IF there are limits to human endurance, Burmese pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is pushing back their established boundaries. For 10 days, from August 24th to September 2nd, Suu Kyi camped in her car 10 miles outside the capital city of Rangoon in a stand-off with Burma's ruling junta, that could, at worst, have cost her life, at best, seriously damaged her health. The stand-off ended when the military forced her to return to Rangoon, and padlocked her inside her home.
Her defiance of the military's orders not to leave Rangoon was a bid to attract international attention to the plight of a country that has slipped from the headlines, her message reflected in the urgency of her action: Burma needs help, and fast.
Shortly before Suu Kyi (55) started her stand-off, she agreed to be secretly interviewed at the headquarters of her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), in Rangoon. Getting to see Suu Kyi can take months to organise before even getting inside the country's borders. Burma's ruling military council, the State Protection and Development Council (SPDC), has a paranoid fear of "foreign subversives". "Anyone found to be conducting work related to the media will be immediately fined and deported", warn visa applications. Embassies carry out background checks on all visitors. Tell them you're a journalist, or with the United Nations, or any Western government, and your application will be filed neatly in some embassy bin.
Suu Kyi arrives at our meeting point flanked by a battalion of armoured cars - her round-the-clock escort from Burma's secret police. When she steps out of her car at the entrance to the ramshackle party headquarters, she doesn't even pass them a glance, gliding inside the building with a look of splendid defiance.
But it's a more embattled-looking Suu Kyi who greets me in a stark, upstairs room of the building. She looks grey and drawn. As if to compensate for her silence, Suu Kyi's closest political associate, U Tin Oo - "Uncle", as he is affectionately known - steps forward to greet me, smiling and pumping my hand.
Suu Kyi hangs back in the shadows of the dimly-lit room, clasping her hands together anxiously. She's dressed in a traditional silk longyi and a yellow blouse and, despite her tiredness, retains some of her radiance. But her eyes look puffy and swollen and she hasn't bothered with the customary orchids in her black, silky hair. I begin to sense that something is amiss in her mood.
We sit at the end of a 20-foot wooden table strewn with books and documents. Her reticence is palpable. She looks so weak and tired I begin to wonder if she's going to collapse before my eyes. But then she sits upright in the hardback chair, focusing her steely gaze on me. She relaxes when asked about Ireland, where she was awarded the Freedom of the City of Dublin in January. "Yes, you know the English used to refer to the Burmese as `The Irish of the East'. I think that's because we were about as troublesome as the Irish." She breaks into a smile. "Although some English say it was because the Burmese were a superstitious and happy-go-lucky people, and in that way we were like the Irish." Until 1948, Burma was the colonial jewel in Britain's Asian conquests. It was Suu Kyi's father, General Aung San, who secured Burma's independence, before he was assassinated in 1947, when Suu Kyi was just two years old. His regal portrait, one of many in NLD headquarters, hangs behind Suu Kyi on the wall.
"My father was one of the independence leaders in the 1930s," she says, "who was very much influenced by the Irish independence fighters. Because we were ruled by the British, we heard a lot about the Irish. At that time, there was a political book club, the Red Dragon Book Club, which translated a lot of books - three or four - about Michael Collins. And I think there was one also about de Valera. "Michael Collins was a great hero for my father and for a lot of our independence leaders. The people here looked upon him as one of the great independence fighters. We were influenced by the Indian independence leaders too, but I suppose, at that time, the most effective fighters against the British, against the English, were the Irish."
Suu Kyi was educated in Burma until she was 15 and lived in Rangoon with her mother and brothers. In 1960, her mother became Burma's ambassador to India and the family moved to Delhi. A few years later, Suu Kyi went to England.
She speaks English with an accent she learned while a student at Oxford, where she met her British husband, Tibetan scholar Michael Aris. The couple travelled extensively, living in the Himalayas, as well as in Bhutan and New York, where Suu Kyi worked with the United Nations. In 1988, she was studying for a doctorate in Burmese literature at Oxford when her mother's illness called her back to Burma.
