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  AUNG SAN SUU KYI

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  AUNG SAN SUU KYI

  A Biography

  JESPER BENGTSSON

  Copyright © 2012 by Jesper Bengtsson

  Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Originally published in Swedish in 2010 by Norstedts (Stockholm) as En kamp för frihet: Aung San Suu Kyi—Biografi. This Englishlanguage edition was translated by Margaret Myers. Published by agreement with Norstedts Agency.

  The author reserves the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in all countries where moral rights exist in law.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bengtsson, Jesper, 1968–

  [Kamp för frihet. English]

  Aung San Suu Kyi : a biography / Jesper Bengtsson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-61234-159-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-61234-160-6 (electronic edition)

  1. Aung San Suu Kyi. 2. Women political activists—Burma—Biography. 3. Burma—

  Politics and government—1948– 4. Democracy—Burma. I. Title.

  DS530.53.A85B46 2012

  959.105’3092—dc23

  [B]

  2011045398

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

  Potomac Books

  22841 Quicksilver Drive

  Dulles, Virginia 20166

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  “The greatest sacrifice as a mother was to do without my sons, but I knew that there were those who had had to make even greater sacrifices. Clearly I did not make this choice lightheartedly, but I made it without reservations and without any hesitation. But still I wish that I had not had to miss out on those years in my children’s lives. I would much rather have shared a life with them.”

  —AUNG SAN SUU KYI IN CHEE SOON JUAN’S TO BE FREE

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  1 “I Have Always Felt Free

  2 The Swimmer

  3 The Homecoming

  4 The Heritage

  5 The Shots at the Secretariat

  6 The Election Campaign

  7 Childhood

  8 Suu from Burma

  9 Family Life in a Knapsack

  10 House Arrest

  11 The World Wakes Up

  12 “My Suu”

  13 The Murder Attempt

  14 The Saffron Revolution

  15 All These Anniversaries

  Sources and Support

  About the Author 229

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Family gathered in Rangoon when Aung San Suu Kyi is one year old

  Meeting at National League for Democracy’s head office (spring 1989)

  With high school classmates (1959–1960)

  The wedding of Aung San Suu Kyi and Michael Aris (January 1, 1972)

  Aung San Suu Kyi with her two sons, Kim and Alexander (1989)

  1

  “I Have Always Felt Free”

  It’s been fifteen years since I first visited Burma. Looking back I realize that I made the trip almost by coincidence. My girlfriend at the time had arrived there one year earlier, and she had talked about the trip constantly for twelve months. She praised the beauty of the country and condemned the poverty and the ruthless military dictatorship. Back then I was a freelancing journalist and decided to go there myself to see what all the fuss was about.

  I was hooked from the first second. Talking to democracy activists— Burmese students living in exile, regular people in the streets who approached you to give their view on the situation in Burma—and meeting people from the various ethnic groups made me understand the importance of Burma. Not only for its own sake, though that’s reason enough, but also for its relevance on a more universal level. Study Burma and you’ll find links to some of the most fundamental questions in politics today. How can we support democratic development in nondemocratic states? How does a state that once had a bright future become such a failure? How should we deal with ethnic conflicts in a postcolonial world? What does the rise of Chinese power mean to international relations and peace building?

  What struck me most on my first visit to Burma in the 1990s was, of course, none of these theoretical questions. It was the immense poverty. And when I returned again in early February 2011, little had changed. The cracks in the streets in downtown Rangoon are the same, the town’s houses as battered as ever, and the children begging for a few kyats even more persistent than I remember them.

  One thing is different, though: the luxury is more evident. From that point of view the military regime has succeeded. Since the regime started to privatize the economy twenty years ago in an attempt to emulate China (liberalizing the economy while continuing to suppress political dissent), a few have become filthy rich, but most people still live in extreme poverty. Foreign investors can be seen in the streets of Rangoon and Mandalay, mainly Chinese and Thai businessmen, but also a few Americans and Europeans. Burmese families with close ties to the military elite live in extreme wealth in old colonial mansions on the outskirts of the big cities.

  Traveling by taxi from downtown to the headquarters of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), gives you a glimpse of all this: the beggars, the women cooking in the streets, the workers trying to fix façades of the old colonial buildings, recently renovated villas around Swedagon, and some of the fancy hotels for Westerners.

  Compared to the hotels, the headquarters of NLD is so unappealing that you almost miss it. The office is located over a furniture shop. It has one small room where Aung San Suu Kyi works and a slightly bigger room where meetings with party officials are held. A narrow stair connects the office section with a public space next to the furniture shop. Here, anyone can enter to meet with other party members, organize local party groups, ask for legal advice, or just stop by for a cup of green tea or a rice and curry.

