1991
On October 24, 1991, for the sixth time in its history, the Nobel Prize was awarded to a woman. And for the first time in its history—thanks to this same woman—it was awarded to a Burmese. A few months prior to the announcement of the award, on July 19, 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi had received the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament. Unfortunately, she wasn’t there to receive it. Aung San Suu Kyi is under house arrest, but even this expression delicately conceals the fact that she is being kept in absolute solitary confinement somewhere in Burma, not far from the capital city of Rangoon.
It is with the utmost simplicity and with deep emotion that Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, introduces us, in the preface to an anthology of texts of which he is the editor, to a woman whose life takes the form of an odyssey from Rangoon back to Rangoon via India, England, Bhutan … Her life reads like an epic, a legend, an exemplary destiny not only for the Burmese people but for human history.
1Aung San Suu Kyi was born in 1945 in Rangoon, the Burmese capital, in a country that was both governed by the British and occupied by the Japanese at the time. Her father, Aung San, the charismatic leader of the Burmese resistance, was assassinated in 1947, shortly before his country gained its independence on January 4, 1948. In 1960, when she was fifteen, Suu Kyi moved to New Delhi, India to live with her mother, the Burmese ambassador (and the first woman to hold that post). Between 1964 and 1967 Suu Kyi studied political science at Saint Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she ultimately earned her degree. In 1972, after working for several years for the United Nations Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions in New York, Suu Kyi married Michael Aris, a British Tibetologist from Oxford University and a specialist on Buddhist religion. Suu Kyi and Aris have two sons.
From 1972 to 1988 Suu Kyi continued her graduate studies and traveled with her family from Bhutan to Japan via India, though always keeping London and Oxford as her moorings.
By 1984 Suu Kyi had finished and published a biography of her father.
2 In compiling the portrait of a man she never really knew, Suu Kyi sensed the inevitable, that she was to be his successor, “an icon of popular hope and longing” for the Burmese people. Or, in the words of her husband, Michael Aris: “In the daughter as in the father there seems an extraordinary coincidence of legend and reality, of word and deed.”
3In 1988, Suu Kyi was admitted to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London to pursue a doctorate in Burmese literature. At the time she also dreamed of creating, and had begun to plan, an international study fellowship for Burmese students as well as a network of public libraries in Burma. But that same year, after receiving news that her mother, Dan Khin Kyi, aged seventy, was seriously ill, Suu Kyi returned home after twenty-eight years in exile. Suu Kyi cared for her mother, the widow of a national hero, until the latter’s death in December 1988. On January 2, 1989, her mother’s funeral attracted huge crowds; this was to be the only time that the Burmese government would cooperate with Suu Kyi.
Upon her return to Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi found not only an ailing mother but an ailing country. Once the rice bowl of Asia, now a socialist republic in the throes of popular insurrection, Burma is a country that in economic terms has been bled dry, ruined, and starved by the incompetence and corruption of a “revolutionary” military junta and torn apart by the ideological battles of its ethnic minorities and their struggle for recognition.
The French barely know Burma: this country of 40 million inhabitants, with a land area 25 percent larger than France, is bordered to the east by India and Bangladesh and to the west by China and Thailand, with the Himalayas to the north and the Andaman Sea to the south. Enslaved by both the Communist arms trade and the capitalist drug trade, Burma, which is one of the world’s poorest countries, is also ruled by one of the world’s most oppressive regimes. Burma has been closed off to journalists and humanitarian organizations for more than thirty years; it is a country run by means of torture, political intimidation, deprivation, and fear. The France-Burma Association recently warned that prostitution is spreading rapidly—and, in the absence of condoms, so are all the associated risks. The devastation of Burma’s tropical forests is paralleled by intensive cultivation of opium fields (the source of 90 percent of the heroin consumption in the United States). Prostitution and opium sales help the Burmese regime finance its purchases of China’s most sophisticated weaponry. On August 8, 1998, the Burmese government, an extreme nationalist socialist regime, a drug-trafficking dictatorship, put down a popular insurrection with a blood bath.
This was the state of affairs, the backdrop to Aung San Suu Kyi’s intuition, an intuition that would lead her to request a promise or a “favor” from her husband Michael Aris before their marriage: “I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them” (xvii).
This woman, who has remained so faithful to her primary identity, to the values and language of her country, that she refused to relinquish her Burmese citizenship and passport and, despite her marriage to an Englishman, only aspired to be worthy of her father’s painful legacy: “I could not as my father’s daughter remain indifferent to all that was going on. This national crisis could in fact be called the second struggle for national independence” (199).
