profile | Hazel J. Lang

THE COURAGE OF AUNG SAN SUU KYI

FOR MANY PEOPLE, Aung San Suu Kyi’s name is synonymous with the struggle for democracy in Burma (Myanmar). She is respected and admired for her courage and perseverance in the struggle for human rights and basic freedoms in a country where ‘fear is a habit’ and military misrule treats too many of its own citizens as enemies. Readers of Overland will be familiar with the hefty personal sacrifices she has made in pursuit of her political values – incarceration for ten of the past seventeen years, and she remains in solitary detention today. Why is Aung San Suu Kyi such a threat to the military authorities who are, after all, armed to the teeth? And what is it about her political values that also inspire a greater universal audience beyond her supporters in Burma? The universal import of her principles and values was recognised when she won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize whilst in detention.
    It was during a return visit to Burma to care for her ailing mother, just as the massive popular uprising against one-party authoritarian rule was gaining momentum in 1988, that Aung San Suu Kyi (or Daw Suu for short – ‘Daw’ is a term of respect for older women) was catapulted into public life. She had lived outside the country since she was a teenager, and was settled in Oxford with her husband and two children, returning to Burma periodically. But as her husband Michael Aris wrote in his introduction to her book Freedom from Fear, Aung San Suu Kyi was always deeply preoccupied with the question of what she might do to help her people– she never forgot that she was the daughter of Burma’s heroic leader, Bogyoke (General) Aung San, who brought Burma to the edge of independence from British rule in 1947, only to be assassinated before reaching this goal when she was 2 years old. In a letter to Michael Aris before they married in 1972, she asked him a favour: “I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them. Would you mind very much should such a situation ever arise? How probable it is I do not know, but the possibility is there.” Although she could not have imagined the momentous role that was to actually transpire, these little insights add weight to some commentators’ description of Aung San Suu Kyi as Burma’s ‘woman of destiny’. In this destiny, as I note below, her ideas are very much concrete, lived ideas embodied in her daily work and from which she is never disengaged. The sources of her ideas are synthesised from influences especially of her father’s political life and ideals (about whom she has also written), her own social and political activism which is thoroughly infused with her own form of engaged Buddhism, and her social and political writings and speeches.
    Aung San Suu Kyi became an instant leader in her first public appearance on 26 August 1988. This landmark speech, the first of some one thousand public addresses given throughout Burma until her first arrest in 1989, took place at the mighty Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon (Burma’s holiest Buddhist shrine) to a rapturous audience of around 500,000 people. A huge portrait of her father, Aung San, hung above the stage embodying the symbolism of her words: “The present crisis is the concern of the entire nation. 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 independence.” But this time it was against the army that her father had created. The people also did not miss the symbolism of her standing on the very same site where her father had given some of his most important speeches in the lead-up to independence. She called on the authorities to hold free and fair elections, and she called on the people for discipline and unity in what was a very tumultuous environment. A mass pro-democracy movement had emerged in 1988, growing to include hundreds of thousands of people by the time of the ‘8-8-88’ National General Strike on 8 August. With her charisma and intelligence, Aung San Suu Kyi (often referred to, in hushed tones, as ‘the Lady’) also became something of a personality cult, something she would be the first to decry. She has always emphasised loyalty to principles rather than individuals; yet at the same time, she personified so potently the principles she and the democracy movement were calling for. This is what makes her so remarkable – that she lives her principles. As life-long Burma scholar Josef Silverstein comments, her ideas are not offered as an example of a scholar or reflective thinker working in the abstract. Rather, she lives her principles with courage and determination, and personal sacrifice. But personal sacrifice is something that she does not admit to. Once when she was asked in an Asiaweek interview about her status as a champion of democracy she quipped, “Well, I don’t think anything particular about it. For me it is just a job that has to be done.”6 She also rejects the martyr complex, saying “What you need are workers, not martyrs”.
    When asked what he most respects about Aung San Suu Kyi, her close associate U Tin U (deputy chairman of the National League for Democracy) says it is that people trust her to speak the truth – “the lady speaks frankly and people like it”. So what are some of the main elements of her thinking that resonate so powerfully? One, outlined in her famous ‘Freedom from Fear’ essay, concerns the corrupting influence of fear: “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.” For Aung San Suu Kyi, people cannot be truly free if they are living in fear. She recognises that fear is a habit and people are conditioned to be fearful. Particularly in authoritarian states, asking questions can have dangerous consequences and so people simply do what they are told to do. And thus those in power become more oppressive and the people get more frightened – it is a vicious circle. She writes further:

