Long-suffering Burma loses faith in democracy’s favourite martyr
Cathy Scott-Clarke and Adrian Levy
Source :Scotland on Sunday
Sun Jun 24
Her refusal to bow to her country’s military junta has earned her the Nobel peace prize and the respect of the world.
Aung San Suu Kyi chose to remain in Burma even when her British husband was dying in England, fearing that if she left the country she would never be allowed to return.
The leader of the National League for Democracy, whose father led the country towards independence from the UK in 1948, united the opposition parties and divided ethnic groups as a powerful force against the generals who ruled the country. However, after a decade of representing the opposition of the Burmese people to the regime, former supporters are saying that Suu Kyi’s years in isolation as a political prisoner have left her autocratic and ill-equipped to edge Burma towards democracy.
The revelations are particularly important when the attitude of the military junta appears to be changing. Suu Kyi declined an offer to begin discussions with the junta in January.In February a number of hardline generals were killed in a helicopter crash. It was believed to be an accident but US intelligence has discovered that it was caused by a mid-air gunfight. Clearly the junta was not as united as it had been when, in May 1990, it ignored the elections which gave the NLD 392 out of 485 parliamentary seats.
While the world’s most famous political prisoner, Suu Kyi, fought for democracy from behind the locked gates of her Rangoon home, the country has been slowly strangled by a junta that has launched dozens of military campaigns against its people - one million of whom are now missing. But supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi have voiced fears that the Nobel peace prize winner might not be able to convince the generals that she still wields the kind of popular backing that forced change in Indonesia, Serbia and the Philippines.
It is a matter of record that over the 12 years that Suu Kyi has spent under house arrest, formally or informally, hundreds of party workers have been killed. Also more than 65% of the NLD’s elected MPs and party members have resigned, been imprisoned or gone into exile. But what is only now emerging is that dissent has been brewing within the NLD since the fated general election. When the regime failed to honour the results, the NLD leader called for hundreds of thousands of supporters to clear the streets.
"I do not want to encourage this tradition of bringing about change through violence," said Suu Kyi. The NLD strategy would be to isolate the junta by calling for international sanctions, citing its success in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela had been released in February 1990. But could a nation like Burma, forged by thousands of years of conquest, annexation and bloodshed, be reformed through peaceful means alone, some in Suu Kyi’s party began to ask.
After talks between Suu Kyi and the generals broke down in 1994 - the last time they met - she reiterated the need for sanctions. It was derided by member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations that promptly invited Burma to join as an observer.
Calcification set in. Suu Kyi wrote of holding on to dharma and metta, loving kindness, in the face of generals who demonstrated "the banality of evil". The junta talked of "annihilating the foreign whore" and its deputy chairman General Maung Aye, Burma’s army chief, warned: "I will never deal with those who would have us hung."
When Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in 1995 the fact that her strategy was being opposed within her party began to leak out. Than Tun and Thein Kyi, NLD MPs who had spent many years in prison, accused their leader of acting unilaterally after she announced in November that year that the party was boycotting the junta’s National Convention - a toothless committee formed to devise a blueprint for democratic government. Suu Kyi was opposed to clauses in the convention that guaranteed the generals a role in any future government and barred anyone with foreign relatives. Her critics claimed that by walking out and with no other plan in the offing, she had severed the NLD’s only line of communication with the generals. The following summer, Than Tun and Thein Kyi presented Suu Kyi with a 10-page report, signed by another seven NLD MPs, that called on her to adopt "more realistic policies". They were critical of the NLD’s reliance on its sanctions call that they claimed had cut the Burmese people off from the outside world while failing to bring the junta to its knees.
Burma, unlike South Africa, barely participates in the global economy and can endure Western boycotts. Many Asian businesses and organisations, angered by what they saw as neo-imperialist meddling, began to invest, while British and American companies withdrew. The bankrupt generals forged ever-closer ties with the country’s drug barons.
The NLD leadership closed ranks. A resolution was passed that gave Suu Kyi and her chairman, Aung Shwe, complete control over decision-making, a move to counter the junta’s outlawing of NLD party congresses. On January 6, 1997, Than Tun and Thein Kyi were expelled from the party. The following February, another of Suu Kyi’s close aides broke ranks. The Far Eastern Economic Review published an extraordinary article entitled ‘The Burmese Fairy Tale’, written by Ma Thanegi, who had served three years in prison after joining the democracy movement. "My fellow former political prisoners and I are beginning to wonder if our sacrifices have been worthwhile," she wrote. "Suu could have changed our lives dramatically. She could have struck up a constructive dialogue with the government and laid the ground for a sustainable democracy. We had hoped that when she was released from house arrest that the country would move forward again. Suu’s approach has been moral and uncompromising, catching the imagination of the world. Unfortunately, it has come at a real price for the rest of us."
In March 1999, 28 NLD MPs, including Tin Tun Maung, a central committee member, and Kyi Win, a former student leader, appeared to support Ma Thanegi’s stance. They called for the NLD to hold talks with the regime without Suu Kyi, who responded by suspending four of them, accusing them of "colluding with military intelligence".
The dissatisfaction spread beyond the party. Student campaigners who triggered the mass democracy uprisings of August 1988, in which thousands were shot by the junta, began to question the NLD’s lack of progress. The Irrawaddy, a magazine published by exiled Burmese students in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, warned last year that Suu Kyi needed a bigger stick to avoid becoming "a victim of history".
A breach in the democracy movement has now opened up in the border regions too, occupied by Burma’s ethnic groups that make up 30% of the country’s population. Leaders of the Karen, Karenni, Chin and Arakanese have formed a jungle coalition to oppose the military junta rather than trusting the NLD, which previously campaigned on their behalf. Last year, a leader of the Shan people, from the north-east, said: "Suu Kyi never has anything to say about the needs of ethnic groups like the Shan. ‘Democracy first,’ she tells us ‘and then I’ll consider your demands.’ We’re sick of waiting." Suu Kyi is quick to dismiss dissent. She said recently: "We have had a few people leave but they were working with the authorities. Not everyone has the staying power."
But what has her enduring alliance with the West - one that centres on passive resistance and international sanctions,contributed to the struggle in Burma? It has made Suu Kyi the world’s most prominent spokesperson for "freedom and democracy" after Nelson Mandela, and she is undoubtedly a remarkable talisman for the Burmese people, who once brought cohesion to a fractured opposition. In turn, we in the West have adopted Burma as our pocket pariah, but sanctions are a limited gesture that have cost us little and achieved even less. Does the fact that some are now calling for these new talks to take place without Suu Kyi reflect a concern within Burma that only seasoned political horse-traders will break the impasse? With her unwavering moral standards and Western sensibilities, it appears compromise is something that Suu Kyi will never accept. It is possible that Burma could adopt a power-sharing agreement, a peculiarly Asian form of democracy not unlike that which thrives in Thailand, where army generals have abandoned their khakis for pin-striped suits. But would Suu Kyi be able to accept this?
The full version of this article is published in the July issue of Prospect magazine: www.prospect-magazine.co.uk.
The Stone of Heaven, The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade, by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.