Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  12

  “My Suu”

  At first the NLD had certain hopes that the release in 1995 was the start of a real process of reconciliation. Aung San Suu Kyi hoped that the junta, the NLD, and the ethnic minorities would get down to solving the country’s problems together. “There is more in common between the authorities and us of the democratic forces in Burma than existed between the black and white peoples of South Africa. Why shouldn’t Burma be able to start a process similar to that in South Africa?” asked Suu Kyi rhetorically at a press conference immediately after her release.

  The talks she had had with Khin Nyunt during 1994 were one explanation for these hopes. In February of that year, U.S. representative Bill Richardson had traveled to Burma. He met both Suu Kyi and representatives for the junta, and after that a number of preparatory talks were held.

  Another explanation for Suu Kyi’s belief that talks would be meaningful was her awareness of the enormous problems confronting Burma. The economy was still stagnating. The junta’s economic “liberalization” had not worked out. The international campaigns were one explanation, but just as important was the fact that the generals did not understand what was necessary to attracting foreign companies. Burma was far too corrupt. Companies that were considering investing in the country withdrew as soon as they understood that they were expected to pay a certain percentage of their investments as bribes to the civil servants and officers in charge. When the state-owned companies were to be privatized, they were given away to the generals and members of their families, who resaddled and became company executives without any previous knowledge at all about how one was supposed to act in a market economy. Many companies from other countries were scared away by this obvious incompetence and also by the fact that several of the new actors in the Burmese economy were former drug barons from the Shan mountains who were exploiting liberalization to launder money from the trade in heroin and methamphetamine.

  It soon became apparent that the junta had no serious intentions of taking steps toward democracy with the release of Suu Kyi. A first indication came when the state-owned newspapers did not even mention that she had been released. When the United Nations envoy Álvaro de Soto demanded that the junta should hold talks with Aung San Suu Kyi, the generals replied that she was an ordinary citizen and that it was impossible for a government to carry on a dialogue with all its citizens. Some months later, Burma’s ambassador in Bangkok said that the regime did not have any plans to discuss reforms with Suu Kyi. He referred to the national convention: “We don’t need a dialogue with anyone.”

  In November 1995, the NLD withdrew from the national convention in protest against the continued harassment, which made the junta further escalate their propaganda. Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD were accused of being traitors who threatened the stability and security of the country. The state-owned newspapers, like the Englishlanguage New Light of Myanmar and Myanmar Times, published—and are still publishing—a piece every day with the headline “People’s Desire”; its themes were encapsulated in four points:

  1. Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views.

  2. Oppose those trying to jeopardize the stability of the state and progress of the nation.

  3. Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the state.

  4. Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy.

  Of course most of this was directed at Suu Kyi personally. During her years under house arrest, the propaganda had made her out to be a puppet in the hands of her husband, who in his turn was alleged to be allied with foreign security services and powers that wanted to cast Burma into a state of chaos and anarchy.

  Yet Suu Kyi managed to remain optimistic. On her birthday in the summer of 1996, Peter Carey traveled to Burma. It was his first visit to the country since his family had moved away from there in the 1950s, and what struck him most was that Suu Kyi seemed so full of confidence. She also seemed almost completely untouched by the period of house arrest:

  She really believed that things were on their way to changing in Burma, however hard her life had been in house arrest. Michael thought the same when I spoke to him at home in Oxford. He believed that a change was imminent. We talked and spent time together for a few days and she was the same Suu whom I had met in Oxford many years earlier, with a jasmine blossom in her hair, just as full of energy as ever. In Burma she is called “the iron butterfly.” She is frail and simultaneously intractably strong and stubborn. I believe that she is very like her father in that respect.

  On one level she had, however, already surpassed her father: during her time under house arrest she had become a political superstar of a caliber that was unthinkable in the 1940s, and after her release, her fame came as a shock. “She stood in the center for the whole world but did not even have an assistant to call her own,” recounted Debbie Stothard when I met her in Bangkok. “Most of those who were active were still in prison and the NLD had no resources for employing people.”

  Debbie Stothard comes from Malaysia, and in the mid-1990s she started the organization ALTSEAN. Burma was then on its way to becoming a member of the Southeast Asian cooperative organization ASEAN, and Debbie founded ALTSEAN as a lobby organization with the aim of getting countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore to increase the political pressure on Burma. When Aung San Suu Kyi heard about this organization, she invited Debbie to her house on University Avenue. The meeting ended with Debbie becoming a kind of press secretary for Aung San Suu Kyi. All inquiries about interviews, meetings, and statements passed through ALTSEAN’s office in Bangkok, and Debbie often traveled to Burma to work directly with Suu Kyi.

  “Everybody wanted to know how she coped with the time under house arrest, what her view was of the military junta, and what plans she had for the future,” says Debbie. “Everyone wanted to capture a small part of her time and attention for themselves.”

  It sounds somewhat like the situation after her release in 2010. Diplomats and journalists from all over the world were lining up in the same way as I had done before my interview. And everyone was hoping to get a piece of her attention.