Within a system which denies basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even common wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man’s self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilised man.

In her challenge to authoritarian rule, she invokes Nehru’s assessment that the greatest gift for an individual or a nation is fearlessness, not just in the bodily form but absence of fear from the mind. For Aung San Suu Kyi what is needed is courage through determined effort, the courage to cultivate the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one’s actions.
    In her reference to the second struggle for independence, Aung San Suu Kyi calls for a “revolution of the spirit” born of an intellectual conviction for a need to change mental attitudes and values which shape a country’s development. It is not enough to change official policies, institutions or just material things, she argues. A political system must be guided by certain spiritual values. For example, in her 1991 essay ‘In Quest of Democracy’ she invokes a simple Buddhist model of the four causes of decline and decay in Burma: “failure to recover that which has been lost, omission to repair that which had been damaged, disregard of the need for reasonable economy, and the elevation to leadership of men without morality or learning”. In articulating the decline in moral and political values, her thinking combines modern political principles (for freedom, human rights and democracy) with Buddhist values such as metta (loving-kindness), karuna (compassion) and thissa (truth).
    Some people might wonder whether it is simply idealistic or naïve to talk about metta in politics but Aung San Suu Kyi responds by saying “it makes a lot of practical good sense” to her because these values can move people more strongly than any form of coercion. She says that metta is not only to be applied to those connected with you; you should also radiate metta towards those who are against you. So she sends metta to her oppressors – she does not see any point in animosity; she says she does not hate her captors, claiming that “you cannot really be frightened of people you do not hate”. As one commentator notes, in the absence of access to instruments of government, Aung San Suu Kyi’s approach has been to emphasise spiritual dimensions to the political process and to incorporate Buddhist qualities into her leadership qualifications. She has also cultivated her spiritual growth through the years in detention.
    While clearly Aung San Suu Kyi’s most trenchant opponents are the top military men ruling Burma (they have negatively depicted her as everything from neo-colonial ‘axe-handle’ to toothless ‘democracy princess’), other critics have questioned her apparently uncompromisingly principled approach. There has been a perception (amongst some journalists and diplomats for example) that she is inflexible. But it is worth remembering that the military has been consistently opposed to real dialogue over the past decade and a half. Apart from the occasions when secret talks have occurred led by now-purged junta strongman General Khin Nyunt (little is known about their content), Aung San Suu Kyi and her party have been denied the opportunity for true dialogue. Some view her approach of radiating metta even to tyrants as a way of persuading the Generals to come to the bargaining table. But others have questioned the impasse arising from her perceived uncompromising commitment to principles, as the following excerpts from a long interview with Asiaweek captures:

Interviewer: Politics is the art of the possible. You seem to be holding out for the impossible [referring to the call to recognise the results of the 1990 elections].
ASSK: Why? What are we holding out for that is impossible?
Interviewer: Parliament for a start. They are not going to give it to you.
ASSK: Well, that’s what they say. In how many countries have military regimes absolutely insisted that they were not going to give in and they had to give in anyway? So what’s so impossible about asking for change? . . . haven’t there been regimes just as bad, just as obdurate, and actually far more efficient, but in the end they had to agree to change?
Interviewer: So you don’t rule out power sharing?
ASSK: We say we don’t rule out anything before negotiations. After all, that’s what negotiations are for. To find out what one can accept.
Interviewer: You are regarded as inflexible . . .
ASSK: . . . I think it is inevitable in such situations. Because if you stand up to a military regime and stick to your guns, you are accused of being inflexible. You have to make a distinction between standing up for certain basic principles, and . . . inflexibility. If you give up all the basic democratic principles which we are fighting for, then why [sic] would we be doing with the movement at all?

