Aung San Suu Kyi (24 page)

She read books about vipassana meditation and practiced purposefully in order to improve herself. When she had been released some years later and was asked about what she would do if she were to be arrested once again, she replied with a laugh that she would in that case see to it that she reached even higher levels in her meditation.

Meditation is central for understanding how she and the other political prisoners coped with their time in isolation. “For a Buddhist it is not necessarily a negative thing to shut out the world. Even as children we learn to withdraw into ourselves, to shut out the world and purify our senses,” said the student leader Min Ko Naing in an interview in 2005. At that point he had spent sixteen years in an isolation cell and had meditated every day.

Every time Suu Kyi is asked about the years under house arrest, she emphasizes that she has been treated very mildly when compared to many other political prisoners. In a television interview with the Swedish journalist Malou von Sievers, she said that she has not felt like a prisoner since she has not been held in a prison, and that many of her party comrades had had a much harder time. They had been tortured and not known what had happened to their families. Her own family was safe in another country, and she has said in several interviews that she has felt a security in knowing that they were not directly threatened.

On another occasion she recounted that the Buddhist principles of self-control and inner peace were crucial for her to cope with the period during which she was under house arrest. She “accepted” the circumstances under which she lived and tried only to influence those parts of her life that were still hers to control. “I simply stopped worrying about my family,” she said in 1996. “I couldn't do anything about the situation so I learned to control my thoughts.”

Restraint. Self-control. Suu Kyi often speaks about these as goals for one's personal development. One cannot influence everything around him or her. The only things that one can control with any certainty are his or her own thoughts and actions. Inside yourself you can always in some sense be free; even under strict imprisonment there is room for action. It is ultimately a matter of preserving one's integrity. As is often the case with Suu Kyi, she seasons this philosophical reasoning with humor and a peal of laughter. “I believe that some people who have been in prison also did not feel like prisoners,” she told Alan Clements, and then she quoted her party
comrade U Kyi Maung as having said, “If my wife knew how free I felt in Insein prison she'd be furious.”

Even though Aung San Suu Kyi kept up her courage and was “free in thought,” those six years, as well as the later periods of house arrest, must have been both mentally and physically stressful. One problem was money. She was not allowed to receive money from the outside, and at the same time she refused to accept free food from the guards who were stationed by the dozen outside her house. The junta was not going to be given any kind of hold on her. However, after a short time she had no money left and she had to be satisfied with eating two small portions of rice a day. In the end she came to an agreement with the junta. They would deliver food to her and she would pay with furniture and fittings from the house. Slowly but surely the building was emptied of the furniture her mother had collected throughout the years. The officers who were responsible for the guard could not bear the thought that Aung San's daughter should be totally destitute, so they secretly stored all the furniture in a warehouse a little distance away from 54 University Avenue. When she was freed in 1995, they wanted to give her back her belongings, but Aung San Suu Kyi refused to receive them and demanded that she be allowed to buy them back. No favors.

Even after the furniture-for-food system had been established, she was compelled to live frugally. Her breakfast usually consisted of tea and a piece of fruit. Never bread, that was too expensive. Once every weekend she allowed herself the luxury of eating a hard-boiled egg. The effect of this diet was that she rapidly lost a lot of weight, from 110 to around 90 pounds, and during that period she must have been on the brink of malnutrition.

The economic problems were partly solved when Michael Aris published the book
Freedom from Fear
, with texts by Aung San Suu Kyi and people who had come to know her over the years. The income from the book was deposited in an account in Rangoon and was thereafter at the disposal of Suu Kyi.

In the meantime the junta continued to slander her, consistently and without any sign of shame for their blatant racism and narrow-mindedness. On one occasion a cartoon was published in one of the state-owned newspapers. It showed a lone boy beside a group of children. The boy was ugly and crippled, and his caption made it clear that he was of mixed race, a direct allusion to Kim and Alexander. The group of children were athletic and full
of well-being, and under this group of children the caption stated that they were “real citizens.”

The junta also exploited the fact that Michael was able to send parcels to her, and one day pictures were published showing the alleged contents of one of the parcels. They were a tube of lipstick and a couple of American fashion magazines. In the text Aung San Suu Kyi is described as a “Western fashion girl.” Clearly something very reprehensible in the eyes of the junta.

During her first period under house arrest, changes also occurred at the top level of the junta. During 1991 Gen. Saw Maung, who had led the SLORC's seizure of power in 1988, displayed several signs of being mentally ill. Rumors went around that he was an alcoholic and had heart trouble. During a visit to a golf course he pulled out his pistol and threatened others there while yelling at them that he was the reincarnation of King Kyanzittha, a Bamar king in the eleventh century. He was forced to resign from his appointment as the leader of the SLORC in April 1992.

He was succeeded by Gen. Than Shwe. Than Shwe was born in 1933 in the vicinity of Mandalay, and during Ne Win's years in office he rose in rank until he was appointed brigadier general and acting minister of defense in 1985. After the SLORC's power takeover in 1988, he became the second-in-command of the junta.

Now he formed a leadership troika with Gen. Maung Aye and Khin Nyunt. The latter was formally third-in-command, but as the chief of the powerful military security service and with the support of Ne Win from the sidelines, he was understood by many to be Burma's strong man. Khin Nyunt has Chinese roots, and after his military career he had been called to Rangoon in 1984 to investigate a bloody terrorist action against a group of politicians from South Korea who were visiting Burma. Khin Nyunt quickly took control of the military security service, which became a state within the state under his leadership. Khin Nyunt was considered to be Ne Win's favorite among the younger officers.

