TIMEasia.com: Asian Heroes - Aung San Suu Kyi

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Thirteen Years Of Solitude
To bring Burma democracy, AUNG SAN SUU KYI has lost both family and her own freedom. Andrew Marshall delves into the psyche of a lady trapped in a not-so-gilded cage

A few years ago, The New Light of Myanmar, Burma's Orwellian state newspaper, did something extraordinary: it published a piece of actual news. The country's factories, it proudly reported, now produced so much barbed wire that they had begun exporting it. This was a revelation indeed. For in the gulag that is modern Burma—a nation once described as "a prison with 47 million inmates"—bushels of the stuff have already been unfurled to separate one woman, Aung San Suu Kyi, from the millions of people who support her.

On a sweltering Rangoon afternoon in 1996, I stood by the barricades surrounding Suu Kyi's home on University Avenue and watched a heart-stopping event unfold. Nearby, in full view of armed troops and government spies, her supporters were gathering. First only a handful, then a few dozen, finally a 50-strong crowd, all hoping to cross the barricades. Suddenly, three army trucks roared up, more soldiers jumped out, and the entire crowd was prodded into the vehicles at bayonet point and driven off. It was a dramatic illustration of the almost suicidal loyalty Suu Kyi commands among ordinary Burmese.

She has earned it—and not just because she is the daughter of Aung San, the independence hero who helped free Burma from the British in 1948, and who founded the army that, ironically, now imprisons his daughter. To fight what she terms "the second struggle for independence," she has sacrificed much, above all her own freedom. She can easily end her ordeal by simply leaving the country. But she refuses to give the generals that satisfaction or abandon her fellow Burmese in their fight against oppression.

Such was the life-transforming choice Suu Kyi made in 1988, when she returned to Burma to nurse her ailing mother and was swept up in Burma's great pro-democracy uprising. "I could not as my father's daughter remain indifferent to all that was going on," she told a crowd of over half a million Burmese at Rangoon's revered Shwedagon pagoda, the first of a thousand speeches she would deliver across the country.

The military crushed the democracy movement by shooting hundreds of unarmed protesters in cold blood and imprisoning thousands more. It nullified the results of a 1990 general election—which should have put the National League of Democracy into power—and placed Suu Kyi, its leader, under house arrest. As a child, she conquered a fear of the dark by standing alone at night in her family's rambling lakeside home. Now 56, she has spent the best part of 13 years confined to it. She battles her isolation with the same single-mindedness, sustained by her faith—she is a devout Buddhist—and by what a friend from her days at Oxford University recognized as "her rooted reluctance to accept defeat." In 1995, when the restrictions were briefly lifted, she claimed that house arrest had made her "spiritually stronger."

Indeed, it elevated her to secular sainthood. People nicknamed Suu Kyi the "Angel of University Avenue" and placed her portrait atop household shrines. They also credited her with near-mystical powers. After the 1990 election there were reports that Buddha statues across the country were growing breasts. There was a rational explanation: when worshippers apply gold leaf to Buddha statues they often place it over the heart, thus the bulging chest. But the superstitious Burmese interpreted the phenomenon as a cosmic endorsement of Suu Kyi's leadership. At the time the regime was so worried that some temples were cordoned off by troops.

Her enduring popularity baffles and enrages the generals, who seem unaware that their aggression only helps sustain it—just as the brute force of British imperial rule helped create one of her heroes, Gandhi, whose tactics of nonviolent confrontation she champions. The junta has responded with tactics both brutal and bizarre. Suu Kyi's car was attacked by a well-orchestrated mob armed with stones and iron bars; a senior military officer publicly called for her assassination. Girls with astrological charts suggesting strength of character have been banned from state-run beauty contests for fear their success might augur a rise in Suu Kyi's power. Commentaries in state-run newspapers have blamed Burma's crippled economy on her repeated calls for sanctions (rather than on the generals' operatic greed and ineptitude). Accompanying cartoons have depicted her as a shaven-headed, toothless crone—a "democracy sorceress" spitting invective.

Suu Kyi is also "Mrs. Aris," a sneering reference to her marriage to the late Oxford don Michael Aris, a choice of husband (according to the regime) that renders her patriotism suspect. She has defused the accusation with winning humor. At a public speech at Meiktila in central Burma, an elderly man once asked her why she had married a foreigner. "I married a foreigner because I grew up in foreign places," she replied. "If I had grown up in Meiktila, then perhaps I would have married—you." The old man blushed, and the crowd roared with delight.

Ten years later, a terminally ill Aris tried to visit his wife to say goodbye. Callously, the regime denied him entry and suggested Suu Kyi visit him and her two children in Britain instead. Knowing that if she left Burma she would never be allowed to return, she stayed put and never saw her husband again. The decision must have been heartbreaking, but nobody who knew her was surprised—least of all the long-supportive Aris.

Suu Kyi would roundly disapprove of this issue of Time. "There is no room for hero worship in a true political profile," she once wrote. (The Nobel Committee disagreed, awarding her the Peace Prize in 1991.) She prefers to laud the unrecognized heroism of ordinary Burmese, who have now endured 40 years of military rule. She and the generals are currently engaged in reconciliation talks. Nothing has come of them, prompting the suggestion that someone with less principle, less defiance and more pragmatism might be better able to wring concessions from a junta famous for its calculated mendacity.

Propaganda aside, that's as strong a criticism as one is likely to hear of Suu Kyi. Nobody in Burma is as widely loved and admired, or as trusted by the various ethnic minorities whose cooperation is vital to the nation's future stability. There is a subtle but crucial difference between power and strength, and Aung San Suu Kyi has proved it. Burma's generals fail to see the distinction. Until they do, no amount of barbed wire will contain her.

Andrew Marshall is the author of The Trouser People: A Story of Burma in the Shadow of the Empire (Counterpoint)

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