Whether or not she likes it, Aung San Suu Kyi has developed a personality cult. But Burma’s ‘woman of destiny’ has tried her best to counter references to her as such things, saying that her simple attitudes may be part of this problem: “Some people want to make something extraordinary out of me, but I’m not particularly extraordinary. I suppose people think I’m extraordinary because I’m so simple they can’t believe it.” She has also told people of Burma that she can only show the path to democracy, but: “Do not think that I will be able to give you democracy. I will tell you frankly, I am not a magician. I do not possess any special power that will allow me to bring you democracy. I can say frankly that democracy will be achieved only by you, by all of you.”
    Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) won a decisive victory in the 1990 elections (the results of which have never been honoured) and, notwithstanding her long periods of solitary detention, her popularity has not waned. Gustaaf Houtman points out the paradox that while the military complains about personality cults destroying Burmese politics, it is precisely its own authoritarian form of government that produces the personality cults it so dislikes. The Rangoon regime, threatened by her principles and popularity, has felt compelled to detain her for ten of the past seventeen years. Her first detention lasted from July 1989 to July 1995, after she was arrested (along with a host of her NLD colleagues) for speaking out against the former dictator U Ne Win. During the early part of this period she received limited visits from family and diplomats, but much of the remaining time was solitary. She kept to a strict, disciplined routine during her incarceration, which included insight meditation practice. When her surprise release occurred in July 1995 she immediately resumed her political life with speeches and long, busy days with people from all walks of life.
    Immediately after her release in July 1995, I joined the throngs of people who came to the gate of her compound at 54 University Avenue for her daily speeches as the monsoon rain poured down. During those first few days the crowds grew to thousands in a country where gatherings of more than a handful of people are deemed illegal. The people’s mood was euphoric – there was hope for change at last, the international media poured in and beamed images to the rest of the world of the charismatic leader (who always wore fresh flowers in her hair) speaking animatedly to the people, addressing their questions. Soon her daily speeches were kept to weekends so that she could get on with the work of her party. Her senior NLD colleagues were released from Insein jail, and the party gathered momentum once again. The NLD began functioning again and Aung San Suu Kyi encouraged people to participate in the movement.
    The SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council) regime at the time allowed the talks to go on, hoping the crowds would die down. The regime then began intimidating the crowd by sending in military intelligence personnel with video cameras to record people’s faces and eventually barbed wired barricades were erected. In 1997, the SLORC reconstituted itself into the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) after some particularly corrupt SLORC members were purged. In the period leading up to Aung San Suu Kyi’s re-arrest in September 2000, the regime subjected the NLD to increasing harassment and limitations on activities. In one incident when Aung San Suu Kyi insisted on travelling in defiance of the regime’s restrictions, we saw the rather odd stand-off between her entourage (stuck for days in the car by the bridge) and the SPDC authorities. She was released from house arrest in May 2002, but just over a year on she and her supporters were violently set upon by a junta-sponsored mob and she was re-arrested and this time sent to Insein jail. This was her first stint in this notorious prison, and undoubtedly gave her insights into what her colleagues had suffered during her long years of house arrest. She was then transferred to house arrest where she remains today. In October 2004, the regime purged the ‘moderate’ faction headed by intelligence chief General Khin Nyunt, who was known to hold a more open approach about entering into dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD. This purge has left the hardline junta faction in control and Burma’s political stalemate stalled as ever. The regime maintains its choke-hold on power by virtue of military might and Aung San Suu Kyi remains in solitary house arrest.
