Mother Courage from The Times Magaz

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Subject: Mother Courage from The Times Magazine

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MARCH 2, 1996 
THE TIMES MAGAZINE

MOTHER COURAGE

Aung San Suu Kyi has endured six years of house arrest, death
threats, separation from her British family. Yet still the petite
symbol of Burmese democracy soldiers on against her
opponents. Joanna Pitman is the first to meet her free at home. 
Photograph by Daniel Simon

I WONDER IF John Major ever blushes. As he sits down
today at the first Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in Bangkok,
with the heads of state of the European Union, the seven
members of the Association of South East Asian Nations, plus
those of Japan, China and South Korea, he should be aware of
what Aung San Suu Kyi thinks of him and his government.
The Burmese Nobel Peace Prize - winning opposition leader
has struggled to bring democracy to a country ruled by one of
the world's most repressive military regimes, leading to six
years under house arrest, death threats and a vicious and
enduring campaign of intimidation. When we talked last week
in her first full interview since her release from detention last
July, she delivered a devastating critique of the hypocrisy of
British policy towards Burma.

"The British are certainly not behind us in our struggle. They
are clearly more interested in making money than in helping us
to achieve democracy. British investors eagerly rushing in now
are only supporting the present conditions of government and
this is damaging our struggle and delaying the establishment of
the democratic system that we are fighting for.

"The British approach is certainly not something one could
ever be proud of. These people are hurrying in to make cosy
little business deals while pretending that nothing is wrong.
They need to be reminded that this is one of the most brutal
military regimes in the world and putting money into the
country now is simply supporting a system that is severely
harmful to the people of Burma. It's not going to do much
good for their investments, either, in the long term.

We live in an era when the interests of commercial factions can
openly be identified with those of the nation; and a declaration
of co - operation with a foreign government need be no more
than a matter of resolution taken at a board meeting of
directors.

Burmese Government figures -- not known for their accuracy,
but nevertheless accepted as a broad guide -- show that in 1995
Britain invested more than any other foreign country in
Burma. British officials hastily point out that this is because
non - British investments have been channelled through
London or, for tax reasons, through the British Virgin Islands.
But there is no denying that British firms have targeted Burma
for investment --  Rothmans, for example, has a cigarette
factory; Premier oil has invested $20 million, with more
committed -- and British Government policy remains to
encourage British firms to look for opportunities there before
they get left behind.

Today's ASEM summit will mirror this mercantile mood. 

Human rights issues in Asia  --  the undeniable shame, for
example, of Burma's politics of repression, its slave labour,
mass deportations and political prisoners -- will perhaps be
mentioned in whispers by European delegates and then set
aside so that they can get on with the more important business
of deciding how Europe and Asia can mutually profit from
new economic links.

Suu Kyi will follow the proceedings closely via one of her only
links to the outside world, the BBC World Service. Last week
I found her free from house arrest, but still far from free to
carry out her duties as an opposition leader. Her mail is
censored, her phones tapped, her home watched and
photographed, her movements severely circumscribed. The
huge majority (over 80 per cent) of the popular vote that her
National League for Democracy (NLD) party won in the May
1990 general elections has been annulled. NLD branches are
not allowed to hold meetings, even in their own premises, nor
to publish material of any sort.

Suu Kyi is living alone in the same family villa that was her
jail for six years, in what is usually described with grim
understatement as reduced circumstances. The villa is in a
state of advanced disrepair. Plaster has flaked from the
exterior, the remaining furniture that has not been sold to buy
food is worn and old, mould creeps up the inside walls and the
ceilings betray a time bomb of damp rot lit by the clammy light
of yards of fluorescent tubing.

In her life of monastic simplicity, Suu Kyi is undeterred. She
stands aloof above our concerns for her safety and repeats with
unshaken faith her creed that democracy is attainable because
it is the will of the people She is committed firmly, whatever
the sacrifice.

