Another unhappy birthday in
Myanmar By Larry Jagan
BANGKOK - Light another candle for Aung
San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's most famous political
prisoner, who turned 61 on Monday.
The
Nobel Peace Prize-winning pro-democracy leader has
spent more than 11 of the past 17 years under
house arrest for her political views and
activities. Last month the ruling State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC) renewed her latest
detention order for another six months - though
few believe the military junta has any intention
of releasing her any time soon.
Myanmar's
military rulers recently told Malaysian Foreign
Minister Syed Hamid Albar that Suu Kyi was
"irrelevant" to Myanmar's
political future. Than Shwe,
the SPDC's top general, told Ibrahim Gambari, the
United Nations' undersecretary for political
affairs, reportedly with a straight face, that she
had no support inside the country. "Aung San Suu
Kyi is nice to foreigners but she is not very nice
to us," he reportedly said.
Inside
Myanmar, the reality is that the popularity of Suu
Kyi - and of the National League for Democracy
(NLD) she founded - still widely outpaces the
ruling junta's, whose illegitimate rule has run
the economy into the ground and placed the
country's democratic hopes behind bars. Across the
country, Suu Kyi is affectionately referred to
simply as "the lady".
Internationally, Suu
Kyi's sustained campaign of non-violent opposition
has elevated her to icon status, on par with
India's Mahatma Gandhi and South Africa's Nelson
Mandela.
Under international pressure for
change, notably both from diplomatic friends and
foes, the SPDC is now in the process of managing a
sort of political transition whereby it intends to
hand power to a civilian incarnation of itself,
the United Solidarity and Development Association.
This handover, which may coincide with the
re-establishment of Myanmar's long-abolished
monarchy where Than Shwe is crowned king, is
expected some time toward the end of next year. It
is doubtful, though, that any political change
that excludes Suu Kyi will placate the military
regime's Western critics.
But that's
definitely what the junta has in mind. This year
the SPDC made the decision to eliminate the NLD
forcibly over a 12-month period. Since then, it
has launched a hard-knuckled campaign of
harassment and intimidation aimed at forcing
thousands of NLD members to resign from the party.
Myanmar "is now facing numerous
destructive elements, the principal one the NLD",
police chief General Khin Yi told a secret meeting
of senior police officers this year, according to
notes of his speech reviewed by Asia Times Online.
"The home minister has ordered us to clear all the
NLD."
Global icon Suu Kyi's
birthday obviously was not publicly recognized in
Myanmar. However, it was bound to be celebrated by
Myanmar exiles and foreign nationals alike in a
number of other countries, including the
Netherlands, Japan and the United States, to name
but a few. The irony, perhaps, is that the
self-effacing Suu Kyi herself would probably
disapprove of the world making such a fuss.
For all the global adulation, she has
continuously shunned personal attention. Even when
her husband and two sons accepted the Nobel Peace
Prize on her behalf in 1991, her acceptance
speech, which had to be smuggled out of Myanmar,
said the prize should rather go to all the people
of her country struggling for democracy.
As the daughter of Aung San, the national
independence hero and founder of modern Burma
(which was renamed Myanmar in 1989), Suu Kyi
actually lived much of her life outside of the
country. She was raised in India, where her
widowed mother served as a diplomat. Later, she
studied at Oxford University in England, where she
met and married the renowned British scholar
Michael Aris. They spent several years in Bhutan,
where Aris served as a personal tutor to the king.
Suu Kyi returned to Yangon in 1987 to tend
to her ailing mother, which circumstantially drew
her into politics during the pro-democracy
uprising that temporarily brought down General Ne
Win's military regime, which had been established
in a 1962 putsch. In the midst of that political
crisis, Suu Kyi became a leader of the
pro-democracy movement and founder of the National
League for Democracy. In 1990, the NLD won more
than 80% of the popular vote in an election the
junta subsequently nullified.
Since then,
Suu Kyi has put aside personal concerns for the
sake of Myanmar democracy. And the junta has made
her pay dearly for that resolve.
The past
two decades of political activity have taken a
heavy toll on her private life. The regime refused
to allow her husband to visit Myanmar when he was
diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997, despite
the private urging of many world leaders,
including pope John Paul II and UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan. She refused to leave Myanmar
at the time and did not attend her husband's
funeral in England in 1999 for fear that the
regime would not allow her to return to Myanmar.
She has not been allowed to see her two sons,
Alexander and Kim, for more than five years.
She has also suffered from health
problems, which included a major hysterectomy in
2003 that resulted in the removal of her uterus.
