Aung San Suu Kyi (3 page)

This is not a complete biography of Aung San Suu Kyi. Such a project would have required her own participation from the start. The major part of this book was written during her house arrest. My interview with her in 2011 was a way to learn her views of the situation in Burma and her own plans for the future. As a matter of fact she has not talked much about her background after her release. Her schedule has been full of more urgent events, and her focus is on the politics of Burma and the democracy movement.

Aung San Suu Kyi is of course sixty-five years old now, but in all probability she has many years left as an active politician. If the military power falls, she will be of decisive significance for a free and democratic Burma. Hopefully, that chapter in her life remains to be written.

This is a story about Aung San Suu Kyi and about Burma, though it doesn't start with either of them. It starts in May 2009 with a fifty-three-year-old American man who decided to take a swim in Lake Inya.

God had appeared to him in a dream and given him a mission. Visions of great clarity had streamed through John's head. He had seen himself swimming across a dark lake and clambering ashore near a house of white stone. Sheltered by the darkness, he had stood by a door. Behind it there was a woman whom he was to save from being murdered.

The dream was easy to interpret. He had been at that spot only a few months earlier but had been turned away, so now he was compelled to make a new attempt. If he refrained, he would never be able to live with himself. Only two years earlier he had dreamed that his son Clint would die in a motorcycle accident. On that occasion he had not paid any attention to the warning, and when Clint perished in precisely such an accident a few weeks later, his grief was exacerbated by the fact that he could have prevented the tragedy.

The period after the accident had been dark and dismal, and he was not intending to make the same mistake again. That was why he now lay on his stomach in a drainage pipe on the outskirts of Rangoon. His clothes were covered with clay and water. A couple of minutes earlier there had been a close call. Two armed guards in green uniforms had walked by on the track leading around the lake. They passed him just at the opening of the drainage pipe so he had flung himself flat out into the muck and crawled forward in
the way he had learned in the army more than thirty years ago. The pipe was around fifteen feet long and it gently sloped downward. The water level rose the closer he got to the mouth. It only took a couple of minutes, and then he was immersed in the cool waters of Lake Inya. There was a sudden splash when his two fully packed plastic bags broke the surface of the water; otherwise, there was silence.

He started to swim, but realizing that he could touch bottom, he took a couple of steps forward instead. He felt impeded by the clumsy flippers made out of hard corrugated cardboard that he had taped around his sandals a few minutes earlier.

Just then both soldiers caught sight of him. Or rather they caught sight of the plastic bags that bobbed up and down on the waves, hiding his head. One of the soldiers picked up a stone and chucked it toward him. It hit the surface a few centimeters in front of his face. Then there was another stone, and yet another. They were aiming at the target, as though they were trying to sink the plastic bags, and they seemed not to understand that a middleaged Westerner was behind the floating objects. Slowly he tried to move the bags in time with the waves, and then suddenly the soldiers appeared to get bored. They turned and went away. He had pulled it off.

It took him a good while to reach his goal. Sometimes the water got deeper and he had to swim. When he saw the house with its white stone façade stained by damp, he knew that he had made it. He waded the last few yards with the plastic bags hanging loosely by his sides. He was tired and thought to himself that he was making terrible noise. But the darkness was impenetrable and none of the guards in front of the building could see him. Some steps led up to a veranda. On the last occasion when he had been there the house staff had turned him away. He had not been allowed to enter and therefore not been able to deliver his important message. All he had done was to hand over some books about the Mormon Church. He wondered sometimes whether the woman in the house had read them and whether she had understood anything of the message.

It was as he had assumed: the veranda door was unlocked. He opened it slowly, carefully, and then suddenly he was standing inside the house. In the dark room he could see two women staring at him. They looked astonished, almost shocked.

The time was five o'clock in the evening on May 4, 2009, and John Yettaw had just realized his dream. He had made his way into Aung San Suu Kyi's house by Lake Inya in Rangoon.