  Paying the cab driver I notice two serious-looking guys sitting outside a teahouse on the other side of the street. They wear sunglasses and white shirts; seeing me, they raise their cameras and shoot a couple of pictures. A friend of mine who was at the headquarters a couple of weeks before had warned me about the intelligence officers; they have been there, watching the NLD office from the tea shop, since the day Aung San Suu Kyi was released in November 2010. They try to snap a photo of every Westerner who’s meeting her, to make sure the visitors never again get a visa to Burma. That’s the risk I take in seeking a meeting with her. Some journalists have even tried to mask themselves with sunglasses and a hat to avoid being recognized, but I simply don’t care. If they manage to pick me out from one of their pictures and use it against me the next time I try to visit Burma, so be it.

  I enter the public area in the office. It’s full of life, very different from the previous times I’ve been here. But during those times, Suu Kyi had
been under house arrest and her party under severe pressure from the regime. The pressure is still there, but her release has given the democracy movement a lot of new energy.

  I grab a cup of tea, take a seat on one of the rickety plastic chairs, and wait for my appointment, which was quite a challenge to secure. Before leaving Sweden I was in contact with a friend in the Burmese exile movement based in Thailand. He arranged for me to meet Aung San Suu Kyi on a Friday. But when I got to Rangoon I realized it was all a misunderstanding. “Sorry,” the young woman in the reception area said, “but you have to wait for at least two weeks. The Lady [as she is respectfully referred to in Burma] has been sick for a week, and now she is very busy.”

  My plane back to Bangkok and Stockholm was to depart a week later, so I couldn’t wait that long.

  I had made plans with this risk in mind and I had several other interesting appointments scheduled, but when I tried to convince myself that the cancellation didn’t matter I felt like Cinderella in the Disney movie, standing in her tower, telling herself that a ball at the royal palace would be dreary and boring. To be honest, it felt like someone had hit me with a jackhammer. The first edition of this book had already been published in Sweden, based on interviews with colleagues and friends of Aung San Suu Kyi and written material, both by herself and by journalists and authors. But I hadn’t met her myself. She had been under house arrest for many years without any chance for anyone to see her. Now I wanted to get her own perspective on the situation in Burma and her life after her release.

  My optimism mounted again when I had the opportunity to engage in a long and interesting interview with U Win Tin, the eighty-one-year-old author and activist who up until recently spent twenty years in prison for his involvement with the democracy movement. He told me about his life in prison, the poetry he wrote on the walls during periods of solitary confinement, the use of civil disobedience, and how he and some cell mates had made a small “prison magazine” on tiny pieces of paper and secretly distributed it to other prisoners. And finally, after an hour, he promised to help me set up a meeting with the Lady.

  Now it’s Monday, and after a while in the public area, with the intelligence officers raising their cameras every time I look out through the main door, a staff member takes me upstairs. I sit down in a tiny waiting area with the blue paint peeling from the walls. Suddenly the wooden door to the office flings open and I stand face-to-face with one of the world’s most famous and admired women.

  Most journalists who meet Aung San Suu Kyi make comments about her looks and I had decided to avoid that (somehow male politicians never get such comments), but it is impossible not to notice her striking appearance. She is wearing a purple longyi (a Burmese sarong) and a pink shirt, and she has the trademark jasmine flowers in her hair. She celebrated her sixty-fifth birthday last summer and had been under house arrest for fifteen of the past twenty-one years. Still, she looks more like a woman of forty-five, and she has the energy of someone even younger. The hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people who saw her first public appearance after her release in November, during which she gave a speech in front of the headquarters building, made the same observation.

  “She has experienced more challenges than most people do in a lifetime, and still she looked as if she was back from a two-week vacation,” said an international observer who followed the event in Rangoon.

  We sit down on a sofa, a few feet away from each other. She seems relaxed and perfectly composed. I ask her about her energy and apparently good mood. “It’s not strange at all,” she says with an ironic glint in her eyes. “The military gave me seven years of rest, so now I’m full of energy to continue my work.”

  Someone with a less optimistic view of life would define those seven years as “wasted,” but not this Nobel Prize laureate and democratic icon. She has survived all these years of isolation by embracing it and choosing to see the benefits rather than the obvious downsides.

  “I have always felt free,” she says, laughing. “When my lawyers came to see me during the house arrest I was perfectly free to talk about anything I wanted.”

  She notices a skeptical expression on my face and continues: “I think freedom has two aspects. The first is your own state of mind. If you feel free, you are free. I think sometimes if you are alone, your time is your own and therefore you are more free. The other one is the environmental aspect. Is your environment free? And mine is certainly not because I don’t think Burma is really a free country.”