You feel in a way that is difficult to define that Suu Kyi speaks
for Burma. She is driven by the courage to believe that human
society can be built on moral principles. She is also driven by a
moral revulsion, a will to resist the treachery, baseness and
duplicity that she confronts every day. You do not have to
learn this will.

Her body is tiny, fit and slender in a serpentine sort of way.
She is 50, but looks 15 years younger. The face now known to
millions across the world is luminously beautiful, a strong face
made of small, strong bones with the regularity of feature of a
fine ivory carving. The smooth, pale skin is set with huge dark,
liquid eyes like lustrous black grapes. I will never forget those
grave unblinking eyes.

It is through them that the gravity of her message is made
clear. The Burmese Government, known by the unlovely
acronym SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council),
released her in an attempt, she thinks, to repair its image in the
eyes of the West and to offer foreign investors the shameful
and shabby rags of a patched up political conscience with
which to wrap their speculative forays into the country. 

Suu Kyi believes that John Major displays an undignified lack
of political backbone. "The classic theory is that with
economic reforms you get a strong and growing middle class
and with this you eventually get democracy. The problem is
that in Burma there is no middle class. A small sector at the
top of society is benefiting from the money coming in. The rich
are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And as long
as new money comes in, the SLORC is under less and less
incentive to change. The British and all the other foreign
investors know this full well. Their policy is not something to
be proud of."

At only one point does this strong woman allow herself a brief
release of emotion, and that is when I mention the word
martyr. "Martyr? No, l am not a martyr. Well, yes, l have
suffered, but there are many more in my country who have
suffered much more than me. People have been killed in
peaceful demonstrations. There are hundreds of political
prisoners, many of them my colleagues, detained without trial.
Those foreign businessmen, who come here to strike up deals
while ignoring the reality, should know that we are all
suffering. There certainly are martyrs m Burma. Millions of
them. 
Plenty of observers have described Suu Kyi as a martyr and a
saint, as a legendary figure of Nelson Mandela's stature and
gravity. And in many ways she is. Ever since 1988, when she
founded the NLD, she has held out for dialogue with the
SLORC. There has been none. In May 1990, when the
effectively banned NLD won an overwhelming victory in a
surprise general election, the results were ignored. Still no
dialogue was offered and the nervous junta clamped down
harder.

SINCE HER RELEASE and the SLORC's bid to win
international approval and hard currency, money has started to
flow in, shrinking the incentive for SLORC to yield to Suu Kyi
s demands for political pluralism. "Releasing me does no good
if the attitudes of the SLORC do not change. Whatever they do
to me personally, that s between them and me. I can take it.
What's more important is what they are doing to the country.

There is no doubt in my mind, nor of anyone around her, that
Suu Kyi will continue her fight as long as she has to. To take a
stand against this nasty and most intransigent of juntas, to defy
assassination, to endure six years of house arrest, seeing her
British husband and two children only twice, and then to be let
down by the mercantile cravings of foreign democratic
governments, and still to show absolutely not one iota of
hesitation in continuing her struggle -- this is to be a truly
stubborn person.

Suu Kyi is a remarkable fighter driven by a thrilling
unwillingness to compromise. In person she has an air of quiet
assurance, almost serenity. But also a deep weariness and a
slight sadness that is, I suspect, habitual. You get the feeling
that her personal feelings have never been allowed to interfere
with her politics. "I'll stay here as long as I'm needed. I'm
confident that we'll move towards democracy in the near
future simply because the will of the people is so very strong
that change is inevitable. It'll take 20 or 30 years before we can
say we've done it, when a new generation has grown up within
a democratic framework. It's a very long - term job."

No description of Suu Kyi and her deep preoccupation with the
welfare of her country should go far without mention of the
enduring influence of her father, Aung San, Burma's national
hero. It was he who led the struggle for independence from
British colonial rule and from Japanese occupation.  Trained
by the Japanese during the Second World War, he entered
Burma with the Japanese army and their promise of
independence. When that promise proved false, he went
underground to lead the
resistance and help the re-invading Allies. After the war, he
negotiated Burma's final independence and then, at one of his
first provisional cabinet meetings, the 32 - year old Aung San
and most of his colleagues were gunned down by a political
rival. It was July 19, 1947, just a few months before the
transfer of power. But far from being removed from the
Burmese political scene, Aung San became the unifying
symbol of a free Burma and an inspiration to all who followed.