Apart from visits from her personal physician, who
is sometimes denied access for weeks at a time,
she has been held in solitary confinement at her
Yangon home. There have since been widespread
questions in the diplomatic community about her
physical and mental health, though she was
reportedly in good spirits when she received
Gambari last month.
Cringing junta Counter to the junta's intentions, years of
official harassment have acted to enhance Suu
Kyi's political legitimacy - both at home and
abroad. That fact is not lost on Myanmar's ruling
generals. SPDC leader Than Shwe reportedly cringes
at the mere mention of her name, say Myanmar
officials aware of the situation. Asian foreign
ministers were requested by their Myanmar
counterparts at the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) summit in Phnom Penh in 2002 to
avoid mentioning her in his presence.
Khin
Nyunt, the SPDC's former intelligence chief and
prime minister, frequently warned the UN's special
envoy to Myanmar, Razali Ismail, to minimize
mentioning Suu Kyi's name when he held discussions
with the top general in the past. Indonesia's
foreign minister, Hasan Wirajuda, reportedly
confided to UN officials that there was a marked
change in Than Shwe's demeanor when he mentioned
Aung San Suu Kyi. "His eyes glazed over and his
facial muscles tensed; clearly our discussion had
come to an end," he said.
Cutting Suu Kyi
off from the outside world, including from
Yangon-based diplomats, has engendered some
confusion about her political stance. There have
even been mild grumblings in some diplomatic and
exile quarters, including certain US officials
with experience in the region, who claim that Suu
Kyi's unwillingness to compromise has
unnecessarily prolonged Myanmar's conflict.
They point in particular to her decision
not to participate in the ongoing National
Convention to draft a new constitution, as well as
her hardline stance that the results of the 1990
election won by her NLD party must be honored.
Others have criticized the NLD's emphasis on her
leadership, claiming it has stunted the grooming
of a new generation of party leaders.
In
on-the-record interviews with the detained
pro-democracy leader, however, Suu Kyi
consistently portrays a compromising profile.
"We've been trying to get them to the
negotiating table for 14 years but they have never
been keen on the idea," Suu Kyi said in an
interview with this correspondent in March 2003,
just months before she was put under house arrest.
"We certainly bear no grudges against them. We are
not out for vengeance. We want to reach the kind
of settlement which will be beneficial to
everybody, including the members of the military,"
she said.
During Suu Kyi's second long
period of house arrest, which began in 2000, the
regime had for the first time in years made
tentative contacts with the pro-democracy leader,
through secret talks brokered by UN special envoy
Razali. Although in retrospect this contact was
never substantive, it raised hopes inside Myanmar
and abroad that some sort of political reform
could be the agenda. A process of national
reconciliation was started, ostensibly involving
senior representatives of the military regime,
pro-democracy leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi,
and the ethnic rebel groups, many of whom have
been fighting for some form of autonomy for more
than five decades. Many leading Myanmar dissidents
in exile and Yangon-based diplomats were from the
start skeptical, believing the overture was a ploy
to alleviate international pressure and legitimize
rather than loosen the junta's hold on power.
True to form, that process came to an
abrupt halt in May 2003 with the SPDCs murderous
assault on hundreds of Suu Kyi's supporters in a
northern region of the country, which some
pro-democracy leaders contend was an attempt to
assassinate her.
Yet Suu Kyi has
reportedly continued to make conciliatory gestures
toward the regime through back channels. She did
so publicly during her meeting last month with UN
envoy Gambari. And she has often claimed that as
the daughter of independence leader Aung San she
understands the Myanmar military's mentality and
is prepared to work side-by-side with the SPDC in
a process of national reconciliation.
"We
have genuine goodwill toward the Burmese military.
I personally look upon it with a certain amount of
affection because of my father, and I want it to
have an honorable position in the country," she
said in 2003.
Still, it now seems certain
that Suu Kyi will remain under house arrest until
after a new constitution is drafted and put to a
referendum that excludes NLD representation, which
won't likely happen before the end of 2007,
Myanmar's Foreign Minister Nyan Win told his
counterparts at an ASEAN meeting this year.
In 2003, Suu Kyi said she remained
undeterred by the years of incarceration. After
her release from her last detention term in May
2002, she confided to this correspondent that the
isolation gave her plenty of time for reading,
reflection and meditation. In solitary
confinement, it's impossible to know exactly what
she is thinking nowadays. Still, her candle still
burns with hope for democracy in Myanmar.
Larry Jagan previously covered
Myanmar politics for the BBC. He is currently a
freelance journalist based in Bangkok.
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