Soe Min calls himself “the luckiest man in Myanmar,” but he will need more than luck to win a seat in a crucial April 1 by-election. He will need a miracle.
That’s because the retired army doctor is running against Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, whose nationwide political campaign has been cheered by huge crowds in cities and villages across Myanmar.
“She went abroad to be educated. I was educated here. Now we meet again,” said Dr Soe Min, a jovial 49-year-old candidate for the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the ruling party created by the former military junta.
How the son of a rice farmer ended up in a popularity contest against a living saint is the latest twist in a dramatic life Soe Min recounted in hesitant English in an interview.
His story offers a bloody glimpse of Myanmar’s past battles for democracy and its ongoing civil war. In a country now governed by a nominally civilian government packed with former generals, it also underscores the reverence former soldiers feel toward an institution many of their compatriots revile.
He was born in Twantay Township, a district neighboring Kawhmu, the constituency he is contesting with Aung San Suu Kyi. His father had a dream that Soe Min would fulfill.
“He wanted to be a doctor very much, so he saved all his money for me,” Soe Min said.
Among his favorite books were the writings of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th US president who railed against slavery.
Soe Min won a place at Yangon’s Institute of Medicine 1.
At that time, Myanmar’s campuses seethed with anti-government feeling, but he avoided politics. In 1988, two years after he graduated, the military crushed a nationwide pro-democracy uprising, killing and wounding thousands, and Soe Min treated the injured at a makeshift clinic.
“I even treated gunshot wounds,” he said.
In 1989, he got his first glimpse of the woman he faces at the polls.
Aung San Suu Kyi was born in 1945 and lived most of her early life outside Myanmar. Her mother, Khin Kyi, served as Myanmar’s ambassador to India and Nepal.
She studied at Oxford University and later raised two children in England with the late British academic Michael Aris, but she returned to Myanmar to nurse her ailing mother and was swept up in the 1988 protests. Khin Kyi died later that year and Aung San Suu Kyi led a funeral procession through Yangon in January 1989.
“That’s when I saw her for the first time,” Soe Min said.
Thereafter, their lives took different paths. Aung San Suu Kyi spent much of the next two decades under house arrest, a prisoner of the same military that, in 1989, Soe Min freely joined.
In 2008, he retired from the army to work as a government health officer before joining the USDP. The party chose him to run in by--elections that the US and Europe regard as a key test before sanctions against Myanmar can be lifted.
Aung San Suu Kyi is a tough adversary, Soe Min said, but her “weak point” is the time she spent abroad.
“She does not know the true nature of our country’s problems,” he said. “She knows more theoretically. I know more practically.”
When it is pointed out that Aung San Suu Kyi’s ability to get to know her country was hampered by years of house arrest, Soe Min echoes the rationale of the former junta: her detention prevented political unrest.
He believes his military past is an advantage, but is also banking on his image as a doctor, appearing on campaign leaflets in a white coat with a stethoscope. He runs two free clinics, he said, with nursing staff and drugs paid for by his party.
In a chronically poor and backward country, Soe Min’s policies are no-brainers. He wants to modernize agriculture, improve healthcare and help students from poor families pursue further studies, just as he once did.
The near-certainty of defeat does not worry him.
“I will get a lot of experience from this election,” he said.
He is thinking of contesting a Yangon seat in the more important general election in 2015.
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