Suu Kyi was just two years old when her father was
assassinated. "I never really knew him, but I was taught to
think of him as a loving and indulgent father and as an upright
and honourable man who put the welfare of his country above
his own interests. As I grew older, I developed a strong sense
of empathy as I discovered many similarities in our attitudes. It
is perhaps because of this strong bond that I came to feel such
a deep sense of responsibility for the welfare of my country."

Suu Kyi's mother, a formidable woman named Daw Khin Kyi,
took up the strings of her life again after this disastrous
personal and national bereavement, but never let her three
children forget their father's heritage. She served as the director
of social welfare and then, in 1961, was appointed Burma's
ambassador to India.  Suu Kyi went with her mother to India, a
shrimpy girl of 15 with long legs and plaits, who promised to
be beautiful. Life revolved around school and a circle of Indian
friends that included Indira Gandhi's sons, Rajiv and Sanjay.
But Suu Kyi spent much time exploring and
absorbing the lessons of the country of Mahatma Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru. 

She was in India when in 1962 the present regime came to
power in Burma. All foreign influence was banned and the
Burmese Way to Socialism was instituted.  A xenophobia that
was almost paranoid set in. The country tucked itself away in
the backwaters of international politics, rejecting progress in
the name of cultural integrity. For 20 years Burma's isolation
was formidable.

Suu Kyi, meanwhile, grew up and went to St Hugh's College,
Oxford, to read PPE. In 1969 she went to New York to work
for the United Nations, then under the Burmese secretary
general, U Thant.  And then in 1972 she married Michael Aris,
a British academic specialising in Tibet, and they had two
sons, Alexander, born in 1973, and Kim, born in 1977. For a
few years the family lived in Bhutan, where Michael was
doing research. but in the mid-Seventies they moved back to
Oxford, where Suu Kyi brought up her family, entertained a
constant stream of guests and pursued her academic study of
Burma's modern history. She spent a year, taking Kim with
her, at Kyoto University in Japan.
Back at Oxford with the family reunited, she was continuing
her academic career at the School of  Oriental and African
Studies when her mother had a stroke. It was April 1988 and
Suu Kyi took the first plane out to Burma.

She found the place gloomy and angry and brewing trouble.
The mood of the people had changed in reaction to the growing
repression. The political turbulence was just beginning and
200 peaceful demonstrators had been killed in confrontation
with the police. A few months after her arrival, Suu Kyi
intervened with an open letter to the government proposing a
consultative committee of independent people to lead the
country to multi - party elections. Days later she addressed
several hundred thousand in Rangoon, offering a political
programme based on human rights, democracy and non -
violence. A few days later, SLORC was established, martial
law introduced and political meetings banned, with offenders
to be sentenced without trial. A week later, Suu Kyi and a few
others founded the NLD. "The crisis of 1988 was the concern
of the entire nation. I could not, as my father's daughter,
remain indifferent to what was going on."

Suu Kyi was raw and untrained in party politics, but in all this
one can recognise a single principle, a noble one, a rare one
anywhere, and in Burma all but stamped out, cowed and
beaten -- an indefatigable courage to take up the cause of her
people. Suu refused to play the SLORC's game. She defied its
bans and went on the campaign trail, often at gunpoint. She
spoke out sharply against the murder in the streets of non -
violent demonstrators. She criticised the military as it increased
its violations of human rights, intimidation and repression. She
continued to call for peaceful change through free and fair
elections, but this became more difficult as the military began
to arrest her followers and to harass her.

