Aung San Suu Kyi (27 page)

However, her new focus on religion and spirituality might just as well be interpreted as an attempt to talk about democracy and freedom in a way that connects with the more traditional Burmese way of thinking about societal matters. Michael Aung-Thwin, who worked together with Suu Kyi in Kyoto in the 1980s, has accused both her and the democratic movement of forcing the development of a “democratic jihad”: democracy at any price and according to a Western model. His criticism is reminiscent of the arguments the junta usually employs. Ever since the coup in 1962, the generals in Burma, as in many other dictatorships in the third world, have asserted that democracy is a Western import, foreign to the cultural and religious traditions of their own country. In Asia many rulers talk about “Asian values,” which is often just a way of excusing a continued totalitarian government.

Aung San Suu Kyi continues to show that striving for popular influence in the political decision-making body is not only common to all humanity but is also rooted in a tradition that is valid even in Burma. She has not written any more comprehensive political texts, and her long period of house arrest has prevented her from drawing up a more coherent, concrete description of her political program. However, by mirroring democracy and Buddhism in each other she actually makes an important contribution to the discussion of the legitimacy of democracy.

The years of isolation had not diminished Aung San Suu Kyi's popularity among the Burmese either. On the contrary, the isolation had increased the
mythmaking around her, and when she was released the interest in listening to her was greater than ever. During the first days after her release in the summer of 1995, thousands of people gathered outside her house. In the end, the pressure became so great that she and her helpers placed a table on the inside of the gate on University Avenue. She climbed up on the table with a broad smile on her lips. She was dressed in a green blouse and a grayish-blue longyi. Several NLD activists stood beside her and looked out over the crowds while she gave a short speech.

The following day even more people collected outside the gate. The NLD leaders repeated the same procedure once more, but the only effect was that even more people turned up the day after that. In the end they had to ration her appearances, and she started to give her speeches every Saturday at four o'clock in the afternoon. For many of the inhabitants of Rangoon this became almost their regular weekend outing. They brought food and drink with them and sat on blankets and waited until Aung San Suu Kyi's head became visible on the other side of the gate. She spoke for exactly one hour, mostly about political matters of course, about the SLORC, the imprisonment of NLD activists, and the basic principles behind a democratic system. However, after a time she placed a letterbox by the gate, where people could write questions that she later replied to and commented on during her weekend appearances. She spoke in an informal, almost easygoing tone, and she often joked with the crowds. The meetings were monitored by the security police, and Aung San Suu Kyi always finished her speech by calling on the crowds to be careful and to hurry on home. Her experience from the election campaign in 1989 made her wise to the fact that those who took part in her meetings always ran the risk of being arrested.

During a number of months in 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi was able to move about relatively freely, but that did not last long. Her last visit outside the capital was made early in the autumn of 1995. She traveled to a monastery on the Thamanya mountain, about eight hours' car journey from Rangoon. There she met Hsayadaw U Vinaya, one of Burma's most respected monks. After the massacres some years earlier, he had repudiated the junta and refused to accept the donations and benefits that the junta offered to the monasteries in order to acquire better karma for themselves after the bloody crackdowns on the monasteries following the elections in 1990. Aung San
Suu Kyi gave a detailed account of this visit in the book
Letters from Burma
, a collection of articles she wrote for a Japanese newspaper in the mid-1990s. She highlighted the monastery school among others, where 13 teachers gave tuition to 375 children from the district around the monastery, without any resources at all for schoolbooks or writing materials.

That journey became her last for a very long time. When she and the others in the NLD leadership were to attend a Karen new year's ceremony a few days before the new year, the junta explained that her freedom no longer meant that she could travel as she wanted in the country. On another occasion she was going to travel to Burma's second-largest city Mandalay in order to open a new NLD office there, but just before the train was about to leave, her carriage was uncoupled and left standing at the platform. Authorities placed blame on technical problems.

As soon as she left her home to visit friends or party activists in Rangoon, she was followed by a car full of security police and two police motorcycles. If she visited a restaurant in the evening, it sometimes happened that it had to shut down the day after, so her possibilities of any free movement among people were extremely limited.