  I meet her at a time when revolutions and popular uprisings are changing the political structure in much of the Arab world. The Burmese regime tries to block information about these developments from reaching the people, scared that the turmoil could spill over to Burma, but everyone knows about it anyway.

  “They are not allowed to publish anything about it in the newspapers here,” says Aung San Suu Kyi, “but a lot of people have heard about it. On the radio and through the Internet. However totalitarian a government is, people do get to know what’s going on. That’s very different from when I was arrested the first time, in 1989. As a matter of fact it’s very different even from seven years ago when I was arrested the latest time.”

  Obviously the regime is so eager to control the news about the Arab uprisings because there are similarities to the revolt in Burma in 1988—the events that finally made Aung San Suu Kyi step forward and become the leading figure of the democracy movement. But she also sees some differences.

  “Everywhere, all over the world, people do get tired of oppression and dictatorship. This kind of thing always happens in one way or the other. But I think people have to remember that it has taken years for this kind of development. For example, Egypt has been under military rule since the early fifties. And to some extent it’s the same with Tunisia. The demonstrations seem to have changed things rather quickly, but you have to consider the long years it has taken for these countries to arrive at this point. But the military in Egypt decided not to shoot at the people. That’s very different from what happened in Burma.”

  The last time Aung San Suu Kyi was free, for almost two years in 2002 and 2003, she was allowed to continue her political work. NLD organized a number of tours in the country and tens of thousands of people came to listen to her speeches, though the junta officially claimed, falsely, that her star was falling and that interest in her politics was diminishing. This time she says that no restrictions are placed upon her. She is supposed to be free to do whatever she wants and to travel freely around the country. But the junta has stated this before, without showing any obvious indications of a guilty conscience when the generals failed to live up to it. When I met her in February 2011 she still hadn’t tested the limits.

  “My schedule has been full with meetings and appointments in Rangoon and my office,” she says, “so there has simply not been enough time to travel around the country.”

  She has met an almost endless string of party members, diplomats, foreign politicians, and journalists. Her face has been on the cover, or her name in the headlines, of the Times, Financial Times, Al Jazeera, BBC, and several other international media outlets. She has also met with many other political groups in Burma, both other parties and representatives from the country’s major ethnic minorities.

  From her first comments and interviews it was clear that Aung San Suu Kyi was more searching, less sure about the political environment than she had been seven years ago. As she’s done so many times before, she talked about the importance of dialogue. “I want to hear the voice of the people,” she said in her first speech. “After that we will decide what we want to do. I want to work with all democratic forces.”

  The last comment was a direct reference to the fact that the democracy movement in Burma split over the junta-controlled elections held only days before her release. A few democratic parties decided to field candidates in the elections, among them the National Democratic Front (NDF), a group founded by former members of her own NLD, which, togeth
er with several of the ethnic minority groups, had decided to boycott the elections. Suu Kyi tells me that she has met with people from the NDF as well but only on “a personal level,” not as representatives from the party.

  After her release she also proposed a new “Panglong conference” among the junta, the democratic movement, and the ethnic minorities. Back in 1940 her father, Aung San, held a conference in the town of Panglong, where he convinced several of the minorities to join the new Union of Burma and accept a federal constitution with great respect for the minorities’ rights to self-determination. Many groups have called for a new meeting like that to deal with Burma’s present problems.

  With her trademark capacity for forgiveness, Aung San Suu Kyi has stated that she doesn’t bear any grudges nor feel any hatred for her oppressors, despite her long house arrest. She wants to talk with the generals, not get back at them, and she has repeatedly said that she respects them as human beings though she “is critical of some of their actions.” The junta leader and the state propaganda in Burma have spent the past twenty-one years trying to portray Suu Kyi as a dogmatic Western-influenced troublemaker. Her plea for reconciliation and for a dialogue including all ethnic groups stands in almost amusing contradiction to this.

  So far her release has brought at least one major change to Burma: the democratic movement has been rejuvenated. It’s obvious when you see the slightly chaotic activity on the ground floor of the headquarters as well as Aung San Suu Kyi’s own agenda. Right after my interview with her, she would meet with two hundred young activists from all around Burma. After the meeting they will go back home and start organizing youth groups.

  “Obviously I wasn’t here during my arrest so I can’t compare,” she says, “but I think it’s more energetic now. The day after my release I said I wanted to build up a new network and that has taken off. Not that everyone is joining NLD, but we have found that there are small groups in the civil society all over the place and they connect to us. They want to be a part of our network, and that’s very refreshing to see.”