Demonstrations erupted throughout the country and, in what has become known as "the massacre of 8-8-88", 3,000 students and monks were slaughtered when the army opened fire on protesters. Thousands more were killed and imprisoned in the months that followed. Suu Kyi decided to stay in Burma and founded a counter-force, the National League for Democracy, which took 82 per cent of the seats in "free, democratic and fair" elections in 1990. The elections were immediately annulled by the ruling military government.
"I always had links with Burma so Burma was nothing new to me. But the country I came back to had changed beyond recognition. When I was a student in Burma, Burma was a democratic country. You know, a lot of people forget that. "Some people think that Burma has always been under dictatorship. But there was a liberal government, and the people were free and there were opposition newspapers that criticised the government. Now there is no freedom for people to speak out and challenge the junta.
"Living in one country does not have to change your view of people in general. People are people, wherever they are. Obviously the kind of education one has influences one and . . .", she breaks off for a moment, before continuing, "one's family, I suppose." Daw Suu's two sons, Kim (22) and Alexander (27) were 10 and 15 when she returned to Burma. The junta has withdrawn their Burmese citizenship and they have been refused visas on their British passports. The last to see her was Kim, in 1997. Last year, the junta refused Suu Kyi's dying husband, Michael Aris, a final visit to Burma. Instead, they offered her safe passage to Britain to meet him. "It was a thinly veiled attempt to exile me from my country. It was political blackmail," she says in a remarkably calm voice, although her eyes water. She says that when she was first cut off from her family, she thought about them a lot. Then she realised she had to stop. "It's something most political prisoners have to do. You have to realise that there is no point going on and on worrying about something you can do nothing about."
Suu Kyi was granted "unconditional release" from house arrest in 1995. For 12 months, she used her freedom to hold weekend rallies at her two-storey villa, where she would stand on a chair and speak to her followers behind a wall trimmed with razorwire. In response, the army blockaded the roads leading to her house on Rangoon's University Avenue. Since then, the phonelines to her house have been tapped and frequently cut, and she has not been permitted to leave the capital. This week, following the roadside protest, she was padlocked inside her home. She's defensive about the restrictions on her freedom and seems frustrated that foreigners miss the point. "I'm not the only person in Burma to have restrictions on my freedom. The cruelty of this regime is standard fare for everyone, not just for me."
When she does talk about intimidation, it's in relation to the party and how her colleagues are suffering. "They blocked off the road to my house so I can't have meetings there. But now they've been shutting down, forcing our people to shut down their offices. And last month, they arrested two elderly women who rent offices to our party. In some constituencies, our party members are not allowed to leave their town."
The junta's declared mission is to "annihilate" the NLD. Thousands of Suu Kyi's supporters have been imprisoned, forced to flee over the borders, intimidated, tortured. But the junta's attempts at "annihilation" extend also to the civilian population at large. The latest report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur to Burma (1998) says the following violations are commonplace in Burma: "extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the practice of torture, portering and forced labour". Members of ethnic minorities are forced to serve as porters for the army. Any person who cannot carry the required load is allegedly beaten with bamboo sticks or rifle butts. Deprivation of food, water, rest and medical care is also reportedly a common method of punishment".
Alongside the terror is fear; fear of reprisals for speaking to the BBC (14 years with labour), fear of punishment for sending a report to the UN (15 years with labour), fear of being woken in the middle of the night and "disappeared". Suu Kyi has been trying to help her people overcome this fear and has written many essays on a concept which she calls "freedom from fear". She once faced down the guns of a line of soldiers ordered to shoot her while she was out walking with friends. The soldiers were reportedly quaking with fear while she advanced towards them smiling. When she says in a flat tone that she wasn't, isn't, afraid, I strangely believe her. She laughs off the military's threats on her life with the words, "I hope my colleagues make good capital out of it".
She becomes more enthusiastic in her responses when talking about trade sanctions against Burma. "Tourists and investors should stay away from Burma until Burma has a democratic government in place," Suu Kyi says, when asked how the outside world can help to topple the military government.
