Aung San Suu Kyi is free, but has the ruling junta won the battle for Burma’s future?
Aung San Suu Kyi’s late husband, Michael Aris, was a good friend of mine at St Antony’s, Oxford. The gentlest of gentle academics, he helped establish a centre in Tibetan studies at Oxford, and converted to Buddhism. In 1972, he married Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he had met while they were both studying in Oxford. They had two young sons, Alexander and Kim, and for a while settled into the quiet life of north Oxford.
But as we all know, in 1988, Suu Kyi returned to Burma to tend her ailing mother and soon found herself swept into politics. As the daughter of the martyred hero General Aung San, she was invited to lead Burma’s pro-democracy party, but her success was her undoing and she was placed under arrest by the ruling Slorc (the State Law and Order Restoration Council).
When my wife and I went to Burma in 1997, Michael asked if we would go to see Suu Kyi. He gave us a suitcase for her. Cautious of the nosiness of the secret police, we checked carefully through its contents. It consisted of letters, of photos of the two boys, and — most touchingly — quantities of cosmetics unavailable in austerity Burma.
Arriving in Burma, after some circuitous telephoning, we took a highly nervous taxi to 54 University Avenue. At the top of the street we were stopped by a police block. The taxi disappeared at top speed. We were quite disagreeably harassed, both by armed soldiers and plain-clothes ‘guards’, liberally photographed, and made to sign a registration book. Suu Kyi’s ‘compound’, as she called it, consisted of a once elegant but now badly decayed stucco house overlooking a lake on whose banks some of the worst massacres of 1988 occurred. A lunatic American swam across it, uninvited, a year ago — thereby adding another 18 months’ house arrest to her already endless sentences.
The compound was surrounded by the bravely challenging red flags of her party, but right up against her house was a Slorc security post. It became evident later that our (very outspoken) conversation had been bugged.
Inside we were greeted by a slender, very feminine woman of extraordinarily delicate beauty, with all the natural proudly erect elegance of a Burmese. She was wearing a pretty purple jacket with a fresh orchid in her hair, and an embroidered silk longyi, the long sarong worn by both male and female Burmese. Despite the rigours of recent years, she looked younger than her 52 years. Her eyes moistened as we brought her news of Michael and home, and handed over his suitcase. On seeing the photographs of her boys, she exclaimed, ‘Heavens, Kim’s hair is down to his shoulders!’
She laughed gaily when I said I intended to photograph the guards on our way out: ‘What a jolly good idea!’ There was something about her which was still unmistakably Oxford; her perfect, musical English spiced with such expressions as ‘rather miffed’. But underneath one sensed a steely seriousness and deep commitment.
Slorc, with its parochial orientations, had been swift to latch onto the ‘Oxford connection’, attacking her ‘foreignness’ and claiming that she knew nothing of Burmese politics.
To this she replied: ‘The trouble is that I know too much’ and ‘I could not, as my father’s daughter, have remained indifferent to all that was going on.’
‘Are things getting better?’ I asked. ‘No, it was worse over the past year, with more arrests of our people in the middle of the night.’ Some of them received seven-year sentences. ‘But they have miscalculated, our party wouldn’t collapse.’ Though warmly appreciative of what we had brought her from the outside world, she ticked me off for coming to Burma at all: claiming that most of the income from tourism and foreign investments only found its way into the pockets of Slorc.
I riposted by observing that, as a writer, I had written about Soviet Russia and Pinochet’s Chile — and where were they now? ‘If you open the windows, it can only let air and light in eventually.’ We disagreed politely; but perhaps, to some extent, this is what happened last week. In 1997, she was pessimistic about the prospects of the generals ever packing up and leaving one day.
The house was austere, with absolutely no concessions whatever to femininity. My wife Sheelin asked about her everyday life. ‘It’s taken up with politics — three meetings this morning, now your visit this afternoon, then another meeting this evening. I have books and videos, but I don’t have time to watch them.’
As we left, Suu Kyi presented Sheelin a silver ‘Fighting Peacock’ brooch, the symbol of Aung San’s rebellious students in the 1930s. We were deeply moved. Suu Kyi’s parting words to us were, ‘I hope to see you back again soon in a democratic country; it won’t be long!’
We left with lumps in our throats; hers was the true anatomy of courage, and she had the self-sacrifice of the early Christian saint. Having given up family life for her beliefs, would she win, this frail little lady, against all the evil might of the Rangoon generals?
Outside in the street, I fulfilled my promise to her and — rashly — took a photograph of the thugs manning the checkpoint. The taxi driver almost had a seizure, setting off even before the door was closed.
Since then, a devastating dossier of human rights abuses against the Rangoon regime has been compiled over the 13 years.
Shortly after we returned to England, Michael Aris was stricken with terminal prostate cancer. Despite appeals from all over the world, including from Pope John Paul II, Slorc would not allow him to return to see his wife one last time. Instead they urged Aung San Suu Kyi to leave the country to visit him; making it perfectly plain that, once out, she would not be allowed to return.
Michael died on his 53rd birthday, in 1999. Since 1989, when Suu Kyi was first placed under house arrest, he had seen her only five times, the last of which was at Christmas in 1995. The year after he died, she was back under house arrest — as she has remained, on and off, for the past ten years.
Like many others, in a way I wish she had come out when Michael was dying. All emotion aside, with her youth, beauty and blazing honesty, if she had been free abroad she would have made an even more powerful beacon of protest for human rights than Solzhenitzyn ever did. Could she not have been a new Mandela? But, no; she insisted, ‘I cannot leave my people.’ Possibly that very refusal to compromise may have told against her.
As the years went by, and she stayed at 54 University Avenue as prisoner of the generals, increasingly forgotten by the outside world, it seemed tragically as if she were losing the game.
Last week’s elections looked like a cunning ploy by the ruling junta, now calling itself the Union Solidarity and Development Party. It succeeded in fracturing, for the first time, ‘The Lady’s’ NDF party. Were the elections a sign of strength, or of weakness?
On her release last weekend, Aung San Suu Kyi displayed great moderation, expressing willingness to negotiate with the government. On Monday she spoke a little more forcefully — of a need for a ‘non-violent revolution’. It is hard to believe that the West’s sanctions and feeble bleats of protest over the years have had any effect, but if this odious team really is at last contemplating change, then we should perhaps not remind them of de Tocqueville’s historic sentence: ‘The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.’
Alistair Horne’s memoirs, But What Do You Really Do?, are to be published by Orion next September.