LADY IN WAITING [The New Republic]

[moe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Lady in waiting 
The New Republic; Washington; Apr 12, 1999; Anna Husarska; 

Volume: 
                 220
Issue: 
                 15
Start Page: 
                 16
ISSN: 
                 00286583
Full Text:
Copyright New Republic Apr 12, 1999


Being arrested is never pleasant, but, when your detainers are wearing
flip-flops and
sarongs, it's somehow less threatening. I had already given mv exl)osd rolls
of film to an
acquaintance to my exposed rolls of film to an acquaintance to smuggle out
of Burma, so
the police had to settle for an unexposed one left in the camera. My notes,
in Polish, were
briefly examined, then ignored. And with that I was summarily deported-just
a few hours
before my planned departure. 

I had been taken into custody just after leaving the headquarters of the
opposition National
League for Democracy (NLD) in Rangoon, where I had met with 1991 Nobel Peace
Prize
winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Throughout my stay in Burma, everyone kept asking me
excitedly, "Will you see the Lady?" So it seemed natural that my
interrogators, too, would
ask the same thing. "Did you see the Lady?" they barked. 

That her admirers and detractors alike refer to Suu Kyi as "the Lady" is a
testament to how
she has become the absolute center of everyone's attention. In the junta
mouthpiece The
New Light of Myanmar, she is "[w]hite alien's wife Suu Kyi who is conspiring
to sell the
Union into the hands of neocolonialists." The paper also runs poems about
her. A sample
from the December 23, 1998, edition: "Here, woman, the people knowing/The
story of
puppet on strings/Nothing good you are doing/Even when not in power/Adorned
with
deception of yours/Gives orders, a woman inferior/Just retrace your steps/To
your
husband, go back/You were not asked to come." 

To the Burmese people, however, Suu Kyi is practically a saint, the
repository of all their
hopes-which is both uplifting and a little unsettling. There is a
spontaneous cult of
personality around her. A business woman asked me: "You like my dress top?
She wears a
similar one." A bike renter in Mandalay explained it to me according to a
simple formula:
"She is the daughter of the father of the nation. So the Lady is the
nation." To prove it, he
gave me five different banknotes emblazoned with the picture of her father,
Gen. Aung San.
Throughout Burma, streets, parks, and squares are named after him, and his
statues are
everywhere. Although he was assassinated in July 1947, six months before
Burma's
independence, he is the national hero and, in a paradoxical twist, the
founder of the
Burmese Army, which controls the current junta. 

The military dictatorship began in 1962 with a coup that brought Gen. Ne Win
to power.
Soon the country was on the autarkical "Burmese way to socialism," which,
like all roads in
this direction, was a bumpy downhill path. Opposition grew, and, in June
1988, Ne Win
resigned. Burma enjoyed a "Rangoon spring" only to see it crushed in a major
military
crackdown that began on August 8, 1988. In April of that year, Aung San Suu
Kyi had
come to visit her ailing mother from Oxford, England, where she had been
living with her
British husband, Michael Aris, and their two sons. Even before they were
married, she had
written to Aris: "I only ask one thing, that, should my people need me, you
would help me
to do my duty by them." 

In the wake of the crackdown, the Burmese people's need was all too
apparent. On
August 26, Suu Kyi spoke at a rally outside Rangoon's Shwedagon Pagoda: "I
could not,
as my father's daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on. This
national crisis
could, in fact, be called the second struggle for national independence."
This speech sealed
her position as the leader of the burgeoning democratic movement 

By September, the death toll was in the thousands. The generals formed the
State Law and
Order Restoration Council, known as SLORC-a rather unfortunate name that,
on the
advice of a Washington-based public relations firm, was later changed to
SPDC for State
Peace and Development Council. Within a week of SLORC's formation, Suu Kyi and
dissident Burmese officers founded the NLD. In 1990, demonstrating its total
ignorance of
the national mood, the junta confidently organized elections. The NLD, led
bv Suu Kyi,
months earlier, the generals had put her under house arrest. The junta
refused to hand over
power and increased repression. 

Ne Win, now 88, continues to wield power from behind the scenes. As for Suu
Kyi, she
remained under house arrest for the next six years. Nowadays, it is almost
impossible to
see her. Her family house is offlimits for most locals and foreigners; even
DHL can't deliver
packages. And her movements are restricted when she tries to visit
supporters outside
Rangoon. Twice last summer, when the military blocked her route, she
conducted a silent
protest by remaining in her car for several days. 

These standoffs were planned to coincide both with a meeting of the
Association of
Southeast Asian Nations and with the anniversary of the August 1988
crackdown or
"8/8/88" as it is known here. "People all over the world need to be alerted
to what is
happening in Burma [or else] it will be difficult for them to voice their
support for what we
are doing," Suu Kyi explained at the time. "I think keeping lines of
communication open is
very, very important." 

Keeping those lines open is easier said than done. Nobody who is anybody in
the NLD is
allowed a working telephone. To arrange my meeting with Suu Kyi, I had to
make three
nighttime visits to the home of a won 82 percent of the seats even though,
a few
go-between-meow,ing like a cat to get his dogs' attention without alerting
the surveillance
team across the street and retrieving messages from him left on a gate
outside his house. I
met Suu Kyi at the party headquarters in Rangoon. The shabby, two-story
building is easy
to spot because of the crowd of plainclothes and uniformed officers milling
about outside.
The inside is bare, save for a poster of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in
English, many portraits of Gen. Aung San, and the NLD flag, a yellow
fighting peacock on
a red background. 