In April 1989 she wrote in a letter to her husband Michael:
"The last trip was gruelling, travelling by bullock cart and
boats in the blazing sun -- alas, your Suu is getting weather -
beaten, none of that pampered elegance left as she tramps the
countryside spattered with mud, straggly haired and pouring
with sweat! I need a few months in grey, damp Oxford to
restore my complexion. But in spite of all the difficulties, I feel
that what I am doing is worthwhile -- the people of Burma
deserve better than this mess of inefficiency, corruption and
misuse of power."

The dangers she risked were formidable. It was like walking
on a knife - edge. A few days earlier, an army captain had
stopped her party of campaigners at gunpoint, threatening to
open fire should they advance. Suu Kyi calmly told her
companions to step aside and walked on alone. Her split -
second decision was that only one life --  hers -- should be put
at risk. It was a bold move and successful, for at the very last
moment a major intervened to prevent the shooting.

Suu Kyi was not going to be stopped easily. The SLORC
hesitated for a long time, but then finally, unequal to her
growing popular appeal, they arrested her on July 20, 1989.
Her two sons were ten and 15 and at school in Oxford.
Michael was there, too. Suu Kyi found herself alone in her
mother's house, cut off from the world. She had a small
number of censored books, no letters, no telephone, and during
the six years she was allowed just two visits from her husband,
one from each of her sons, and one from a monk. At one point
she endured two years and four months in solitary confine-
ment. Her only source of intellectual nourishment was the
BBC World Service, her only vessels of spiritual escape were
her piano and her paintbrush.

A lucid mind and a strict sense of discipline kept her going. "I
don't know why people think it so amazing that I managed on
my own. I had a very disciplined upbringing, very strict, and
my mother always imposed rigid standards of self - control. All
I had to do was to draw up a timetable and stick to it, which
was not so hard, as I had been doing that all my life."  Every
day she rose at 4.30 am, did one hour of meditation, listened to
the news on the radio, exercised, had breakfast, read for two
hours, and so on. The simple act of doing these things every
day created a certain purpose for her.

She also disciplined her mind "Once I had made up my mind,
it was easy. I had decided that this was the course I was going
to follow and it was no problem. It is those who have not made
up their minds one way or the other who suffer a lot more.
They have inner conflicts and that is what exhausts people
more than anything else.''

What about the pain of separation from a husband and two
young sons? "My family has been very supportive, as have the
families of all my other colleagues. I always had said to my
husband early on that if I needed to go back to my country, I
would go. Of course the separation was painful. It's painful for
any parent not to see their children, but I think one always
worries more about the children because you always expect
adults to be able to cope better. My sons have coped not too
badly. It was a strain for them. It's never been easy for a
family to be broken up, but I discovered a lot of other families
of my colleagues in far worse situations. I realise that I was
lucky because I always knew that my family was safe."

This sounded frighteningly dispassionate, even faintly robotic,
as she said it, rather as if she were reading it from a manual on
Western emotions. But her words deserve careful
interpretation. I suspect that Suu Kyi is experiencing just as
keen and devastating a pain over her family separation as any
wife and mother would, but in what is, perhaps, an Asian way,
she has steeled herself and hidden it away somewhere very
deep, where it lies carefully contained, to be confronted
privately in her own time. It is a part of her pride and her
discipline to be able to master and control her emotions. And
she has made her family do the same. As Michael points out,
there was never any point in trying to oppose Suu Kyi's will.

Today, despite her "release" from house arrest, Suu Kyi is still
effectively isolated in her own home, hounded and, as far as
possible, marginalised by the SLORC. But every Saturday and
Sunday, she stands up on a table behind the gates to her
compound and speaks for an hour to the crowds gathered there.
Last Saturday about 3,000 people had come to hear her. A sea
of faces squatted in the road, blocking the traffic, and hundreds
more extended four or five deep, clinging to the banks of the
road. They were slim men and women of all ages, stocky
peasants with cigarbrown faces, withered elders with white
hair, monks in saffron robes and young people -- students,
teachers, the new breed of office
workers - wearing expectant expressions and clean shirts above
their knotted loungyi skirts. Water sellers threaded their way
through the crowds doing brisk business.

