One evening early this year in Yangon, Myanmar, a 65-year-old woman went to the cinema — on the face of it an unremarkable occurrence. Except that the woman was Aung San Suu Kyi and the films she was watching, on a makeshift screen in a shopping mall, showed monks on the march, beatings by riot police, apparent abductions and even firefights between ethnic minority militias and the Burmese army.
The screening was unprecedented; nothing like it had occurred in the 50 years since Myanmar’s military had taken power. Between 1988 — when the democracy movement had first been bloodied in clashes with the authorities — and mid-2010 — when change had begun to come — participating in such an event would have meant imprisonment, torture and possibly death.
Now, a second screen outside the mall relayed the images for a crowd of hundreds gathered on the sidewalk.
Among them was Ei Thu, a 28-year-old accountant.
“I don’t really care about politics, but I love Aung San Suu Kyi. I don’t care what party she is from. I want her to be president,” she said.
The pro-democracy leader watched the images of violence and repression impassively. Only after the screening, when a young man, head of security for the youth wing of her National League of Democracy and one of Myanmar’s best-known hip-hop artists, took the stage to perform did she smile. A measure of how fast Myanmar is changing is that the 31-year-old musician became a member of parliament in recent elections.
For a long time, the world paid little attention to Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi may have enjoyed a global celebrity on a level with former South African president Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama, but few people could pronounce her name or point on a map to the city where she lived. This too is changing.
Aung San Suu Kyi was born in 1945 in the middle of a war as UK forces, aided by Burmese nationalists, ousted the Japanese invaders. Her father was Aung San, the rough-tongued, charismatic leader of the Burmese effort for independence from their imperial overlords.
This is, many say, the primary determining factor of her personality and her life. She delivered her first major political speech at a vast rally at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon in 1988, beneath a giant screenprint of the father of the nation.
“It is difficult to overestimate the importance of her father and what he did, for her,” says Peter Popham, Aung San Suu Kyi’s biographer.
Critics say that she fits the familiar local profile of the dynastic heir to power, but though across much of Asia, the sons or daughters of colonial liberators or later leaders either hold high offices or are close to doing so, Aung San Suu Kyi, despite her background, never sought to lead.
A long-standing acquaintance said the influence of her parents explains why she accepted the role when asked to assume it, with all the sacrifices it would entail. Aung San was assassinated when his daughter was two years old and she was raised by her formidable mother.
“She was very strict, very hardworking ... with high moral standards. If [Aung San Suu Kyi] got ambition from her father, she got a very strong sense of duty from her mother,” the friend said.
A journalist remembered how, during a relatively frosty interview in the mid-1990s, the only question that elicited any warmth was about her mother.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s upbringing was pure Southeast Asian elite and this shows, at least in her icily correct interactions at the press conferences and functions she is now having to attend. First, she attended one of the most exclusive schools in Myanmar. Then, when her mother was appointed ambassador to New Delhi, she was sent to equally exclusive English-language institutions there.
This cool exterior is somewhat deceptive. Nirmal Khanna, one of her teachers in New Delhi, remembers a “quiet, modest girl who was a good debater.”
Others remember a sharp wit. The philosopher Mary Warnock, who taught Aung San Suu Kyi at Oxford, remembered her as “totally untouched by the sexual aspirations of her friends, naive in a way, but sure-footed and direct in all her dealings ... [who] found many things hilarious, not least her tutorials.”
In 1972, after living and working in New York for the UN, she married Michael Aris, a Tibet scholar at the university whom she had met through mutual friends.
Her marriage and domestic life in suburban north Oxford have given rise to what one acquaintance called the “myth of the housewife.”
Though she pursued further studies and wrote, Aung San Suu Kyi did bring up her children, darn socks and run grocery errands.
However, the acquaintance said she was also “still very conscious of being the daughter of Aung San.”
And from early on in their marriage, the couple were aware that one day, the call of duty might separate them.
That call came when Aung San Suu Kyi was 42. Incompetent economic management over 26 years of army rule had impoverished most Burmese, despite their country being one of the most promising, resource-rich Asian nations.
In 1988, a series of demonstrations and strikes, often bloodily repressed, disturbed the country. By chance, she was in Yangon, having returned to nurse her dying mother. As the daughter of the “father of the nation,” she was the obvious choice to lead the disparate protesters.
Reluctantly, but inexorably, she was drawn in. She helped found the National League for Democracy (NLD) and threw herself into campaigning. Her husband and sons returned to the UK without her.
In July 1989, she was placed under house arrest for the first time. The results of elections in 1990, won categorically by the NLD after energetic campaigning, were ignored.
The pro-democracy leader remained imprisoned — largely under house arrest in her rundown family home on the banks of Inya Lake in Yangon — for the best part of the next two decades. There was an assassination attempt, periods of ill health and a spell of detention in the terrible Insein jail.
One witness remembered Aung San Suu Kyi and Tin Oo, a highly decorated senior soldier and pro-democracy activist, being attacked by government thugs in Yangon in the mid-1990s: “Their car had its windows smashed and Tin Oo came out bleeding and shouting, but [Aung San] Suu [Kyi] stepped out very composed, her face just a tiny shade paler than normal. Despite hundreds of thugs nearby with knives and sticks, she stood on a stool in the street and briefly spoke her usual message about how everybody has to work for democracy, and warned supporters not to react to the violence and to go home peacefully. As if nothing had happened.”
Aung San Suu Kyi saw her husband for the last time in 1995, when he visited Myanmar four years before his death from cancer.
The regime had made it clear that she could travel overseas whenever she wanted, but it was also clear that she would not be allowed to return.
“She has been attacked for being cold or unfeeling, but she couldn’t show the regime she was suffering. Her anguish was genuine and profound,” Popham said.
In November 2010, three years after a new wave of bloodily repressed protests dubbed the “Saffron Revolution” and to the surprise of virtually all observers, Aung San Suu Kyi was released. The regime appeared to have decided that, to preserve any power and wealth, they needed Myanmar to partake in the rapid Asian economic growth. This, the argument went, was impossible while under sanctions and without an element of political reform.
Despite the challenges Aung San Suu Kyi now faces as leader of the democracy movement, “there was a lightness to her,” one reporter who interviewed her shortly after her release said.
Others describe her as “mischievous, funny, relaxed.”
Since then, though the reforms have been steadily consolidated, an election held that saw her gain a seat in parliament and sanctions suspended, “the Lady” appears more, rather than less, careworn.
The question now being asked is whether the strength of character and determination that saw Aung San Suu Kyi through the decades of detention will serve her as well in the complex, fast-shifting new political environment.
There is also a concern that she has become the personification of Burmese democracy and that this is dangerous.
“If the West put the whole focus on [Aung San Suu Kyi], that could be very misleading. We trust in her and her intuition, but this is all happening very quickly,” said U Win Tin, one of the founders of the NLD, in January.
And how will Aung San Suu Kyi, who has repeatedly said she detests being described as a saint or an icon, cope with the adulation she will receive this week? On Thursday, she appeared to bend over in pain before vomiting at a press conference in the Swiss capital, Bern.
“I don’t understand why people say that I am full of courage. I feel terribly nervous,” she told journalists.
“It’s a duty,” said the friend, who requested anonymity fearing Myanmar’s still powerful security agencies.
“I expect she will visit her husband’s grave [in Oxford], but the emotional side will be sealed off. She is a very private person after all, a bookworm really, she once said. So she protects herself,” the friend added.
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