When modern Myanmar's founding father, Gen. Aung San, was cut down by assassins' bullets in 1947, his daughter Aung San Suu Kyi was just 2 years old.For four decades after Aung San's death, a succession of weak, incompetent or despotic leaders ruled the country, also known as Burma.
His legacy seemed consigned to the history books and to his dusty home, turned into a museum visited by schoolchildren. The date of his death, July 19, was marked each year as Martyrs' Day, but the annual ritual seemed only a reminder of the country's doleful history.
Now, however, Martyrs' Day has become a day of hope, buoyed by the rise of Aung San Suu Kyi - the daughter who has become the undisputed leader of the country's pro-democracy movement.
"I think you see his presence in the thought and expressions of Aung San Suu Kyi,'' says Myanmar specialist Josef Silverstein, a retired professor from Rutgers University in the United States. "I think that the people still see her as carrying out his ideas about a peaceful and united Burma.''
This year for the annual commemoration, Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition party urged a dialogue with the government to solve the nation's many woes, saying the talks should be in line with "policies laid down by the martyrs'' - a reference to Aung San and his fellow independence fighters who had visions of creating a democratic nation.
Aung San, one of Asia's great anti-colonial leaders, was blunt and direct, a man of action; his Oxford-educated daughter is refined, worldly and patient.Their common characteristics: charisma, fierce nationalism and a stubborn streak. Rebellion also runs in the family: some 19th-century ancestors actively resisted British colonization.
"Even at a young age, Aung San was very much anti-British, in a xenophobic sort of way, because his maternal grandfather had been beheaded by the British,'' recalls Sein Win, 80, who as a young reporter covered Aung San's brief career.
Born in 1915, Aung San became head of the country's largest nationalist association, and enlisted Japan's aid to build up a "Burma Independence Army'' to kick out the British. When the Japanese took over Myanmar in World War II, they installed a puppet nationalist government including Aung San.
But he led an underground struggle against the Japanese, and his nationalist army switched its allegiance in March 1945 to the Allied cause. Aung San then negotiated an independence accord with Britain, and in April 1947 his party won 196 of 202 seats in an election for a constitutional assembly.
But six months before independence, gunmen burst into a meeting of the interim government, killing Aung San and six Cabinet ministers. A jealous political rival, former Prime Minister U Saw, was tried and hanged for arranging the assassination.
Aung San's life was cut short at age 32.
"He died as a freedom fighter, as a hero, but not as a real political leader,'' says Sein Win.
In 1962, one of Aung San's comrades in the independence struggle, Ne Win, staged a coup d'etat, installing a socialist police state which led the nation down the path to economic ruin. His misrule sparked a popular uprising in 1988.
By chance, Suu Kyi had returned home in April that year to nurse her dying mother. She had lived abroad since she was 15, earning a B.A. at Oxford University, working at the United Nations and, in 1972, marrying an English academic, Michael Aris.
Except for her name, she was an unknown figure in Myanmar. But as many as a half-million people turned out for her public speech on Aug. 26, 1988, at the foot of Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda.
"I could not, as my father's daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on,'' she declared.
Defying a brutal military crackdown, she helped found the National League for Democracy party to rally people to the democratic cause.
The day after an abortive protest on Martyrs' Day 1989, Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest and spent the next six years in isolation at her lakeside residence in Yangon.
During that time her party won a 1990 general election, taking 392 of 495 parliamentary seats, but was not allowed to take power by the military. She was awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.
In his presentation speech, Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Francis Sejersted likened her to India's Mahatma Gandhi as well as to her father.
"In both, one can see genuine independence, true modesty, and 'a profound simplicity,' to use Aung San Suu Kyi's own words about her father.
To Aung San, leadership was a duty, and could only be carried out on the basis of humility in face of the task before him and the confidence and respect of the people to be led.'' - AP