Between cheers and much clapping, the crowd sat there for an
hour, listening with rapt attention to Suu Kyi discussing the
question of ethnic minorities and other future NLD policies.
She struck up a tremendous rapport with the crowd, spiked her
speech with plenty of jokes, and the impression was of a much- 
loved heroine of almost filmstar appeal, reassuring her
followers, gently and persuasively, that one day their dream
would come true.

"She is our leader, our hope, our future,'' said one middle -
aged taxi driver, his betel - reddened teeth gleaming in the sun
like red tinfoil. "We simply cannot do without her."  His
devotion to his heroine was genuine and time had added lustre
to that devotion.

AFTER THE SPEECH, the crowds dissipated quickly in a
seething mass of excited and enraptured humanity, moving in a
stream of multicoloured clothes like a cascade of hundreds and
thousands being poured out of a jar. I went into her compound
a second time and found Suu Kyi elated and glowing, far more
relaxed and animated than the weary fighter I had met the
previous day. For ages we sat in the cool of the evening in her
garden, chatting as the pale yellow briar roses in her hair
slowly wept their petals on to her shoulder.

She recalled her undergraduate life at St Hugh's and how she
had learnt to master the art of bicycle - riding while wearing a
loungyi. "Oh. we were so prim in those days. 1 think young
women are so much more, well, grown - up these days. But I
must say, I made my best women friends when I was at
Oxford."

She has a touch of the Oxford don's wife about her today,
solicitous of my comfort, offering a cup of tea.  Gradually a
picture emerges of a straitlaced young undergraduate, fiercely
pure and genuinely innocent, but clearly so single - minded in
her pursuit of knowledge and experience that she made herself
try most things on offer. Climbing into the college after a late
date, for example, won social kudos. After two demure years,
Suu Kyi wanted to climb in, too, so she arranged for a
respectable Indian friend to take her out to dinner and then to
hand her over the college garden wall. The rules had been bro-
ken, but with the utmost propriety.

Suu Kyi's curiosity extended to alcohol, too. and at the very
end of her final year she bought a small bottle of something
potent, and in great secrecy, accompanied by two more
experienced Indian handmaidens for this rite of passage, she
retired to the loos of the Bodleian and there tried and rejected
alcohol for ever.

We talked about her house in Oxford, how she misses the long
summer evenings and the mists in autumn. Michael, she
explained, cannot move to Burma because of his work. "Of
course I'd like him to be here. It would make no difference to
my political role: I've never hidden the fact that I'm married to
a Briton. But Kim is still at school. He's quite a home - loving
boy and I think he deserves a home life until he's more
independent. Anyway, Michael's work is important. It would
be difficult for him to do research here, but maybe he'll come
for longer spells if he can get the visas."

It is clear that the role of the fighter, the legend and the
champion, hard as steel and resilient to all sorts of villainy, has
not been allowed to define Suu Kyi, not been allowed to
eclipse her individual self, the funny, humane and delightful
wife, mother and academic.

There is no question that Suu Kyi still welcomes life, still
accepts its terms even in her current circumstances. This is
because she manages to transcend the limitations placed on
her. She buys her necessities with the earnings from a column
in a Japanese newspaper, but is still occasionally forced to sell
off furniture and family silver (she is unable to accept foreign
donations). She shrugs off the anonymous letters that appear in
the press daily, in an odd epistolary style assumed to be that of
the SLORC, and which accuse her of all sorts of depravities.

She is a very brave woman, of this there is no doubt. It is for
her moral courage that she will always be loved by her people,
and for this she is a worthy recipient of the Nobel and the
Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Suu Kyi has followed
her father in becoming the inspiration and the conscience of the
nation. She has also become for the Burmese a kind of
talisman for their future freedom. She is a great character, a
wonderfully evocative person and an absolute figure of justice,
this woman who made silence speak. 



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