Aung San Suu Kyi (28 page)

The image of Aung San Suu Kyi is, in other words, more split than one might perceive at first glance. An image emerges of a person who is prepared to negotiate almost anything if only it leads to greater openness and democracy, but who also makes certain basic demands of her counterpart. The junta must release all political prisoners, allow the NLD to be active, and permit Aung San Suu Kyi herself freedom of movement.

When those demands—perfectly reasonable—are not met, she can be just as stubborn as her critics assert.

The junta was made to experience this, if nothing else, in the summer of 1998. For over two years they had refused to carry on any kind of meaningful talks and prevented her from leaving Rangoon. She had done all she
could to restore the NLD organization in the capital, but she had also been harassed during that work. On May 27, members of the NLD gathered at a congress that had been hastily announced and at which they demanded that the junta should convene in August at the latest the parliament that had been elected in 1990. As usual the junta responded by arresting a few dozen of those who had been elected, in order to make an example of them.

In that situation, Aung San Suu Kyi decided to test the limits of her own freedom of movement. Twice during the summer of 1998 she attempted to leave Rangoon by car, but both times she was stopped by the police. On July 22 she made a third attempt. She got into a car along with an assistant and two chauffeurs. They drove west toward Bassein in the Irrawaddy Delta. After twenty miles they were stopped by armed police. Aung San Suu Kyi refused to turn back, however, and for six days the whole of her party slept in the car, watched by the police and international media. They had no food with them and only a limited amount of water, and the police saw to it that nobody could reach them with supplies. Later on the police decided that enough was enough. They jerked open the doors of the car and threw out the chauffeurs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was lying asleep in the back, was pushed violently down into the seat, and then the car was driven back to University Avenue.

Aung San Suu Kyi was furious. “They kidnapped me. They even stole my car,” she said via a spokesperson, and she promised to make a new attempt to leave the capital as soon as she had recovered her strength.

The moment was strategically chosen. While Aung San Suu Kyi was spending the nights in the backseat of a car on the outskirts of Rangoon, the ASEAN was holding a meeting in the capital city of the Philippines, Manila. The U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was present at the meeting, and along with her colleagues from the ASEAN countries she put pressure on Burma's representatives to release Aung San Suu Kyi and initiate a dialogue with the democratic movement. The spokesperson for the SPDC, Hla Min, rejected the criticism with irritation and accused Suu Kyi of having consciously provoked the clash so that Madeleine Albright would have an excuse to attack Burma.

During the autumn, the NLD formed a committee to represent the popularly elected parliament, and the junta responded by once more increasing
the pressure. Over a thousand NLD activists were imprisoned or forced to reject the party. Several popularly elected parliamentarians were arrested in so-called guesthouses, and the junta explained that they would stay there until they had been put through a “reforming education.” If there had been any trust between Khin Nyunt and Aung San Suu Kyi in 1994, it had now definitely been demolished. In January 1999, the NLD handed in a summons in which the powerful chief of the security police was accused of undermining and sabotaging a political party that had every right to act freely according to Burmese legislation.

And at that exact moment, when the situation in Burma was at its most dramatic, something happened in Oxford that changed everything: Michael Aris was told that he had cancer.

Some very heavy years for the family had passed. While the boys had of course suffered severely from not having their mother for six years, they had never complained or for one moment criticized Suu Kyi for her decision to remain in Rangoon. Alexander was already in the process of leaving home when she was confined to house arrest, and he moved to the United States to study. Kim was just on his way into his teens and missing his mother. Michael had also been given a post as guest researcher at Harvard in 1990, and for two years Kim stayed at the home of Michael's sister, Lucinda Phillips, and her spouse, Adrienne. “The house was not the same without the restless, creative presence of Suu,” he said much later on, when he had married and started a family, and was working in Oxford. “There were always friends coming and things happening, and we had some fantastic travels. Without her, I suppose we lived a simpler life.”

The family traveled to Burma twice after her release in 1995, the first time in the summer and then around Christmas. After that Kim received permission to travel there twice by himself during the years that followed. He stayed with her for a couple of weeks at a time. Since the family had always been very strict about the boys' right to a private life, nothing has ever been written about these occasions. The only thing Suu Kyi has mentioned is an anecdote about how Kim taught her to listen to reggae and rock during one of his visits. When he first arrived, he walked around with a Walkman all day every day, with the music at full volume in his headphones. Suu Kyi became worried that he would injure his hearing so she allowed
him to play his CDs on the stereo in the house. She, who had never listened to anything other than classical music, found herself liking Bob Marley as well as the Grateful Dead.

Michael Aris had not been given an entry visa since 1995, despite having applied several times. Life had carried on. He continued his work as a teacher and researcher and among other things been one of the people who founded a center for Tibetan studies at the University of Oxford. Just before Christmas Eve in 1998, he was informed that he had prostate cancer. In the days between Christmas and New Year's he called his friend Peter Carey. “I've got one piece of bad news and one piece of good news,” he had said to Peter Carey. “The bad news is that I've got cancer. The good news is I'm going to beat it.”