It is still unclear what John Yettaw, a fifty-three-year-old Mormon from the state of Missouri, hoped to achieve by his visit to one of the world's most famous and respected political prisoners. When he clambered out of the waters of Lake Inya that night in May, Aung San Suu Kyi had been under house arrest for fourteen of the last twenty years, and during the past six years she had been almost totally isolated from the outside world. Only a few people had met her: two domestic servants (they were the women who had met John Yettaw at the door of the veranda), her doctor, a contact person in the democratic movement, and, on rare occasions, representatives from the international community.

It is possible that Yettaw saw himself as the hero in a drama in which Aung San Suu Kyi would regain her freedom. In the two black plastic bags he was carrying among other items two black chadors—Muslim headdresses that cover the body from head to knee. Yettaw seems to have been planning on disguising himself and Aung San Suu Kyi in this garb, and then leaving the house via the main entrance. He does not seem to have reflected on exactly why the guards would accept two Muslim women from nowhere suddenly coming out of the house where Burma's most well-guarded political prisoner was to be found.

He was allowed a few hours' sleep on the floor in the hall, and as soon as darkness had fallen, he was transported away and let go, only to be seized the day after outside a shopping center in central Rangoon. The security services had clearly been keeping a watch on him and had only been waiting for the right moment. Shortly afterward Aung San Suu Kyi and her two domestic servants were also arrested.

To the military junta, Yettaw's little swim was like a gift from the gods. Aung San Suu Kyi's latest house arrest had begun in May 2003 and was due to expire only a few days later. According to Burmese law, the junta would be unable to detain her without first having her sentenced in a court of law. Releasing her was unthinkable. Burma found itself in far too sensitive a
situation and the military junta's entire possession of power was at stake.

Barely two years earlier, in the autumn of 2007, the demonstrations of the Buddhist monks known collectively as the saffron revolution had focused the eyes of the world on the junta's violations of power. These huge public protests broke out after the junta had scrapped petrol, gas, and other fuel subsidies, which doubled fuel prices overnight. People suddenly had to invest their entire monthly income in fuel. However, at that point the unrest had been seething just below the surface for several years. Despite the efforts of the junta to open up the economy to the world at large, significant sectors had remained under the iron control of the state. All exports and imports require licenses, which entail masses of paperwork and corruption. The rice market is totally in the hands of companies that are directly or indirectly controlled by the junta. Trade with neighboring countries is rendered more difficult by the wretched state of the roads and railways, and many of the most vital everyday commodities are in shortage.

In other words, there were strong breeding grounds for the protests of September 2007. For several weeks the whole world followed the tens of thousands of monks who went out in the streets in protest against decades of power abuse, and the whole world was appalled when the junta quickly and efficiently crushed the revolt. The violence led to massive international protests. Both the United States and the European Union increased their sanctions against the country, and for the first time ever the crisis in Burma was placed on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. Up until then China and Russia had blocked all attempts to put more intense pressure on the military junta. The Security Council demanded that a stop be put to the violence and that a dialogue be initiated between the junta and the opposition.

But even if the junta seemed superficially prepared to have talks with Suu Kyi, nothing happened in practice. The demands of the United Nations were principally met with arrogance and silence, and the world organization had no chance of carrying the question any further.

Barely a year later, on May 2, 2008, Hurricane Nargis slammed the Burmese coast. Vast areas of the densely populated Irrawaddy Delta were inundated by the waters. In retrospect, it is almost touching to read the Western media's reporting on what would later turn out to be an extreme natural disaster.
Even in Rangoon, which was far from the most severely hit regions, trees had been dragged up by their roots. Whole blocks had been on the point of collapse. Even 54 University Avenue, Suu Kyi's home by Lake Inya, had had its roof torn off by the storm gusts.