For months, Burmese dissidents flocked to the house where Suu Kyi was then caring for her dying mother. Finally, on August 26, 1988, at the Shwedagon Pagoda, a site of great symbolic importance in Burmese Buddhism, Suu Kyi spoke for the first time in public in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people. In the months that followed, Suu Kyi crisscrossed Burma—a country that was then and is still under martial law—insisting that the nonviolent struggle for human rights and democracy be the first principle of the National League for Democracy, the party she cofounded and now leads. As her husband describes it, “she spoke to the common people of her country as they had not been spoken to for so long—as individuals worthy of love and respect” (xxi).
On July 20, 1989, along with the majority of her fellow league members, Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest. However, despite a xenophobic government campaign against Suu Kyi (on the grounds that she was married to a British citizen and could thus never be a true national leader), her party won a landslide victory, earning more than 80 percent of the votes. Again, her husband Michael Aris describes the emotion and the irony of that moment: “The vote was a personal one for her: often the voters knew nothing about their candidate except that he represented Suu … There is a great irony in this, for she had become the focus of a personality cult which she would have been the first to decry. Loyalty to the principles, she had often said, was more important than loyalty to individuals” (xxiv).
The military junta has never acknowledged that Aung San Suu Kyi won 80 percent of the votes.
Everything in Suu Kyi’s life, the life of this serene woman, this woman who at a time of “frenetic activity” still made her house “a haven of love and care,” this woman who for so many years had taken responsibility for her family so that her husband could conduct his research, helping and encouraging him in his work—everything predisposed Aung Sang Suu Kyi to sacrifice her peaceful family life, in the midst of great suffering, to be faithful to her mythic heritage, to become this “indomitable” heroine, this sage, this Mother Courage to a tyrannized people. This was the legacy of her parents, and it was both a paternal and a maternal legacy, masculine but feminine too, a legacy that drew on a deeply rooted Asian tradition of female leadership, from Indira Gandhi to Benazir Bhutto, on both Buddhist religious and cultural values and on Western democratic cultures grounded in the spirit of freedom articulated by the United Nations and the principles of human rights and—finally and perhaps most deeply—on the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi.
In her speech, “Freedom from Fear,” Aung San Suu Kyi’s analysis of the origins of fear exposes unequivocally the universal nature of fear, in Burma and elsewhere—even here, in France. “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it” (180).
Vaclav Havel, who nominated Aung San Suu Kyi for the Nobel Prize, has also analyzed the phenomenon of fear under a Communist regime: “The fear I am speaking of is not, of course, to be taken in the ordinary psychological sense as a definite, precise emotion…. We are concerned with fear in a deeper sense, an ethical sense, if you will …”
4 The more brutal forms of oppression—fear of trials, fear of torture, loss of property and even deportation—have been replaced by more refined forms. The principal weight of this pressure has now been displaced to the sphere of existence where it becomes, in a certain sense, more universal: “Everyone has something to lose and so everyone has reason to be afraid.”
5The greatest fear for the year 2000, as it was for the year 1000, as it is today, is the fear of thought and science, of the foreigner, of the Other, the green fear,
6 the brown fear, the fear of women, the misogynist fear, the fear that undermines the fundamental liberties and the sacred, inalienable rights of every human being, regardless of ethnic origin, religion, nationality, beliefs, or sex. Here in the West, from Austria to Louisiana, through Wallonia and Scandinavia, this fear has given rise to young chieftains who take Mussolini as their model.
If fear, from East to West, can today be considered as universal simply because it is human, then the faithfulness to herself, the respect for her fellow human beings, the unrelenting effort, the resistance, the humble daily gestures, the acute sense of responsibility, dignity, and wisdom manifested by the “indomitable” woman Aung San Suu Kyi may also become, through her exemplary struggle, universal virtues, simply because they too are human.
The daily asceticism, the daily ordeals, the courage and wisdom that triumph over this fear and this destructive madness: these are the nonviolent gifts Aung San Suu Kyi has given us and the world; we must learn to accept them in order to wrest her from the shadows and the silence of her prison so that we can give her back to those who love her and need her. If we are like children afraid of the dark, then in these shadowy times, the words of Suu Kyi light the way for us.
A political prisoner since June 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi has not been allowed to see her husband since December of that year, and the last letter her family received from her was dated July 17, 1990. Today international concern for her plight is immense. Last October three members of the Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) told the press that “in reality, no one knows where she is being held.”
7