It soon turned out that the SLORC had a plan. The junta hoped that the economic development after liberalization would assuage people's anger. It was only a matter of keeping Aung San Suu Kyi imprisoned until they had constructed a political framework that would enable them to stay in power and finally ignore the election results from 1990.

The first step in the plan was to set up a national convention with the task of drawing up a new constitution. More than a thousand delegates were handpicked by the junta. Only a very few of them were politicians who had been elected to parliament in 1990. The convention assembled for the first time in 1993, and initially the NLD chose to cooperate in the process, despite Aung San Suu Kyi still being held under house arrest.

After that, Khin Nyunt succeeded in achieving a truce with most of the ethnic groups, who were tired of decades of war. None of them handed in their weapons, but they had realized that they would never be able to conquer the regime in Rangoon by military means.

Khin Nyunt's biggest victory was the agreement he concluded with the remaining members of the old communist party, the CPB, in the northeastern Shan state. The CPB had controlled the region since 1968, but China had withdrawn its support at the end of the 1980s, and the dissatisfaction among the soldiers had increased dramatically. The old leadership of the CPB refused, however, to give up and said no when Beijing offered them a place to retreat to in China. The troops mutinied in the spring of 1989, driving their leaders into a humiliating exile. What was left was a number of loosely connected armies. The biggest of them, with its base among the Wa people, took for itself the name United Wa State Army (UWSA).

Khin Nyunt called in the notorious drug smuggler Lo Hsing-Han to mediate between the junta and the new groups. The result was a truce with the regime that was reminiscent of the agreement Ne Win had concluded with the KKY units in the 1960s. UWSA received the green light to produce heroin and methamphetamine in return for a promise of support in the war against other guerrilla groups.

Some of the major resistance armies, such as the Karen National Liberation Army and the Shan State Army, still refused to cooperate, and the truce with the UWSA meant that the junta was able to send in greater military resources against the groups that were still at war. Step by step, often with extremely brutal methods, the SLORC gained control over regions that had previously been controlled by the ethnic groups.

Parallel to this, Khin Nyunt was also carrying on talks with Aung San Suu Kyi. Some of her earlier collaborators assert that she actually experienced these talks as being meaningful. At one meeting with Khin Nyunt,
she put forth a suggestion the gist of which was to open the NLD offices that had been closed and to allow the democratic opposition to elect its own delegates to the convention. It is possible that Khin Nyunt actually considered this, but that he was stopped by other powers within the junta.

On July 10, 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. In the few photographs of her that exist from those first days, she looks almost impudently full of energy. None of those who met her could see that she had just spent six years under house arrest. It was as though six years of isolation had just been a brief interlude, an unwelcome but manageable interruption to the work she had now made into the mission of her life.

Michael Aris was an academic and teacher, and he was happy with that life. However, during the first period of house arrest he also became Aung San Suu Kyi's mouthpiece in an international context. It was a public role that he neither liked nor felt especially suited to. Yet he persevered with bravura. He argued her and the Burmese democratic movement's case before the United Nations, innumerable human rights organizations, and foreign governments that wanted closer insight into the conditions at University Avenue.

“Michael was an impressive person,” says Peter Carey. “He had no ambition whatsoever to promote himself. He was really happiest out of the limelight, but now he had taken upon himself the task of supporting her, and this he did very skillfully. He emphasized her situation but was careful not to put his own words in her mouth. It was almost the role of a martyr, and unfortunately it ended up that way too.”

Michael Aris was driven by the will to protect his wife. “I was not a politician, nor am I Burmese,” said Michael. “I was literally just her husband and as her husband I did and said everything I could to get her released.”

According to friends of his at Oxford, he was convinced that the best method was publicity. By focusing the international spotlight on Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi was provided with a kind of life insurance. The generals would never be able to cause her any injury without being held responsible for it.

His hard work contributed to the fact that in the autumn of 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a distinction that suddenly placed her in the same category as Desmond Tutu, Lech Wałe˛sa, and Mother Teresa. The SLORC realized instantly that this was an extremely significant distinction and protested loudly, but they were not able to prevent Alexander and Kim from receiving the prize at the ceremony in Oslo. Alexander, who was nineteen at the time, made a speech of thanks on his mother's behalf.

I know that if she were free today my mother would, in thanking you, also ask you to pray that the oppressors and the oppressed should throw down their weapons and join together to build a nation founded on humanity in the spirit of peace.

Although my mother is often described as a political dissident who strives by peaceful means for democratic change, we should remember that her quest is basically spiritual. As she has said, “The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit,” and she has written of the “essential spiritual aims” of the struggle. The realization of this depends solely on human responsibility. At the root of that responsibility lies, and I quote, “the concept of perfection, the urge to achieve it, the intelligence to find a path toward it, and the will to follow that path if not to the end, at least the distance needed to rise above individual limitation.

“To live the full life,” she says, “one must have the courage to bear the responsibility of the needs of others . . . one must want to bear this responsibility.”

For Michael Aris, it was a moment filled with disparate feelings. Pride over Alexander's speech, which reached a whole world, was mixed with the longing for his wife. “It's a dark time,” said Michael at the press conference after the ceremony. His voice trembled and his eyes welled with tears. “But I'm sure there will be a change. I am optimistic about the future. Burma will open up. It's just a question of when.”

The junta chose to exploit Michael's public role in their own propaganda. That Aung San Suu Kyi was married to a “foreigner,” and furthermore one from the former colonial power, had been one of their main points of attack
right from the beginning. Now, in addition to this, he was acting as her defender, a piece of evidence as good as any that neocolonial conspiracy was being plotted against Burma. And they did all they could to drag their marriage in the mud. The author Barbara Victor met some of the generals during a trip to Burma in the mid-1990s.