Rangoon's Cruelty May Backfire

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Rangoon's Cruelty May Backfire 
Wall Street Journal; New York; Apr 6, 1999; By Anna Husarska; 

Edition: 
          Eastern edition
Start Page: 
          A26
ISSN: 
          00999660

Abstract:
Michael Aris, the husband of Burmese opposition leader and Nobel peace
laureate
Aung San Suu Kyi, died on March 27 in Britain. He did not see his wife
before he
died because of the intransigence of the military junta in Rangoon. Married in
1972, Ms. Suu Kyi and Mr. Aris had been living apart for 10 years when he
died,
and saw each other for the last time in January 1996. Ms. Suu Kyi knew that
she
would not be readmitted to the country if she went abroad, and the junta was
denying Mr. Aris an entry visa.

In December I went to Burma, the country that the junta renamed Myanmar, to
meet Ms. Suu Kyi, who heads the National League of Democracy. It was a most
confusing encounter. Ms. Suu Kyi seemed to me both strong and fragile, both
courteous and curt. I assumed at the time that this was because six years of
house arrest and continuous persecution were taking their toll. I also thought
that her situation couldn't get any worse. Little did I know about the
personal
reasons for her state of mind or about her endurance.

Full Text:
Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Apr 6, 1999


Michael Aris, the husband of Burmese opposition leader and Nobel peace
laureate Aung
San Suu Kyi, died on March 27 in Britain. He did not see his wife before he
died because
of the intransigence of the military junta in Rangoon. Married in 1972, Ms.
Suu Kyi and
Mr. Aris had been living apart for 10 years when he died, and saw each other
for the last
time in January 1996. Ms. Suu Kyi knew that she would not be readmitted to
the country if
she went abroad, and the junta was denying Mr. Aris an entry visa.

In December I went to Burma, the country that the junta renamed Myanmar, to
meet Ms.
Suu Kyi, who heads the National League of Democracy. It was a most confusing
encounter. Ms. Suu Kyi seemed to me both strong and fragile, both courteous
and curt. I
assumed at the time that this was because six years of house arrest and
continuous
persecution were taking their toll. I also thought that her situation
couldn't get any worse.
Little did I know about the personal reasons for her state of mind or about
her endurance.

It might have been asking too much to expect military dictators to show
compassion and to
act in a magnanimous way toward a married couple about to be separated by
death. But at
least the junta could have understood that this was a rare opportunity for
them to score a
few coveted points under the heading of "humanity." The Burmese people's
memory of that
gesture might have come in handy when the generals' time is over some day.

Burma's rulers should learn from other regimes that they cannot break the
larger spirit of
resistance by destroying the lives of dissidents. The recent history of my
native Poland
provides a valuable lesson. Ms. Suu Kyi told me that she learned a lot from
the experience
of Polish dissidents. Maybe even now the Burmese generals could learn from the
experience of Polish Communist rulers, the final batch of whom also were
generals.

Poland resembled the Burmese dictatorship most under the martial law imposed
by Gen.
Wojciech Jaruzelski on Dec. 13, 1981. That night most opposition activists
were arrested
and "interned" in camps. In Burma over the past year, the junta has
arrested and
"sequestered for conversations" roughly half of the elected parliamentarians
from the
National League for Democracy. And like the Burmese generals today, whose
idee fixe it is
to destroy Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the Polish junta was obsessed
with the
opposition.

To the Polish Communist Party daily Trybuna Ludu, the opposition was "a
malignant
tumor which tries to eat away the Polish state organism." In a similar vein,
the Burmese
junta's mouthpiece, New Light of Myanmar, writes of the need to "crush" Aung
San Suu
Kyi and the National League for Democracy and declares that "White alien's
wife Suu Kyi
should be deported because she is conspiring to sell the Union into the
hands of
neo-colonialism."

The personal drama in Aung San Suu Kyi's family also has a few precedents in
the Poland
of 1982. In August of that year, leading dissident Adam Michnik, who had
been jailed for
his opinions, was taken from prison for an hour to attend his father's
funeral and then put
back behind bars. A month later, another leading imprisoned dissident, Jacek
Kuron, was
permitted only a glimpse of his father's coffin before being returned to his
cell without even
being allowed to take part in the funeral ceremony. At the time, Mr. Kuron's
wife, Gajka,
was hospitalized after seven months in an internment camp. Two months later,
Mr. Kuron
was allowed out of prison to visit his mortally ill wife. This was too
little and came too late.
Gajka died the same day.

By such vile and inhuman actions, the Polish Communist junta sought to break
the spirit of
the opposition. All in vain. If anything, the regime's lack of compassion
helped hasten its
demise. Seven years later the Communists were swept away, and both Messrs.
Kuron and
Michnik were elected to the Polish Parliament. The former became minister of
labor; the
latter, editor of the most successful Polish daily.

It does not pay to be cruel. Like these Polish dissidents, a woman of the
stature of Aung
San Suu Kyi will be hurt, but not broken. The losers are the generals from
Rangoon: They
lost the opportunity to appear somewhat human. For dictators, such
opportunities do not
come often.

---

Ms. Husarska is a special correspondent for The New Republic.