  Suu Kyi was especially irritated by the need to answer the same questions over and over again. Few people “come alive on the screen” in the same way as Aung San Suu Kyi does, but she could not understand the logic that steers the Western mass media. “I’ve answered those questions once already! Why can’t the journalists be satisfied with that?” she exclaimed in frustration to Debbie Stothard.

  “She began every day by finding out whether any NLD activists had been imprisoned during the night,” said Debbie. “She worked for several hours every day on helping the families of those in prison, and it happened often that we received information about the death of one of her friends in prison. So at one moment it was a case of life or death, and at the next she had to sit and answer the same questions that she had received the previous day, but from a new journalist from some new media company or other. She often became angry and irritated because the pressure was so great, and when Suu Kyi gets angry it is no fun getting in her way,” Debbie continued, laughing. “That’s a side of her that many people forget. She has a terrible temperament. It passes just as quickly and at the next moment she is just as sparkling and full of positive energy as usual. But I can imagine that people who don’t know her might get upset at her anger.”

  Debbie Stothard media-trained Suu Kyi. She explained that repetition is essential for the mass media. Just because one journalist has reported something does not mean that all the others will write the same thing. Debbie taught her to look straight at the journalist in interviews and to talk straight into the camera when she recorded appeals or speeches to international conferences on videotape. Then she helped to smuggle the tapes out of the country.

  One such videotape was smuggled out and sent to the great international gender equality conference in Beijing in 1995. Aung San Suu Kyi had b
een invited to give the inaugural speech. In her taped speech she explained why it was impossible for her to participate in the conference in person: she would be shut out of Burma. After that she argued for women’s right to political power and she criticized her own country’s patriarchal traditions. She pointed out that only 14 of the 485 politicians who had been elected to parliament in 1990 were women, and they all came from her own party, the NLD.

  In the beginning it was a classic speech for equality, but later she changed her tack and devoted a considerable part of the speech to linking together the Buddhist tradition with the striving for democracy. She said that there is a philosophical similarity between the Buddhist tradition of mutual forgiveness (pavarana) and the parliament in the democratic political systems. The pavarana tradition aims at gathering together the monks in the monasteries to talk about the unjust deeds committed between people, and then to encourage all involved parties to forgive: “This ceremony, during which monks ask mutual forgiveness for any offense given during the retreat, can be said to be a council of truth and reconciliation. It might also be considered a forerunner of that most democratic of institutions, the parliament, a meeting of peoples gathered together to talk over their shared problems,” Aung San Suu Kyi writes in her essay “In Quest of Democracy,” published in Freedom from Fear.

  This may sound like a far-fetched, almost rather naive connection, but among the monks in Burma there is really a strong sounding board for such an interpretation. As we have seen earlier, the monk system—the sanghan—has always had an independent role in relation to the Burmese state apparatus. During times of deep oppression and strong state repression from autocratic kings or colonial powers, the monasteries have been a refuge where people have been able to carry on an open and unconditional political dialogue. It was no mere chance that after the election in 1990, a group of monks offered the NLD the possibility of assembling the new parliament in a monastery in Mandalay, just as it was no mere chance that the monks have always played an important role in the popular protests against the military junta.

  In “In Quest of Democracy” Aung San Suu Kyi develops the thought even further. She describes how members of the protest movement that emerged in the middle of 1980 were searching for examples for their own thoughts about power and popular influence, and how they found that support both in the Western ideological tradition and in their own history. She takes an example from the stories about Buddha and his ten recommendations for how a king should act. One of the king’s “duties” is not to govern against the will of the people. In Buddhist mythology there are plenty of examples of kings and rulers who have abused the trust placed in them, through brutality or corruption, and who have therefore been dethroned by their subjects. “It is a cogent argument for democracy,” writes Aung San Suu Kyi, “that governments regulated by principles of accountability, respect for public opinion and the supremacy of just laws are more likely than an all-powerful ruler or ruling class, uninhibited by the need to honor the will of the people, to observe the traditional duties of Buddhist kingship.”

  Another paragraph in the text is devoted to the issue of human dignity. Buddhism is basically about the innate dignity of human beings. All human beings bear a potential to attain nirvana, to see the truth, and through their actions to help others to do the same. However, to attain a true image of life one must also question life, and that questioning is completely at odds with the logic of dictatorships. Dictatorships demand a belief without doubt, writes Aung San Suu Kyi: “An unquestioning faith more in keeping with orthodox tenets of the biblical religions which have held sway in the West than with the more liberal Buddhist attitude.”