A journalist inquired whether they were trying to break her down by means of surveillance. She replied, “If that is what they are trying to do, they will not succeed. Besides, it's almost touching to see how poorly they hide their surveillance. What's the point of a secret police if it's not secret?”

The same “secret” police continued simultaneously to arrest NLD supporters and to harass the meetings of the party. On Burma's day of independence Aung San Suu Kyi had invited people to a great celebration at 54 University Avenue; among the guests were two members of Moustache Brothers, a well-known group of comedians from Mandalay. When both of the comedians were about to leave the party, they were arrested by the police and sentenced to three years' hard labor in the Kachin state.

The junta had furthermore got hold of a new weapon in the battle against the democratic movement. In the spring of 1993, the junta leader Than Shwe founded the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA). The idea was to create a force in civil society that was loyal to the regime, in the same way that Golkar has been to the dictator Suhartu in Indonesia or the Chinese communist party to Mao. The plan was simple: every NLD meeting would be
disrupted by activists from USDA, which had the whole power apparatus at their disposal. The members were recruited more or less by force. School pupils were told that their school grades would deteriorate dramatically if they did not become members. Out in the rural areas, impoverished young people were recruited by being promised that their parents would not have to pay tax, or that they would avoid being conscripted into the army. In the villages, the USDA often took over the monopoly on violence previously held by the police force and sharpened the political surveillance. Its youth section developed into something that almost resembled an armed militia, in which the members were trained in the handling of weapons, the martial arts, and intelligence work, always in close cooperation with the security service. Their foremost assignment was to disrupt and sabotage the political meetings of the opposition.

At one meeting in the town of Inndaw in the autumn of 1996, the USDA's general secretary, U Win Sein, had made several incendiary attacks on Aung San Suu Kyi. He demanded of his followers that they should “exterminate” the causes of the country's internal political problems. “Do you understand what is meant by eradicated? Eradicated means to kill,” he yelled through his loudspeaker system and added, “Dare you kill Daw Suu Kyi?”

Later the same day, she and the rest of the party leadership were attacked when their cars were about to leave from a building in Rangoon. About two hundred USDA activists came after them with clubs and cobblestones. The car windows were smashed, but Aung San Suu Kyi succeeded in getting away unscathed. It later turned out that everyone who had taken part in the attack had received five thousand kyat, barely one week's wages, from the USDA. After several more attacks by the USDA, among others against a Buddhist ceremony at which Suu Kyi was present, she warned the world of that organization:

The world community must realize that the USDA is not an innocent social-welfare organization, as it claims to be, but an organization being used by the authorities as a gang of thugs. Their operations resemble those of the Nazi Brown Shirts. The SLORC sent people from this so-called social-welfare organization to beat up people taking part in a nonviolent, religious ceremony. I must say that that amounts to something very, very close to what the Brown Shirts used to do in Germany.

In the autumn of 1997, the SLORC changed its name to State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), and the propaganda intimated that it would mean a change politically as well. Some of the junta's members were picked out and accused of corruption, but just as it meant nothing when Burma changed its name to Myanmar, so in the same way this change meant nothing in practice. Bertil Lintner disclosed later that the junta had employed the American public relations firm Bain and Associates Inc., which had recommended a cosmetic rearrangement to quiet international criticism.

Rajsoomer Lallah pointed out that no improvements in human rights whatsoever had occurred during recent years. He had just taken over the role of the United Nations special envoy for human rights. In November 1998 United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan once more invited the SPDC to initiate a dialogue with the democratic opposition and the ethnic minorities. However, no dialogue came about this time either.

In the mid-1990s it also became apparent that the NLD had internal problems. First, there was hardly anything left of the organization that had been built up during the election campaign in 1989. Most of the party offices had been forced to close, several hundred leading activists were in prison, and the restrictions concerning Aung San Suu Kyi's freedom of movement prevented a rapid reconstruction of the party.

