An elderly Burmese woman falls dangerously ill just before a national uprising

It is 1988 and in the then Burmese capital of Rangoon, Khin Kyi’s health has deteriorated badly. The 76-year-old is the widow of General Aung San, a hero of the struggle for Burmese independence and a de facto prime minister of British Burma who had been assassinated in 1947. She is also the mother of four children, two of whom died very young. Her only daughter lives abroad, as she has done most of her life. After schooling in India, where Khin Kyi was Burmese Ambassador, her daughter had gone to Oxford University where she graduated in philosophy, politics and economics. After a spell in the United States working at the United Nations, she had married an Englishman and had eventually settled down in England, where she had given birth to two children of her own and written several books.

When Aung San Suu Kyi received word of her mother’s illness, she had no designs on becoming an internationally recognised political figure, and certainly had no desire to become one of the world’s most famous prisoners. She rushed to her mother’s bedside. While she was caring for her, Burma’s military leader General Ne Win resigned after 26 years at the helm amidst a mass popular uprising in 1988. This was put down by the country’s widely despised junta, resulting in the deaths of thousands of protesters. Just a week later, Suu Kyi wrote an open letter to the government, calling upon it to hold free multi-party elections. Well known in Burma on account of her parents, she made her maiden public speech soon afterwards to an immense crowd outside the Shwedagon Pagoda. By September she had founded the National League for Democracy (NLD). Her mother died in December. The following year, the military government declared that Burma would be known as Myanmar (a name that many Burmese refuse to recognise).

Suu Kyi’s demand for elections was eventually granted – the military junta had reckoned that the dizzying number of parties contesting votes would ensure that no clear result was possible and they would be able to use this as an excuse to remain in power. They also banned Suu Kyi from standing for election, though this did not deter her from campaigning on behalf of her party. Come July 1989, her popularity was so great that the military rulers had her placed under house arrest, though without bringing charges against her or sending her to trial. The following year, the delayed elections took place and the NLD won an astonishing 80 per cent of all the seats in parliament. Naturally enough, the junta refused to recognise the result.

Over the 21 years from her first arrest, Suu Kyi was to be imprisoned for 15 years, almost all of that time under house arrest charged with spurious crimes or none at all. She also spent over three months in secret detention. She was released twice, only to be arrested again, before being freed for the final time in 2010, six days after an election in which the NLD had refused to run because of changes to the electoral laws specifically designed to damage the party. During her prolonged periods of confinement there were numerous calls from the United Nations for Suu Kyi’s release. These were simply ignored by the junta. She also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while under house arrest, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2008, making her the first person ever to win the US government award while imprisoned.

The most affecting detail of what must have seemed to Suu Kyi two interminably long decades was that her husband, Michael Aris, was almost never allowed to visit her from Britain. The last time the two saw each other was at Christmas 1995, during a period when Suu Kyi was not under house arrest. When Aris was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he asked the Burmese authorities if he could come to Burma one last time in order to say goodbye. The request was refused. Instead, Suu Kyi was encouraged by the junta to leave Burma in order to visit him. Believing that she would not be allowed to re-enter the country if she did so, she stayed put. Aris died in March 1999.

Suu Kyi made a successful bid for election to parliament in 2012. Three years later, the electorate delivered a landslide victory to her NLD party, giving them 390 of the 498 seats that the military allowed to be contested. In 2016, the NLD chose Htin Kyaw as president of Burma. As leader of the NLD, Suu Kyi should have become president, but a cynical change to the constitution put in place by the junta in 2010 barred anyone who had ever been married to a foreign national from holding that office. However, a few months later, the party created the post of ‘state counsellor’ for her and Suu Kyi has since declared that she will rule ‘above the president’ until such a time as the constitution can be changed.

Not everything has gone perfectly since the NLD took over the reins of government. In 2017, Suu Kyi had to answer questions about the alleged ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Burma and accusations that the army was carrying out atrocities in operations against ethnic insurgent groups (under the current constitution, the army is not under the control of the government).

However, had Khin Kyi not fallen ill just before the uprising, there’s every chance that her British-based daughter, bringing up British-born children, would not have become so enmeshed in her country’s fight for democracy, nor would she have become the figurehead for it. Without her and the perseverance of her party, the generals might still be ruling Burma today. Instead, Burma is a democracy once more and has a government concerned with rebuilding the country by investing in its infrastructure, creating jobs and improving health care. One can only imagine that both Suu Kyi’s parents would have been immensely proud of that.

It’s also fitting that Britain, which ruled Burma from 1824–1948 (albeit with a major incursion by the Japanese during World War II), and whose colonisation of the country helped sow the seeds of the long military dictatorship that Burma suffered, should play a small part in the restoration of democracy there.