Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  When Michael landed at the shabby, badly maintained Mingaladon Airport in Rangoon, the whole runway was occupied by soldiers, military vehicles, and officers, all waiting for the tall Englishman to descend from the plane. He was immediately taken to the VIP lounge inside the main building, where an officer told him that he was to be allowed to visit his wife and sons, but only if he accepted certain specific conditions. He was not permitted to leave the house on University Avenue and he was not permitted under any circumstances to speak to the press or anybody from the British Embassy during his stay in Burma. He agreed to these demands. His only aim with this visit was to see his family again and to take their sons with him back to Oxford. Contrary to what the generals thought, he did not believe for one minute that Suu Kyi would accompany them back home. “She had decided this was her task, and I had no ambition whatsoever to talk her into something else,” he said later, as quoted in the New York Times.

  After the brief interrogation at the airport, he was put into a military vehicle and driven away. No outsider knew anything about his whereabouts. It was as though he had gone up in smoke. The international press wrote about the English academic who had been kidnapped by a junta refusing to answer questions about where he was being “held prisoner.”

  The military drove him straight to the house on the shores of Lake Inya, and as soon as he had crossed the threshold, he was confronted by the news that Aung San Suu Kyi was on a hunger strike. She had stopped eating three days ago in protest against the torture her friends and party comrades were being subjected to in the prisons. She refused all special treatment and demanded once again that she be thrown into the Insein prison along with the others.

  The family lived through twelve days of uncertainty. Kim and Alexander played, read, and watched from the sidelines as their mother’s condition slowly worsened. Guards were posted everywhere around the house and on the street outside, but they all behaved correctly and in a disciplined manner toward the family. The soldiers had great respect for Aung San’s child and grandchildren, despite everything. Some of them looked after the boys and taught them judo and karate in the garden. The boys did not openly show any emotions, as one of Aung San Suu Kyi’s assistants said later: “It’s the British stiff-upper-lip training, and the training of their mother, who’s been trained by her mother” (quote from Barbara Victors, The Lady).

  According to Michael Aris, Suu Kyi lost twelve pounds in weight during her twelve-day hunger strike, which is a lot for a person who was already so tiny.

  When she was in the process of fading away the junta promised that she would partly get what she wanted: her comrades would be spared torture in the prisons and be given a fair trial in court. Aung San Suu Kyi hesitated. She really wanted to continue her hunger strike until they also agreed to her final demand and threw her into prison. Michael did not doubt that she would continue for as long as necessary, but he succeeded in persuading her to accept the conditions and to accept help from a doctor, who immediately gave her an intravenous drip.

  On August 12, 1989, when Michael Aris had been unlocatable for twenty-one days, he was given permission to speak to the British ambassador. He told him about Suu Kyi’s health status, and what her demands to the junta involved. The ambassador spoke to the press, which reported that the hunt for Michael Aris was over and that he was now at his wife’s side, under heavy military surveillance.

  In practice, of course, things did not turn out as the generals had promised. Many of the activists who had been arrested during the election campaign were subjected to brutal torture and had to sit in prison for years without a fair trial. Min Ko Naing, who had led the student revolt the previous year, was imprisoned in March 1989 and not released until 2004. Several of his friends were given similar punishments, and they later revealed that they had been subjected to systematic torture and execrable prison conditions. However, Aung San Suu Kyi had made a point. She would not tolerate just anything and would do whatever she could to oppose the junta, even from her position under house arrest. She also communicated the fact that she under no circumstances was going to do what they wished and leave the country. If they wanted to get rid of her, they would have to drag her in chains to Mingaladon Airport. She had taken upon herself the role of leader of the democratic movement. She was ready to wait until the junta tired, and during the coming years the generals would only permit exceptional visits by Michael and the boys. The family was split up.

  They had married on January 1, 1972, in a Burmese wedding ceremony in the drawing room at Paul and Patricia Gore-Booth’s home in Chelsea. There is a fantastic wedding photograph, slightly yellowed and worn by time. Michael is wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and tie, and he has a flower in his buttonhole. His hair is as wild as was only possible during 1970s. Suu Kyi, more than a head shorter than her husband, is wearing a white dress with bare shoulders. Her hair is worn up in a fashion-forward style with flowers, and she is wearing a white pearl necklace.

  She had chosen to leave New York late in the autumn of 1971. Not because she had tired of the city, her work, or her social life there. She was happy at the United Nations and thought that her volunteer work at Bellevue was useful. The years in the United States had, in reality, taught her more than the years at university. However, in the end she decided that she wanted to spend her life with Michael Aris. During a holiday in the spring of 1971 she had visited him in Bhutan. There they got to know each other seriously. They made long trips into the mountains and Michael introduced her to the country he had lived and worked in for years. They talked about the future. She returned to New York, and during the subsequent eight months she wrote 187 letters to Michael. She wrote about the advantages and disadvantages of a marriage and explained that her loyalty to her native country would always be great and that this might influence their marriage. But ultimately she said yes.

