ANALYSIS:The physically slight but dignified woman on trial in Rangoon remains the greatest threat to the Burmese junta, writes SORCHA NI BHEARAIN
TO UNDERSTAND pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s undimmed moral stature in Burma, one image stands out.
In 1989 during a political tour of the Irrawaddy Delta, Suu Kyi refused to back down in the small town of Danbuyu when confronted with soldiers aiming rifles directly at her and reportedly awaiting orders to fire.
“She told us to ‘keep moving’. . . She was calm, almost serene, as she faced down death,” her party colleague Nyo Myint recalled in a letter to the Burmese news magazine, The Irrawaddy.
That was 20 years ago and for 13 of the years since Aung San Suu Kyi has been under various forms of house arrest, sequestered away from supporters and the world, out of sight but not out of the minds of the Burmese.
Since around 2003, she has been prevented from communicating with supporters, the media, or virtually anyone besides her doctor and two loyal assistants in her home in Rangoon.
The road to her house is manned permanently with road blocks laced with barbed wire, but the faded white colonial style home can be seen clearly from a number of vantage points on Inya Lake, and the dilapidated icon remains a magnet for supporters, tourists, and, apparently, cranks.
Burma’s democracy movement has always attracted a smattering of foreign idealists, eccentrics, and self-promoters. Pride of place among the most misguided must now go to American John Yettaw, the 53-year-old whose bizarre insertion of himself into Burmese affairs and Aung San Suu Kyi’s fate would be merely farcical were not the consequences for the people he has impinged upon so profound.
The regime would almost certainly have found a way without Yettaw to maintain Suu Kyi’s detention, which had been due to end this month. But under the guise of her having broken the conditions of her house arrest by sheltering an unauthorised foreigner, they may well make the conditions of the 62-year-old leader even more harsh.
The generals have already imposed more hardships on the handful of courageous people around the pro-democracy figure. To date, two of Suu Kyi’s lawyers have been dismissed from the bar and her physician has been in and out of detention over the Yettaw incident. Activists in Rangoon have been held and two female assistants are facing trial with the Nobel Laureate in the famously grim Insein prison.
In Burma’s unsanitary jails, a lack of nutritious food and medical attention have caused the deaths of hundreds of political prisoners.
This new nadir in Burmese affairs comes a year after Cyclone Nargis left around 140,000 dead and millions bereft and ruined in the Irrawaddy Delta, south of the former capital Rangoon.
With foreign media still banned, the Delta remains one of the world’s most hidden natural disasters in living memory.
While scores of international organisations are still helping with food, shelter, and cash for work programmes, aid workers say funding shortfalls are holding up recovery for millions.
The Delta is Burma’s rice bowl, but today much of the farmland remains infertile after being inundated by seawater during Cyclone Nargis. Farmers lost virtually all their livestock after millions of cattle, buffaloes, pigs and chickens drowned and many have yet to be replaced.
Cyclone Nargis had one positive result, the extraordinary outpouring of help that flew to the victims from ordinary Burmese citizens of every class, creed and persuasion.
Anyone in Rangoon this time last year could not fail to have been moved by the spontaneous “popular uprising” of fellow feeling that seemed to unite everyone, rich and poor, young and old, student and businessman, Buddhist and Christian.
It seemed a sort of quiet moral victory, evidence of collective reserves of hidden inner strength and generosity among people who have for so long been disempowered, demoralised, and fragmented under military rule. For many Burmese, it was evidence that their society and they themselves had retained traditional virtues such as compassion and goodness. As the most potent symbol around of similar moral virtues and inner strength, Aung San Suu Kyi remains the single biggest threat to the generals who are busy planning a rigged election for next year. And for that she, and Burmese hopes, will stay under lock and key.
Sorcha Ní Bhearain is the nom de plume of an Irish journalist who travels regularly to Burma