about to be dismantled, and TV had brought the world into people’s living rooms. The students who could afford it and who had the time traveled abroad to learn more in places where “reality” seemed to come a little closer than in the chilly lecture halls of Oxford University. One was not in tune with the times if he or she had not picked fruit on some Israeli kibbutz or walked among the poor in India. And one was not truly radical if he or she had not gotten involved in the nuclear disarmament movement or protested against the apartheid system in South Africa.

  Through her background and family contacts, Suu Kyi was of course more well traveled and familiar with the ways of society than most of her contemporaries, but she kept away from all openly political activities. “As a student I was caught up in the concern about apartheid, contributing my tiny bit of support by refusing to buy products from South Africa,” Suu Kyi has written in an article published in the Thai newspaper The Nation. As the leader of the democratic movement she has often used South Africa as an example of how economy and politics are bound up with each other and of how sanctions can in certain situations be a functional recipe for creating political change.

  One explanation for the fact that she was not more explicitly political was her mother’s position, during the time she was an ambassador as well as later after she had returned to Burma. Khin Kyi could have been landed with great problems if it had emerged that her daughter was active in human rights politics along with a crowd of young British radicals. “I don’t believe that she went and listened to debates or was involved in any kind of activism,” says Pasternak Slater. “On the other hand she was perpetually aware of what was going on in the world and we often talked about her background in Burma, the culture and traditions there. And she often expressed her irritation over her older brother. She did not consider that he upheld the family traditions.”

  During summer vacations, Aung San Suu Kyi traveled most often to see her mother in India, but one summer she visited Ma Than É in Algeria. At that time Ma Than É had just left her post in New Delhi in order to build up the United Nations information offices in the Algerian capital, Algiers. The trip gave Suu Kyi the opportunity to experience some of that “adventurousness” that her middle-class friends at Oxford had told her about in connection with their summer travels.

  Algeria had just dragged itself out from under the claws of French colonial power and was slowly recovering from the eight-year-long civil war, a situation not entirely unlike that of Burma after the Second World War. The cities were shabby and demolished, and there were only a few hotels that were able to receive guests. Suu Kyi arrived there a few weeks after Algeria’s counterpart to Aung San, Ahmed Ben Bella, had been overthrown by his former colleague, the more moderate Houari Boumediene.

  Suu Kyi was invited to plenty of social events and parties, but she chose mostly to go out onto the streets in order to meet ordinary Algerians. After a few days she made contact with a man who ran an organization to help the widows of men who had been killed in the war of liberation. He explained that he was busy organizing a project to build homes for these women and he needed volunteers who could help him. For several weeks Suu Kyi worked and lived on the building site. Among her workmates were Russians, British, Lebanese, Dutch, Germans, and Algerians, all of whom were given free lodging and food but no wag
es. Her Algerian friends took her with them to a wedding in the Kabylian mountains. She saw the Sahara desert and made a short trip to Morocco and the Strait of Gibraltar. Then she returned to Oxford.

  On one occasion, just before her finals, Suu Kyi was invited to visit Ne Win. The Burmese dictator had confiscated the passports of millions of Burmese and done everything he could to close the borders; yet he himself made trips to Europe every year, sometimes to Austria where he stayed at a spa and visited doctors, and sometimes to Wimbledon where he rented a spacious villa for himself and his party consisting of women and officers. When Suu Kyi was invited to visit him, her mother had just left her position as ambassador and resigned from all her public undertakings. Suu Kyi had therefore no problem in distancing herself from the regime in her home country, in her own way. She declined the invitation and excused herself on account of having no time: she was studying for her finals.

  During the term, Suu Kyi usually lived at St Hugh’s, but on the weekends she did the little more than one-hour journey to London by train and stayed at the home of Sir Paul Gore-Booth and his wife, Patricia, in Chelsea. The Gore-Booth couple had come to know Suu Kyi’s family when Paul was the British ambassador in Burma from 1953 until 1956. After Rangoon he had been transferred to a post as high commissioner at the British Embassy in India, and there the friendship between the families deepened. When it was time for Suu Kyi to apply to Oxford, Khin Kyi wanted to find somebody who could help her daughter find her way in her new environment and the choice fell naturally on the Gore-Booths, who at that time had returned to London. During the next few years Suu Kyi became almost like a child to the family. “Like an extra daughter,” Patricia Gore-Booth has said. Suu Kyi sat at the table when Paul’s colleagues were there to dine and she gained insight into the English diplomatic corps’ way of reasoning. She often took part in the discussions since the visitors were interested in the situation in Burma and in her mother’s work in India.