  Michael Aris’s family attended the wedding in London, as did several of the friends they shared. Aris’s siblings joked that all of Suu Kyi’s bridesmaids were men. “A number of her old admirers from her time at Oxford were there,” said one of them, speaking about the wedding almost forty years later. “They looked up to her and had become close friends to both of them. Michael was lucky that he was the one to be chosen.”

  Khin Kyi was not at the wedding. She did not approve of her daughter getting married to an Englishman. It was only a year later, when Michael and Suu Kyi visited her in Rangoon, that she recognized her daughter’s choice of husband. Suu Kyi’s brother Aung San Oo was not at the wedding either. At that time the siblings had not had a close relationship for many years, not even when they were both living in the United States.

  In recent years it has become obvious how great the conflict is between Aung San Suu Kyi and her brother. During her second period of house arrest at the beginning of the 2000s, he suddenly demanded to be given ownership of half the house on University Avenue. It was generally assumed that he acted by commission of the junta and that he was thinking of selling his part to the authorities, who would then be able to keep watch on Aung San Suu Kyi more easily. The matter went to court. The court’s decision was that her brother, as an American citizen, did not have any right to own property in Burma. The junta has fiddled about with the laws, which in a way means that the matter is still of current interest. When Aung San Suu Kyi wanted to repair the house after Hurricane Nargis, Aung San Oo did all he could to stop the project, and it was only at the end of April 2010 that the plans for renovations were approved by a court in Rangoon.

  A close relative of theirs implies that it was her marriage to Michael Aris that definitively put an end to the siblings’ contact with each other.

  The presence of an official representative from Burma was out of the question at the wedding ceremony. “The Burmese people would not like the daughter of Aung San marrying a foreigner,” said London ambassador U Chit Myaung in 1995 when he was interviewed by Vogue magazine. “I knew that if I attended the wedding, I would be fired that
day.”

  Michael and Suu Kyi later moved to Bhutan. Now they were going to live together for the first time. Michael was going to continue as tutor to the royal family and at the same time prepare himself for an academic career with the Himalayas and its cultures as his specialization. Suu Kyi had been given a post as adviser to the country’s foreign minister. Bhutan wanted to join the United Nations, and the little mountain state that had always been isolated from the world was in acute need of learning more about the United Nations’ system. Suu Kyi’s experiences from New York were suited perfectly for the post.

  The wedding of Aung San Suu Kyi and Michael Aris (January 1, 1972).

  Courtesy of Norstedts.

  It can scarcely have been regarded as politically correct to work for the regime in Bhutan. It was and is one of the world’s smallest and poorest countries. The highest mountains are over twenty thousand feet high and between them people live by means of farming and trade. The capital, Thimphu, situated at almost a mile and a half above sea level, stretches along the western valley of the Wang Chu river. For many years the king of Bhutan personally constituted the government and saw it as his most important task to drive all “foreigners” out of the country, which in practice meant expelling all Indians and Nepalese. They had in many cases been living in the country for several generations. As recently as the 1990s, the Swedish king received massive criticism from human rights organizations because he and Queen Silvia went on a holiday trip to that country. Meanwhile, Bhutan has been quietly going through a process of modernization and democratization, which in fact began during the years when Michael Aris and Aung San Suu Kyi were working there. Michael was among other things tutor to the crown prince, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who was crowned king in 1974. During his reign, the country slowly started to change and open itself up to the world around it, even if it’s still far from being a democracy. It is probable that Michael Aris played a part in that process of change.

  They remained in Bhutan for little over a year and then returned to England. Michael had been accepted as a postgraduate at the University of London. Furthermore, Suu Kyi was pregnant with their first child, Alexander Myint San Aung Aris. He was born in London in April 1973.

  They only lived there for a few months. Shortly after Alexander’s birth, Michael received an offer from the University of California to lead a research expedition to Nepal. He accepted, and Suu Kyi, who did not want to be left alone with their newborn son, decided to accompany him on the trip. They were already well acquainted with the mountains and the culture in the Himalayas, so it would be wrong to say that they set off for an unknown country. However, how many other young parents of their generation would have had sufficient courage or sense of adventure to take a newborn baby with them on a journey lasting several months to the Himalayas?

  When they returned to England at the end of 1973, they moved for a short time to Michael’s parents’ house in Scotland. After that Oxford University offered Michael an appointment at St John’s College. There he could continue working on his thesis on Bhutan’s historical roots. At the end of the 1970s the thesis was published in a more accessible form under the title Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayna Kingdom.

  During the late 1970s, they lived a traditional family life. Aris worked on his academic career and Suu Kyi stayed at home to take care of the children. Their second son, Kim Thein Lin, was born in 1977. After that, Suu Kyi had her hands full with diaper-changing, cooking, and other household chores, and there was not much time for anything else. She gave up her own professional ambitions, and even though she often visited her mother in Rangoon, she had no real plans for getting involved in the politics of her native country.

  Simultaneously, the problems were accumulating in Burma. The war in the Shan state and other border regions escalated almost without a break. In 1968 every single valley and every single mountainside had been occupied by some local warlord, drug cartel, or ethnic guerrilla group. The politically motivated groups that were fighting to secure their respective people’s independence from the central regime in Rangoon included the Shan State Army; the Lahu National United Party; farther north, the Kachin Independence Army; and farther south, the Karen National Liberation Army.