Second, the junta's arrests, torture, and harassment made several leading representatives defect from the party and openly reject Aung San Suu Kyi. The first to defect was Ma Thanegi, one of the women who had been in the NLD leadership group and who had walked behind Aung San Suu Kyi when the rifle was aimed at them in Danubyu during the election campaign in 1989. Ma Thanegi had spent three years in prison, and now she accused Aung San Suu Kyi of being too dogmatic, stubborn, and unwilling to really solve the country's problems. She wrote an article in
Far Eastern Economic Review
in which she encouraged the international community not to see Burma as a game between good and evil, black and white. There are always gray zones, she wrote, and the answers to a country's problems are never simple.

The core of her criticism was the sanctions. Influenced by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, Aung San Suu Kyi had exhorted the world at large to direct economic sanctions at Burma. Her exhortation concerned trade and commerce, and investments in tourism. (In a country like Burma
it is very difficult to travel as a tourist without the money one spends ending up in the pockets of the regime.) Ma Thanegi did not make these charges explicit, but between the lines one could read that she recommended foreign capital and investments to solve the country's problems. She also accused Aung San Suu Kyi of blocking a dialogue with the junta. Instead of initiating talks with the generals, she had chosen to put pressure on the junta and ask the world to desist from providing aid and economic support.

Her attack received much attention and was supported by the circle of businessmen who had found their way to Burma after the economic liberalization, as well as by several foreign diplomats in Rangoon, whose view was that the politics of isolation were a thing of the past.

However, the greatest loss of all for the NLD was still perhaps U Kyi Maung's defection. He had been one of Aung San Suu Kyi's closest collaborators and the chairman of the party during the election campaign. U Kyi Maung had earlier made an ambivalent statement that Suu Kyi was devoted, on the verge of being fanatical, and he had made it clear that he understood this to be a flaw. Rumors now had it that he defected in protest against her leadership. Later on, twenty-five of the parliamentarians who had been elected from the NLD in 1990 wrote an open letter in which they accused Aung San Suu Kyi of blocking any meaningful dialogue with the junta.

Was there any truth in their criticism?

On the one hand, the answer is no. This criticism, which has been part of the political discourse since then, is bizarre. What can one really expect of a person who has spent so many years under house arrest and seen her own friends and colleagues die in the country's prisons? Furthermore, ever since she came forward as the leader of the democratic movement, she has wished for a dialogue with the junta. When she was released after her first house arrest, what she first requested was precisely talks, not any immediate and unconditional capitulation by the generals. It was the junta that refused to conduct talks with her. In one interview with
Asia Week
in 1999 she even opened up the possibility of carrying on talks with the junta at a lower level and that she herself did not necessarily need to be at the table. Several times in the 1990s she emphasized that she was not necessarily striving for any formal political position for herself. Even in that way she was seeking to emulate Gandhi.

That attitude can be called neither dogmatic nor inflexible, and the criticism against her must be seen as partly an effect of the junta's propaganda, and partly that of an increasing frustration in sections of the democratic movement over the fact that developments were standing, and remain standing, still.

Burma has gotten stuck at rock bottom, and in that situation there are many who hope for something, almost anything, that can kic-kstart the process of change.

On the other hand, it may be a problem that the democratic movement is so dependent on Aung San Suu Kyi, and that it is really impossible to criticize her without seeming to support the SPDC. There is probably also some truth to the accusation that she is intractably stubborn—which is good and bad—and that she made a number of statements after her first house arrest that may be perceived as both dogmatic and severe. “It's us or utter devastation,” she said, for example, at a press conference a few weeks after her release. Several years later, during dinner at a restaurant in the Shan state, she revealed to a close friend that if there was anything that she regretted from those years in the 1990s, it was precisely those words. It was really U Tin Oo who had used them to describe the significance of the democratic movement for the future of Burma, and she had repeated them as a way of honoring her older party comrade. However, it was far too rhetorical, she admitted, and it was exploited time after time by the junta to stamp her as a person who would rather sacrifice Burma's economic development than her own political career.