Then he received new test results showing that the illness had spread to his lungs and spine. He understood that he did not have much time left and immediately applied for a visa to Burma. He wanted to see his wife one last time. However, he was denied an entry visa even on this occasion. The medical system in Burma did not have the resources to take care of him, the junta explained in a statement, and they then suggested that Aung San Suu Kyi “who is in good health is free to travel to England to meet her dying husband who desperately wants to meet her.” It must have been a terribly hard decision, but after having discussed the matter several times on the telephone they decided unanimously that she must stay. The junta wished for nothing better than to be rid of her. If she left the country, the generals would prevent her from returning, and the struggle of the past years would have been in vain. During the winter and spring, while Michael was in the hospital, they talked to each other every evening. The junta had still not allowed Suu Kyi to connect a telephone, so she had to go to the home of a foreign diplomat in Rangoon in order to receive Michael's calls. This worked until the junta understood what they were doing, and one evening the telephone line died as soon as they had said hello to each other. The diplomat has described how he saw Suu Kyi weep for the first time at that moment.

Alexander had moved to the United States to study, and he now returned temporarily to Oxford to be close to his father. He and Kim did not agree with their parents. They longed for their mother and they also wanted their parents
to be together during the last period of Michael's life. “You can imagine how hard it was to deny them that,” Suu Kyi said later.

A broad international campaign started to persuade the generals to change their decision. Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, and even the pope, John Paul II, appealed to the junta to let Michael Aris enter Burma. But nothing helped. He died on his birthday: March 27, 1999.

“They were very similar to each other,” says Debbie Stothard, who got to know Michael during the years she was working for Suu Kyi. Debbie had been on a visit to Europe in 1998 and he had invited her to Oxford.

Kim and Alexander with their mother during a visit to Rangoon after the first house arrest (1989).
Courtesy of Norstedts.

“It was fascinating to see the house at 15 Park Town,” she says. “He had decorated it almost as homage to Suu Kyi. Portraits of her hung everywhere and plaques and pictures from all the prizes she had received during the years.” When they had talked for a few hours, Michael Aris insisted on driving her back to the railway station, so that she would be sure to arrive there safely.

“That was also typical,” she says, laughing. “I've traveled all over the world and would have been able to get myself to the station without any problem. But he had the same kind of human caring as Suu Kyi. She is always very concerned about her colleagues. She worries about their families, sees to it that they eat properly and makes tea for them when they need a break. He did the same kind of thing. They were like twins.”

On their way to the station they passed through central Oxford, and Michael Aris pointed out places that Suu Kyi used to visit. “That was where my Suu used to go when the children were small,” he said as they drove past a park. Or “that was where my Suu used to work,” when they passed the Bodleian Library. It was as though he had carved out a sphere that was
only theirs, against the background of the last years of public life. A map of common memories. Ann Pasternak Slater has perhaps captured something of the relationship between them in her essay on Suu Kyi. At the end of her text she quotes the poet W. B. Yeats: “How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false and true. / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.”

“It's my belief that it was the distance that killed him,” says Peter Carey. “It was very heavy for him not to be able to meet Suu, at the same time as he had to take care of everything at home in England. He was a clever Tibetologist, he wrote books and looked after the children, while being a public person. He really had no private life to call his own after 1988, but I never heard him complain. He did all this first and foremost because he was fond of Suu.”

The tugofwar between Aung San Suu Kyi and the junta continued into 2000, until Suu Kyi decided to test the limits once more. She got into a car, just as she had done two years earlier, this time along with her party colleague, the almost eighty-year-old U Tin Oo. Fourteen youths from the NLD, who were living in an annex on the grounds of Lake Inya, drove first in a Toyota pickup truck. When they came to Dala on the other side of the Rangoon River, the road was blocked by two military trucks, and just as in 1998, Aung San Suu Kyi refused to turn back.

“The soldiers got very frustrated,” says Maung, one of the young students who sat in the back of the pickup truck in front of Suu Kyi's car. I met him in Rangoon in 2010. “The chauffeur locked the steering wheel so that they wouldn't be able to roll the car off the road and they didn't know what to do to make her turn around. They sat on the hood and rocked the car so that it moved a couple of centimeters. In the end the car was quite simply lifted off the road by a group of soldiers.”

There they remained for nine days.

“The first four days were extremely exhausting,” says Maung. “We only had some biscuits to eat and barely any water. Those of us who had traveled in the pickup truck had to take turns in sleeping, and most of us just lay down on the ground outside the car with a jacket as our pillow. However,
we had decided to endure it. Daw Suu Kyi was almost sixty years old and U Tin Oo was almost eighty. If they could manage it then so could we.”

After four days they received permission to leave the cars and buy food and drink in the village nearby. They rigged up a piece of cloth outside Suu Kyi's car to protect her from the worst of the midday sun. The junta's propaganda apparatus then started to present it all as an “excursion” or a “tea party.” In order to reinforce this impression, the military brought in loudspeakers that played “Material Girl” by Madonna at top volume.

“They don't even know what music I like,” said Aung San Suu Kyi later, with a laugh, when she recounted the incident.

The United States and the European Union condemned the junta's action and demanded that Suu Kyi be allowed to travel freely and meet her party comrades in other parts of the country. The junta gave their standard reply that the restrictions were in place for her own security. In an official statement they explained that the population in Dala did not approve of the sanctions against Burma and that their “anger” might lead to violence against Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. The only people who were surprised by that statement were probably the villagers in Dala.