  However, during the 1970s it was not mainly these groups that reinforced their power over the border regions. It was instead the drug cartels and the leaders of Ne Win’s local militia, the KKY, often the same people. The most well-known warlords, like Khun Sa and Lo Hsing-Han, built up modern armies and made enormous fortunes for themselves from the trade in drugs. They became internationally known and hunted during the 1970s, when the United States, Australia, and Europe were flooded with white heroin from the Shan mountains.

  The situation was further complicated in 1968 when the communist rebels in the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), invaded the northern Shan state from China. Open, grim battles took place between the CPB and the militia that the military junta had linked to themselves before the CPB could consolidate its power in the area along the border to China and establish what was in practice a state within a state. Paradoxically enough, the communists then governed almost the same region as had previously been controlled by GMD with the support of the CIA. And in the same way as GMD, the communist guerrillas were more and more drawn into the drug trade as time passed.

  In central Burma, dissatisfaction with the military government also increased. Unemployment was at an all-time high, and there was a shortage of almost all everyday goods. In May 1974, a strike broke out among the workers in the oil industry. The protests spread to Rangoon, and railway workers and employees at a weaving mill joined forces with the strikers. Ne Win did as he had done in 1962 and beat down the protesters with violence. As usual, the real fatality figures were kept secret, but about a hundred people were probably killed when soldiers opened fire on the crowds. Then it was the students’ turn. In November 1974, U Thant died of lung cancer. He had served as the secretary general until 1971 and after that lived with his family in New York. After his death, he should have been buried in his home country, but despite his having been Burma’s best-known politician for ten years, Ne Win refused to give him a state funeral. The relationship between the two men had never been good, and it became even frostier when the last democratically elected prime minister, U Nu, had appeared in 1969 at the United Nations and aimed hard criticism at the regime. U Thant had not had anything to do with this affair, but Ne Win understood it to mean that the secretary general had finally turned his back on him.

  The plan was therefore to bury U Thant in an obscure cemetery, and when his coffin arrived by air from the United States, it was met only by the acting minister of education, U Aung Tun, who was later dismissed because he had disobeyed Ne Win’s orders. The coffin was temporarily stored in a building at Rangoon’s disused racecourse, but in the morning when the coffin was to be taken to the cemetery, it was hijacked by a group of students from the university. They bore it to the university area, and the former secretary general of the United Nations received a burial place he would probably have appreciated. His coffin was lowered at the place where the former student union had been—the same building Ne Win had had blown up in 1962. The students took their chances and spent several days demonstrating against the military junta. This time, too, the military went on the attack, recapturing the coffin and transporting it to a new burial place at Shwedagon Square. However, now the genie had yet again been let out of the bottle. Enormous crowds of people went out onto the streets, and the military responded by opening fire and killing hundreds of people.

  An important explanation for the fact that the protests did not make a greater impact was that they had been unorganized and spontaneous. A unifying force was lacking, something that could channel the popular anger and transform it into a constructive political movement. Ne Win survived the crisis. He had purchased several more years in power for himself.

  During this time, Aung San Suu Kyi was living a peaceful life in Oxford. Th
e family lived in an apartment they had been allowed to rent by St John’s College: an open, light two-bedroom with a high ceiling and large windows looking out onto the garden. On the walls hung colorful mats from Bhutan and paintings from Tibet. The bedrooms were small. One of them, barely bigger than a cupboard, acted as both a nursery for the children and a guestroom when they had visitors from Burma or Bhutan, Michael’s research colleagues or some family member from Scotland. Suu Kyi was in that sense very Burmese. The traveler in her home country is immediately met with enormous hospitality, and if it had not been for the laws of the junta that forbid “strangers” to spend the night in one’s home, it would have been easy to spend a month in the country without having to resort to a hotel.

  One of the visitors was Thant Myint U, a grandchild of U Thant. In his book River of Lost Footsteps he describes an everyday summer afternoon in the garden in Oxford. The children were playing on the lawn. They drank tea together while Michael Aris smoked his pipe. Aung San Suu Kyi encouraged her young compatriot to study in England. His brief account paints a picture of a relatively normal academic family, with the house full of books and thoughts occupied with research and writing.

  Ann Pasternak Slater had lost contact with Suu Kyi during the years in New York, but now they were both in Oxford and also had small children of the same age. They rekindled their friendship. Pasternak Slater often marvelled over how Suu Kyi was able to stand all those visitors living there for weeks at a time in the cramped guestroom. Not for a second did she hint that it was an inconvenience. The friends often met when Suu Kyi came cycling from a hasty shopping trip in the center. The bicycle was always fully loaded with plastic bags full of milk, bread, and cheap fruit from the market. “When I called in the afternoons with my own baby daughter, I would find her busy in the kitchen preparing economical Japanese fish dishes, or at her sewing machine,” she wrote in her essay “Suu Burmese.” Visitors to their home remember how she often did all her household chores with Kim hanging in a square of cloth on her back and Alexander playing at her feet.