Hannah Beech, What happened to Myanmar’s Human-Rights Icon? The New Yorker,
October 2, 2017
… Suu Kyi has little alternative but to
work with the people she once campaigned against. The euphoria that
surrounded her ascent obscured how extensive the military’s power
remains. The Army controls the ministries for defense, home affairs, and
border affairs, and a quarter of the seats in parliament are reserved
for men in uniform. Even ministries that are in civilian hands, such as
finance, are full of holdovers from the previous regime, and much of the
country’s budget is reserved for military use. Myanmar’s constitution,
written by the military in 2008, presents additional difficulties. It
allows the Army to declare a state of emergency and seize power, and it
also contains a clause that makes Suu Kyi ineligible for the Presidency.
(Her current official title, State Counsellor, is a workaround.) Suu
Kyi wants to amend the Constitution and become President, but this
requires military support. Her defenders often cite the precariousness
of her constitutional position as a reason for her reluctance to speak
out about Army abuses. While pushing the military for constitutional
reform, she must also avoid antagonism and a return to military rule.
But her failure to condemn the military is
not merely a matter of pragmatism. The Party she leads was co-founded by
a former commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and several of Suu
Kyi’s closest advisers are ex-officers. The N.L.D. is run with a
military emphasis on loyalty and hierarchy. Few members dare to publicly
criticize it, let alone its leader, for fear of expulsion. One Cabinet
minister proudly told me, “For the most important decisions, the most
important person must decide.” The culture of deference means that there
is always a backlog of vital decisions at the State Counsellor’s door.
Although the N.L.D. has recruited young
talent, party leaders are notable for their age and time served in
prison. “She is surrounded by people who are too high level, not
grassroots,” Sao Haymar Thaike, the childhood friend, told me. “She
doesn’t have many good advisers. She only has her own thoughts. People
are scared to give her information.”
For all Suu Kyi’s opposition to the junta,
she remains a child of the military. The armed forces of today have
their origin in the Burmese Independence Army, which her father founded,
in 1941, in order to rid the country of the British. In her Shwedagon
Pagoda speech, Suu Kyi reminded her listeners of this history. “Let me
speak frankly,” she said. “I feel strong attachment for the armed
forces. Not only were they built up by my father—as a child I was cared
for by his soldiers.” She retains many of the military’s values,
frequently stressing the importance of discipline and unity. In 2013, a
year after she first won a parliamentary seat, she surprised observers
by appearing among the generals to view the military parades that mark
Myanmar’s Armed Forces Day.
I spoke to Jody Williams, who, in 2003, was
the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to be allowed to visit Suu Kyi.
(Williams, the founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines,
won the prize in 1997.) She noticed that Suu Kyi took a pragmatic view
of the generals who had curtailed her freedom. “She said something to
the effect of, ‘If we let the military go with big bank accounts, then
that’s fine with me,’ ” Williams told me. “It’s not an uncommon way to
think, but it was surprising to hear.” Williams was even more struck by
what wasn’t said: “There was absolutely no discussion of human rights,
of all the things that had made her into a global icon.”
Williams’s skepticism deepened when Suu Kyi
visited New York, in 2012, and met with members of an N.G.O. that
Williams had co-founded. “She was hostile to any question about human
rights in her country,” Williams told me, recalling how a young Burmese
activist had been dismayed after Suu Kyi stormed out of the meeting.
“She was so excited to see her heroine,” Williams said. “When Aung San
Suu Kyi displayed such hostility, the poor young woman just kept saying,
‘I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this, this is Aung San Suu
Kyi?’ ”
Williams has come to think that both the
earlier veneration of Suu Kyi as a secular saint of human rights and the
current shock at her transformation are based on misinterpretation.
“She allowed herself to be misread,” she said. Williams suspects that
Suu Kyi’s aims have remained consistent since the period after 1988,
when she returned to her homeland, assumed the mantle of her father, set
her sights on leadership, and was robbed of victory. “Once she decided
to be in the student movement, and then they won the election and it was
taken from her, her mind went like a laser beam to getting into power,”
Williams said. “That’s been her single ambition, other issues be
damned.”
I once asked Aung San Suu Kyi what quality
she most valued in people, and she responded, “Loyalty.” Many people
attest to this. In Naypyidaw, I met the N.L.D. parliamentarian Kyaw Soe
Lin. In 2003, during one of Suu Kyi’s periods of liberty, he was
assigned to be her driver on a national tour. On May 30th, her convoy
was attacked by well-armed assailants, in what is presumed to have been
an assassination attempt ordered by a hard-line military faction. Some
seventy people were killed and Suu Kyi’s neck was cut by flying glass.
True to the principles of nonviolence, she ordered her guards not to
fight back. Kyaw Soe Lin drove as fast as he could through several
roadblocks but was eventually stopped at one.
After the incident, Suu Kyi was placed
under house arrest again. Kyaw Soe Lin and seventeen others were flown,
handcuffed and hooded, to a remote location near the Indian border. He
was punched, kicked, and burned with cigarettes and candle wax—I could
see the scars on his forearms—in an effort to force him to confess that
the N.L.D. had been responsible for the violence. “I could hear the
screams of others as they were tortured, but I stayed silent,” he said.
He was held for months in a tiny room so water-logged that he could not
lie down.
After Suu Kyi was permanently released from
house arrest, Kyaw Soe Lin went to visit her. She held out a small
plastic wrapper. It was from a packet of snacks he had given her on the
day of the massacre. “She told me that she kept the bag of snacks to
remember me by,” he said. “Every day, she would eat a little and then
put it away.” Eventually, there was nothing left in the bag, but she
kept it for eight years.
For her entire life, Suu Kyi has been
faithful to the memory of a father she never knew and to a country that
she’d seen little of between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five. The
intransigence and the certitude that may now cause her to be remembered
as an enemy of freedom are the same qualities that served her well in
captivity. In the years alone in her house, her distance from active
politics made her a perfect vessel for the hopes of her countrymen and
for the idealistic projections of the wider world.
“Aung San Suu Kyi has the benefit of having
become an icon without saying a whole lot,” Kenneth Roth, of Human
Rights Watch, told me. “Havel came to his position by saying a lot, by
being a moral voice. Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t say much at all. She was a
moral symbol, and we read into that symbol certain virtues, which turned
out to be wrong when she actually began speaking.” Suu Kyi was not an
intellectual, like Havel, or a freedom fighter, like Mandela, or an
organizer, like Walesa. And, unlike her father, she did not die before
her legend could be tarnished.
In November, 2010, Suu Kyi’s younger son
visited Myanmar for the first time since her release. He hadn’t seen her
in a decade. Before he returned to England, he went to a pet shop in
Yangon and bought her a brown-and-white puppy. Suu Kyi lavished
attention on the dog, and foreign dignitaries discovered that bringing
gifts for it tended to get meetings off to a good start. Since then, it
has grown into an aggressive creature that growls and snaps at anyone
who dares approach its owner. Suu Kyi is oblivious of the dog’s mean
streak, and enjoys decking it out in sunglasses and kissing it when it
sees her off at the airport. “I hate that dog,” one of her closest
friends told me. “But she loves it like a child, because it’s faithful
to her.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/02/what-happened-to-myanmars-human-rights-icon?mbid=nl_170925_Daily&CNDID=49279735&spMailingID=12001141&spUserID=MTg2MTUwMzg0NDg3S0&spJobID=1242179844&spReportId=MTI0MjE3OTg0NAS2
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