Since Aung San Suu Kyi entered the political scene so spectacularly in 1988, Burma’s military has more than doubled in size to become the second largest in Southeast Asia (after Vietnam). The regime continues to claim a monopoly on ‘security’, and in its version of ‘national unity’ it calls for the crushing “of all internal and external destructive elements as common enemy”. You can find these goals professed in state-run newspapers and on street signboards all around the country. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi continues to symbolise the challenge to this militarised version of reality with her political values, their practical application and powerful resonance with so many people, even if she remains isolated from her followers under house arrest. This makes her such a potent symbol for freedom and democracy for so many people. But it also means that the hardline military junta in power continues to feel threatened by this woman and the political principles she embodies. People continue to hang onto their dreams for a future society free from fear and its corrupting influence. The military has recently shifted its capital 400 kilometres north of Rangoon to a place called Pyinmana. It is here that they are bunkering down, afraid of external invasion or internal uprising.
Aung San Suu Kyi in her writings and speeches has called for the military to be true to her father’s vision – that the army “refrain from adopting a stance that would make their strength of arms seem an instrument of oppression . . . He warned that if the army came to be detested by the people, the reason for which it had been founded would be vitiated”. Unfortunately today, at a time of growing democratisation and the declining role of the military in Asia, every aspect of life in Burma remains dominated by the armed forces, which operate overwhelmingly as an instrument of internal repression. She has frequently said that security without freedom is not real security. Too often ‘security’ is used as an excuse for crushing the rights of the people. Too few among Burma’s fifty-three million people experience true security in the sense of freedom from fear and freedom from want. Her message that true independence means people are free from fear and that the state serves the people (and not the other way around) resonates for other societies beguiled into giving up freedom and human rights.
    But her call to the global community for support and help in the struggle connects the struggle to us all. Aung San Suu Kyi is asking for support beyond the preoccupation with trade and national security/counter-terrorism agendas of Australian foreign policy. She is calling for a wider engagement with Asia that cannot be measured in terms of national security and trade alone. The pursuit of ‘security’ narrowly conceived as national security obscures the wider sources of insecurity and violations of human rights and dignity (in some places carried out in the name of national security) which if left unaddressed only compounds regional and global insecurity. As Joseph Camilleri has said, “What we need in Australia, as elsewhere, is a new participatory ethic, whereby people in their various groupings address the challenges of a rapidly changing world, and increasingly do so in the context of inter-cultural dialogue”. And the exploitation by the Australian government of “fear and the flag to keep us in line”, as Graeme Cheeseman has noted, also serves to narrow the political and intellectual engagement that is possible.
    In a message to the Australian Parliament in 1999 Aung San Suu Kyi reiterated the universal bonds of humanity which link each country to others: “We have always believed that peace in the world is only possible if there is peace in the individual countries of the world”. In this regard, she has often called for people to “use your liberty to promote ours”. We are fortunate in Australian political life that we do not have to confront the same magnitude of struggles as those faced by Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese people. But at the same time, the universal messages of her political thought and values which she is determined to apply to every aspect of life, at the expense of her own freedom, reminds us of the principles that we perhaps too readily take for granted. Let’s hope that the intellectual and spiritual conviction of her political life can be realised one day in Burma and other countries deprived of even the most basic human rights. Her advocacy of persistent effort, courage, metta and the intellectual conviction of a questioning mind free from fear will no doubt continue to vex Burma’s Generals, but hopefully one day the power of her principles will prevail. For now, Aung San Suu Kyi remains one of 1156 political prisoners detained for nothing more than the exercise of these very principles. Hopes for her release in late May – following the high-level visit to Burma by UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs and her first access to a foreign visitor in over two years – were dashed when the regime renewed her detention for another year. And as Desmond Tutu has said, “as long as she remains under arrest, none of us is truly free”.

Dr Hazel Lang is from the Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University and is author of Fear and Sanctuary: Burmese Refugees in Thailand, Ithaca, New York & SEAP, Cornell University, 2002. She has been a Burma watcher for over a decade.

Photograph of Aung San Suu Kyi, at home after her release in 1995, by Kai Ianssen.

Overland 183–winter 2006, pp.61–66

Her message that true independence means people are free from fear and that the state serves the people (and not the other way around) resonates for other societies beguiled into giving up freedom and human rights.