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From Prison to Power: Is It Possibl



Subject: From Prison to Power: Is It Possible?

                         Copyright 1997 Southam Inc.  
                             The Gazette (Montreal)

                     March  1, 1997, Saturday, FINAL EDITION

SECTION: WEEKLY REVIEW; Pg. B3

HEADLINE: From prison to power: is it possible?

BYLINE: NORMAN WEBSTER; FREELANCE

DATELINE: RANGOON

    Is history really on Aung San Suu Kyi's side, as she so stoutly maintains?
Is she destined to follow the example of Jawaharlal Nehru, Robert Mugabe, Jomo
Kenyatta, Kim Young Sam and Nelson Mandela, moving from prison to power?

   Will she overcome? 
   Certainly, if courage and willpower and charisma are enough to carry the day,
she will do it; surely she will.

   But are they armor enough against  Burma's  Orwellian State Law and Order
Restoration Council? Can they overcome the SLORC's tanks, guns and thuggish
unconcern for the currents of history? Right now, many Burmese and foreigners
have their doubts.

   "Yes, she'll make it in the end - but she'll be as old as Nelson Mandela,"
said one cynical diplomat in Rangoon.

   "The lady," as everyone in  Burma  simply refers to her, is not unarmed in
the battle. First of all, she is her father's daughter, and when you are Burmese
and your father was Aung San, that is an enormous asset.

   Aung San is a genuinely revered figure. Leader of the fight for liberation
from the Japanese at the end of World War II, he was preparing to lead  Burma 
to independence from the British when he was assassinated in 1947, at age 32.

   Since then he has been mourned as a combination of George Washington and JFK 
- father of the nation, cut down in his prime. "Second only to Buddha," as one
Burmese said. 
   Aung San is ever-present in  Burma  today. Every town has an Aung San street 
or park or market, and the commonly used 10 kyat note (worth about 8 cents
Canadian) bears his likeness.

   Suu Kyi has no direct recollections of her father (she was 2 when he died),
but she has studied his career closely and assumed his mantle very deliberately.
(An older brother lives in the U.S., a scientist. Another brother drowned while 
young.)

   Her other main asset, of course, is the shining legitimacy of her party's
electoral triumph in 1990, when the National League for Democracy captured 81
per cent of the seats, to the consternation and anger of the SLORC. She is
clearly the people's choice and has the personality and the eloquence. The
generals have 300,000 men under arms.

   They make no attempt to hide them. Suddenly, down a crowded avenue in
Rangoon, there will appear a convoy - five trucks loaded with tough troops and
two armored cars with heavy machine guns on top, ready for action, manned by men
whose eyes constantly sweep the crowd. It brings a chill to the hottest day.

   "Their weapon is fear," said a Burmese quietly. Fear, reinforced by a
nationwide network of informants. 
   There are other cards in SLORC's hand. One is that the campaign to isolate it
from the world is having indifferent success. Despite some high-profile pullouts
(most recently, PepsiCo), there are plenty of Asian entrepreneurs ready to
exploit the country's mineral, forest and tourist resources, and American and
French petroleum companies are building a billion-dollar pipeline across the
country.

   Also, the ASEAN countries, more cynical about human rights than Western
democracies, seem prepared to let  Burma  into their club later this year.

   Meanwhile, China, the giant on  Burma's  border, has massively expanded its
presence in this underdeveloped land. "If the West stays away, in 15 years we'll
be like a province of China," said one well-connected Burmese.

   The ruling junta has also militarily crushed, or done deals with, most of the
minority ethnic groups that have been at war with Rangoon since independence
from Britain in 1948.

   Finally, after 35 years of military rule, the generals have grown rather fond
of power - as well as worried by the example of South Korea, where former
military men who handed power back to civilians have been prosecuted for crimes 
while in office. 
   There simply is no indication, at the moment, of a Gorbachev or De Klerk
figure who might soften the regime, as in the Soviet Union and South Africa, and
prompt it to lay down its arms and join the modern world.

   It is the hard-liners who control the SLORC, and they do not intend to go
quietly. This frightens some moderate Burmese, who see another bloodbath like
that of 1988 if Suu Kyi pushes SLORC too hard.

   "SLORC thinks might is right. The lady thinks right is might. They're both
wrong," said one.

   How to reconcile the two? No one has an easy answer. It is not a happy
situation - for the lady, for  Burma  or for the world.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1997