Nonetheless, both the Burmese authorities and Western media played down the damage. On May 5, the UK newspaper
Daily Mail
reported that “at least 350 people” had been killed by the hurricane. Three days later, Western mass media reproduced the junta's own figures, which stated that about 8,000 people had perished. Some weeks later the truth leaked out. The toll had risen to at least 145,000 dead, and more than 2 million people had been made homeless.

The military junta realized that a natural disaster of this magnitude might result in significant political consequences, and they did all they could to conceal the extent of the catastrophe. First, they refused to accept international assistance in the rescue work, then they accepted assistance but did not admit any foreign rescue workers. The military appropriated a great portion of the aid for its own use and handed out food and money as “loans” to the suffering population. Other portions of the aid were used as propaganda by the junta, which tried to steal the credit for supplying food, tents, and medical equipment. They finally admitted that their own resources were inadequate and allowed aid organizations into the country. By that time the death toll had mounted even higher, and yet even then the aid workers were not given access to the worst-hit regions. The junta were scared to death that the need for foreign aid might be construed as weakness. The population must be given the impression that the junta had provided the aid, they believed; otherwise, the disaster might lead to a popular revolt.

Right in the middle of the disaster effort, while millions of Burmese were breaking their backs to keep body and soul together, a referendum was held about a new constitution. The junta had worked on the issue for years and asserted that it would lead to the democratization of Burma. Their suggestion was, however, a parody of democracy. The military was to be guaranteed 25 percent of the seats in parliament on a permanent basis, and persons who were or had been married to foreigners were not to be permitted to stand as candidates for any political positions. This stipulation was aimed straight at Aung San Suu Kyi, who in 1972 had married Englishman Michael Aris.
The constitution did not have the federal stamp that the ethnic minorities in Burma demanded either. They wanted a large degree of self-government, but the junta suggested that several of the most important political spheres should end up under the central government's control.

When the referendum results had been counted, the junta asserted in all seriousness that 99 percent of the Burmese had voted and that more than 90 percent had voted in favor of the new constitution. The entire world laughed scornfully, but the generals did not even show a ghost of a smile. Thereafter the junta gave notification that an election was to be held in Burma—or Myanmar, as they call the country. The population was to be given the opportunity of voting for a parliament, yet the generals had rigged the election process in order to be able to retain their power. Aung San Suu Kyi was a threat to their entire carefully worked-out plan. She was just too popular. The junta realized that the election would be out of their hands if she were to be released. That was what had happened on the previous occasion, in 1990, when Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD won over 80 percent of the seats in parliament.

For this reason the junta made an issue of Yettaw's little swim. They accused Aung San Suu Kyi of two things. First, she had broken the house arrest rules by letting John Yettaw into her house, and second, she had broken the law stating that one had to apply for special permission if anyone apart from the family were to spend a night in one's home.

The matter was decided in one of the junta's military courts. The junta wanted at all costs to avoid extensive popular protests so they used a courtroom in the notorious Insein Prison. The room had a filthy stone floor and a roof but no walls. The two judges sat at the front on chairs with two-yard-high ornamented backs. It looked as though each of them was sitting on a royal throne. To the left of them sat Yettaw and his lawyer, and to the right, Aung San Suu Kyi's lawyers. There was no sign anywhere in the courtroom of a tape recorder, a court secretary, any books, or other indications of what was to take place. Aung San Suu Kyi arrived just before the trial began.

“Everyone says that she has such personal charm that I had really expected to be slightly disappointed,” said the Swedish diplomat Liselott Martynenko Agerlid, who was there to cover the trial. “But when she stepped out onto that cement floor, she was 100 percent charisma.” She talked and laughed
with her lawyers and then she turned to the public. She spoke in a calm, quiet voice, and the audience had to closely gather around her in order to shut out the cackle of hens, the traffic noise from the street, and the patter of rain on the metal roof. She thanked them for coming and asked them to convey her gratitude to their governments. The presence of other countries was important, quite apart from whatever the outcome of the trial might be.