Aung San Suu Kyi
Authors: Jesper Bengtsson
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
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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 KyiâBiografi.
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, 1968â
 [Kamp för frihet. English]
 Aung San Suu Kyi : a biography / Jesper Bengtsson.â1st 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 activistsâBurmaâBiography. 3. Burmaâ
Politics and governmentâ1948â 4. DemocracyâBurma. I. Title.
  DS530.53.A85B46 2012
  959.105'3092âdc23
  [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
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First Edition
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“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.”
âAUNG SAN SUU KYI IN CHEE SOON JUAN'S
TO BE FREE
5 The Shots at the Secretariat
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 (1959â1960)
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)
“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 activistsâ Burmese students living in exile, regular people in the streets who approached you to give their view on the situation in Burmaâand 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.”