"When foreign companies invest in a regime like Burma, they are investing in a system which is not fully open, which is open only to a few at the top of the regime. It's crony capitalism, I suppose." When she wants to emphasise a point, she curls her hands into a fist. "And when that happens," she declares firmly, staring me in the eye, "it means that they [the military] not only have the weapons of the state in their hands, but they also have the economic advantage."
The US and European governments have heeded her call to enforce sanctions against Burma, but the sanctions are consistently and systematically flouted.
Ireland's Dragon Oil, along with Germany's Siemens, France's Total Oil and US soft-drinks giant "PepsiCo" are noted offenders. Suu Kyi rests her hands under her chin and takes on a weary look. "If you look at what happened in the Philippines under the Marcos dictatorship. There were no sanctions. People invested very freely there and the elite just got wealthier and wealthier while the rest of the people were kept scrambling around garbage piles. It's exactly the same here. And in South Africa, sanctions were effective against the apartheid regime. Burma is not different.
"Investment and tourism in Burma has only led to a widening of the divide between the rich and the poor and there is a very thick divide between the haves and the have-nots of Burma today. The elite throw their money around, they go to restaurants, they go to hotels, but the great majority of the people can't afford more than one meal of rice a day. Inflation is driving up the price of food so that only the elite can afford to eat properly. It's affecting the diet of the people."
Her concern over the many ways in which her people are suffering is obvious, but she is less forthcoming about her own dietary privations. There were times under house arrest when she didn't have enough food and was eventually forced to sell her furniture to get money to eat. It was, she says, an inconvenience. She rests her head on her hands and sighs when asked how much longer it will take for her people to be free.
"Nobody can say with any certainty when that will be. But I calculate it won't take more than 10 years to achieve. But that is only my opinion. I am not an astrologer."
One of her aides arrives to tell her it is time to address the small group of supporters which has gathered downstairs. She warns me to be careful when leaving the building, reminding me that I will be followed. Then she moves off into the crowd, shaking hands and smiling with her supporters.
Outside on the damp streets, a white saloon trails me as I move along the pavements. Half an hour later, a scooter, with two men from the secret police, joins them in my pursuit and soon after, two plainclothes policemen arrive out of nowhere to flank me on both sides. At first, their shadowing is little more than a minor irritation, but worry sets in when I see how people react to their presence.
Children, normally excited at the sight of a Westerner, turn their eyes away and move backwards into the doorways. Taxi-drivers, usually excited at the prospect of earning some dollars, refuse to let me into their cars. "My family," is all one of them says by way of explanation. There's nothing to identify the secret police in their dress but everybody seems to know instinctively who they are. On the drive to Mingaladon Airport, their scooters flank my car and at every traffic-light stop they bang on the windows and pull faces, jeering and laughing. One of them takes out a hand-pistol from the pocket of his jacket and imitates unleashing a series of shots in my direction. The driver is terrified, training his eyes on the road ahead, afraid to speak.
Back home in Ireland, a note arrives from Suu Kyi via my underground contact. She is, the note says, deeply concerned for my welfare and hopes I managed to leave the country without being harmed. The night before our meeting she didn't get any sleep and apologises for her tiredness and abruptness. She must have written it shortly before she went into her stand-off with the military. It's a baffling gesture. A woman whose life is under constant threat and surveillance, wondering if I, as a virtually "untouchable" Westerner, am safe. She was hurt, she says, that our interview might have proved a disappointment.
"Hurt" is not a word many political leaders have in their vocabulary, but it doesn't seem insincere with Suu Kyi. Her courage, her personal privations and her determination seem all the more remarkable for the open-heartedness that lies behind them. I begin to realise that her greatest suffering starts not with her own privations but with the suffering of her people, with the daily reports of tortured party-workers, of slave-labour children, of executions and terror and fear that filter back to her in the prison of her home. It reminds me of a passage from the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. "I've paid dearly", he wrote, "to learn how to die each man's incomprehensible death . . ." It goes some way to explaining why this formidable woman won't give up her struggle for freedom until her people's suffering has ended.
Burma Action Ireland, PO Box 6786, Dublin 14. Tel: 01-2962238, fax: 014622799. Website: www.freespeech.org/bai/ Burma Project: www.soros.org/burma.html Amnesty International: www.amnesty.org