  The author Bertil Lintner wrote in his book about Aung San Suu Kyi that her political thinking after her house arrest has been more tinged by mysticism and Buddhist thought. During her time abroad her texts were often about Burma’s unfinished modernization, about practical political issues and analyses of colonialism and the military dictatorship. In that sense she is paradoxically more like her father before her return to Burma. As early as his first political speech as a student, he embraced how the monk system and politics were kept separate, and even if the nationalist movement were influenced by Buddhism, he held on tightly to that principle even later in life. After her house arrest, with six years’ time for religious studies, Suu Kyi tries on the contrary to actively weave together politics and religion. She refrains consciously from regarding Buddhism or any other religion as exclusive, but she often uses ancient Buddhist terms and moral recommendations to mirror her own political philosophy: metta, karuna, parami, sati, vipassana, nibanna, and so on.

  All this may be interpreted as a mystification of or, to use a more derogatory term, a mixed-up way of approaching Burma’s political and economic problems. Lintner writes that it is to some extent reminiscent of the Bhutanese king Jigme Singye Wangchuck’s striving to replace gross national product with “gross national happiness” as a measure of the progress of a nation. Aung San Suu Kyi had gotten to know King Wangchuck during her time in Bhutan in the 1970s, so the connection is natural.

  However, her new focus on religion and spirituality might just as well be interpreted as an attempt to talk about democracy and freedom in a way that connects with the more traditional Burmese way of thinking about societal matters. Michael Aung-Thwin, who worked together with Suu Kyi in Kyoto in the 1980s, has accused both her and the democratic movement of forcing the development of a “democratic jihad”: democracy at any price and according to a Western model. His criticism is reminiscent of the arguments the junta usually employs. Ever since the coup in 1962, the generals in Burma, as in many other dictatorships in the third world, have asserted that democracy is a Western import, foreign to the cultural and religious traditions of their own country. In Asia many rulers talk about “Asian values,” which is often just a way of excusing a continued totalitarian government.

  Aung San Suu Kyi continues to show that striving for popular influence in the political decision-making body is not only common to all humanity but is also rooted in a tradition that is valid even in Burma. She has not written any more comprehensive political texts, and her long period of house arrest has prevented her from drawing up a more coherent, concrete description of her political program. However, by mirroring democracy and Buddhism in each other she actually makes an important contribution to the discussion of the legitimacy of democracy.

  The years of isolation had not diminished Aung San Suu Kyi’s popularity among the Burmese either. On the contrary, the isolation had increased the mythmaking around her, and when she was released the interest in listening to her was greater than ever. During the first days after her release in the summer of 1995, thousands of people gathered outside her house. In the end, the pressure became so great that she and her helpers placed a table on the inside of the gate on University Avenue. She climbed up on the table with a broad smile on her lips. She was dressed in a green blouse and a grayish-blue longyi. Several NLD activists stood beside her and looked out over the crowds while she gave a short speech.

  The following day even more people collected outside the gate. The NLD leaders repeated the same procedure once more, but the only effect was that even more people turned up the day after that. In the end they had to ration her appearances, and she started to give her speeches every Saturday at four o’clock in the afternoon. For many of the inhabitants of Rangoon this became almost their regular weekend outing. They brought food and drink with them and sat on blankets and waited until Aung San Suu Kyi’s head became visible on the other side of the gate. She spoke for exactly one hour, mostly about political matters of course, about the SLORC, the imprisonment of NLD activists, and the basic principles behind a democratic system. However, after a time she placed a letterbox by the gate, where people could write questions that she later replied to and commented on during her weekend appearances. She spoke in an informal, almost easygoing tone, and she often joked with the crowds. The meetings were mo
nitored by the security police, and Aung San Suu Kyi always finished her speech by calling on the crowds to be careful and to hurry on home. Her experience from the election campaign in 1989 made her wise to the fact that those who took part in her meetings always ran the risk of being arrested.

  During a number of months in 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi was able to move about relatively freely, but that did not last long. Her last visit outside the capital was made early in the autumn of 1995. She traveled to a monastery on the Thamanya mountain, about eight hours’ car journey from Rangoon. There she met Hsayadaw U Vinaya, one of Burma’s most respected monks. After the massacres some years earlier, he had repudiated the junta and refused to accept the donations and benefits that the junta offered to the monasteries in order to acquire better karma for themselves after the bloody crackdowns on the monasteries following the elections in 1990. Aung San Suu Kyi gave a detailed account of this visit in the book Letters from Burma, a collection of articles she wrote for a Japanese newspaper in the mid-1990s. She highlighted the monastery school among others, where 13 teachers gave tuition to 375 children from the district around the monastery, without any resources at all for schoolbooks or writing materials.

  That journey became her last for a very long time. When she and the others in the NLD leadership were to attend a Karen new year’s ceremony a few days before the new year, the junta explained that her freedom no longer meant that she could travel as she wanted in the country. On another occasion she was going to travel to Burma’s second-largest city Mandalay in order to open a new NLD office there, but just before the train was about to leave, her carriage was uncoupled and left standing at the platform. Authorities placed blame on technical problems.

  As soon as she left her home to visit friends or party activists in Rangoon, she was followed by a car full of security police and two police motorcycles. If she visited a restaurant in the evening, it sometimes happened that it had to shut down the day after, so her possibilities of any free movement among people were extremely limited.