When I arrived, the hall downstairs was filled with women and their
malnourished children,
many crying. Suu Kyi stood at the front, handing out spoonfuls of some type
of formula to
each child as his name was called on a bullhorn. Each mother received a
bottle of the
formula to take home. This long, noisy, exhausting event was obviously a way
for her to
stay in touch with her people, just like the distribution of rice that she
does personally every
Monday. However, attendance is low because of intimidation by military
intelligence. 

I spoke with her deputy, Tin Oo, about what it would take to trigger an
uprising against the
junta. A students' revolt is unlikely: since December 1996, the generals
have kept all the
faculties closed. This general turned-dissident thought that economic
desperation would
produce dissent. I couldn't imagine it getting more desperate. Finally, Suu
Kyi joined us. At
age 53, she looks a good 20 years younger. She is graceful and possesses
what the French
call charme hypnotique, yet she is also tough and matter-of-fact. At the
time, I did not
know the news that she knew and was probably devastated by: namely, that her
husband,
whom she had not seen since Christmas of 1995, was dying of prostate
cancer. The
authorities have refused to grant him a visa, and thus Suu Kyi has been
given a Hobson's
choice. If she leaves Burma to see her husband, she will almost certainly
not be allowed
back in. And, if she stays, she will never get a chance to say goodbye to
Aris before he
dies. 

I asked her about a rumored deal whereby, in exchange for World Bank aid and
a promise
by the NLD to rescind its calls to convene the parliament, the generals
would release
political prisoners, open a dialogue with the NLD, and allow it to function
as a political
party. Suu Kyi pooh-poohed the rumor: the NLD was ready to talk and have
negotiations
with the authorities with or without the World Bank. But the NLD would never
put a price
tag on giving up its democratic right to convene parliament. 

Perhaps Suu Kyi wanted to discredit the deal because it would have
interfered with current
international economic sanctions, which, the NLD maintains, are vital. But,
as one Western
diplomat pointed out to me, Burma's very backwardness-the only major foreign
investment here is a controversial pipeline in the south owned jointly by
Total of France,
Unocal of the United States, and the Petroleum Authority of Thailand (with
15 percent
staying in the hands of the Burmese junta)-makes the country less vulnerable
to economic
pressure. "Can a country that for years was closed to the outside world and
practiced
autarky be seriously hit by isolation?" the diplomat asked. 

Meanwhile, the junta's financial policy is bizarre enough to scare off most
would-be
investors even if existing sanctions were lifted. The official exchange rate
is six kyat to a
dollar, while the unofficial one is 60 times higher. Banknotes have peculiar
denominations of
45 and 90 kyat because Ne Win believes in the power of the number nine. In
September
1987, the government canceled all banknotes of the two highest
denominations, thus wiping
out 80 percent of the money in circulation. 

I asked Suu Kyi whether she did not fear that the Burmese, seeing no
positive results from
her pacifist resistance methods, would turn to violence like the Albanians
in Kosovo have.
She snapped that the Burmese knew hers was the right way-Southeast Asia is
not the
Balkans. Suu Kyi was very impressed by Vaclav Havel's classic essay "The
Power of the
Powerless." We spoke about Havel's house arrest, and this led to a
discussion of the
different ways totalitarian regimes treat dissidents. I asked if the
authorities' campaign
against the NLD was effective. "Yes," said Suu Kyi. "This is very serious;
imprisonments
are seriously hampering our work." 

I later learned the exact figures: 193-almost halfof the NLD
parliamentarians elected in
1990 are in detention or, as the junta puts it, "sequestered" in "guest
houses" where
conversations "foster greater understanding of the situation in the
country." Most jailed
NLD members are released only if they renounce all political activities.
Almost 3,000
members have done so since September-the official radio, TV, and newspaper
keep a
tally. Suu Kyi maintains that the very fact that the government bothers to
publicize the
numbers shows how afraid it is of the NLD. Furthermore, she said, many of
those who
supposedly resigned had not been active members, while activists who are
forced to resign
often continue party activities. 

Nonetheless, a Western diplomat who has been in Rangoon for a long time
called the
whole Burmese political scene "virtual politics": the SPDC has no
credibility while the NLD
is bottled up. Although the NLD recently created shadow ministries, there is
not much it
can do with half of the members of parliament "guest-housed." "What will be
left?" the
diplomat asked with genuine worry. `Just a core of heroes around the Lady?" 

In Mandalay, an 84-year-old woman asked me, "Do you think I will live to see
this
change?" It took all my optimism to mumble that maybe the dissidents can
turn the tables
on Gen. Ne Win and make the number nine work for them-i.e., overthrow the
junta on
9/9/99. But she knew I said it out of sympathy for her rather than
conviction. But perhaps
not everything is lost. The policewoman who searched me after my arrest was
assigned to
watch me at the airport on the last leg of my deportation. Boredom made her
talkative. It
turned out that she had not been told why she was searching me. "What did
you do to get
into trouble?" she asked. "You don't know? I went to see Aung San Suu Kyi,"
I said. "Oh.
you saw the Lady!" she exclaimed. "How is she?"