Happy birthday, Aung San Suu Kyi

Burma's National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is spending her 60th birthday under house arrest, her 3rd year under her current stretch of house arrest. Despite her democratic election as leader of the country in 1990, the military junta has refused to give up control of Myanmar -- or to acknowledge Suu Kyi as its elected leader. She has spent much of the last 15 years under house arrest and also had several botched attempts on her life. We hope Aung San Suu Kyi is free by her next birthday, to begin the task of pulling Burma from the poverty and thought-police state that its military has made there.

Here's the story of this remarkable Nobel Prize-winning woman, the Mandela of her country, whom we all should hope will get a chance to lead her country from darkness to the light. This short bio is from a website devoted to her, www.dassk.com (it contains her bio, speeches, awards, photos, interviews, links, letters, books, and forums):

Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of one of Burma's most cherished heroes, the martyred General Aung San, who led his country's fight for independence from Great Britain in the 1940s and was killed for his beliefs in 1947. Suu Kyi has equaled her father's heroics with her calm but passionate advocacy of freedom and democracy in the country now called Myanmar, a name chosen by one of the most insensitive and brutal military dictatorships in the world. The ruling junta -- "political party" would be too generous a concession -- goes by the Orwellian name of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Burma, or Myanmar, has a population of 45 million and is Southeast Asia's second largest country (in area) after Indonesia.

Suu Kyi (pronounced Soo Chee) was two years old when her father -- the de facto prime minister of newly independent Burma -- was assassinated. Though a Buddhist -- the predominant religion of Burma -- she was educated at Catholic schools and left for India in her mid-teens with her mother, who became the Burmese ambassador to India. Suu Kyi went to England where she studied at Oxford University. There she met Michael Aris, the Tibetan scholar whom she married. They had two sons, Alexander and Kim.

A watershed in her life was 1988, when Suu Kyi received a call from Burma that her mother had suffered a stroke and did not have long to live. Suu Kyi returned to Burma, leaving her husband and two children behind in England, having cautioned them years earlier that duty may one day call her back to her homeland. She arrived back in Burma to nurse her mother at a time of a burgeoning pro-democracy movement, fueled by the energy and idealism among the country's young people. There were demonstrations against the repressive, one-party socialist government. Suu Kyi was drawn into the pro-democracy movement, which was snuffed out by SLORC, which seized power on September 18, 1988. Thousands of pro-democracy advocates were killed.

Next came a general election in 1990, which political parties were allowed to contest. Suu Kyi headed the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won a landslide victory, with 80% support. This was not be tolerated by the SLORC leaders, who refused to recognize the election results. Worse, SLORC put the elected pro-democracy leaders under house arrest, including Suu Kyi. Despite the restrictions of house arrest, Suu Kyi continued to campaign for democracy, and for this she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

One of Suu Kyi's most dramatic speeches was in 1995, soon after she was released from nearly six years of house arrest, when she spoke to a global women's conference in Beijing. She didn't appear at the conference, but spoke to the international gathering by means of a video smuggled out of Burma. Suu Kyi always expresses herself with calm conviction and calm passion, which reflects her Buddhist upbringing. She is Gandhian in her synergistic mixture of force and restraint. In her speech, she said, "... to the best of my knowledge, no war was ever started by women. But it is women and children who have always suffered the most in situations of conflict." She mentioned "the war toys of grown men." Without specifically targeting her SLORC opponents, but her words dripping with gentle sarcasm, Suu Kyi went on to say: "There is an outmoded Burmese proverb still recited by men, who wish to deny that women too can play a part in bringing necessary change and progress to their society: 'The dawn rises only when the rooster crows.' But Burmese people today are well aware of the scientific reason behind the rising of dawn and the falling of dusk. And the intelligent rooster surely realizes that it is because dawn comes that it crows and not the other way around.

"It crows to welcome the light that has come to relieve the darkness of night. It is not the prerogative of men alone to bring light to the world: women with their capacity for compassion and self-sacrifice, their courage and perseverance, have done much to dissipate the darkness of intolerance and hate, suffering and despair."

It was a powerful speech, subtly crafted for the targeted audience in her homeland.

In 1999 Michael Aris was dying of prostate cancer in England, where he lived with their two sons. He had repeatedly requested permission to visit his wife one last time before he died, but the SLORC authorities denied him entry, arguing that there are no proper facilities in the country to tend to a dying man. They suggested instead that Suu Kyi visit him in England. She refused, fearing if she ever left the country she would never be allowed to return. The day Aris died, on his 53rd birthday on March 27, 1999, Suu Kyi honoured the occasion at her home in Rangoon, with 1,000 friends and supporters, including high-ranking diplomats from Europe and the United States. As part of a ceremony, she offered food and saffron robes to 53 Buddhist monks, one for each year of her husband's life. The monks recited prayers and chanted sutras. Instead of wearing her usual bright flowers and wreathes of jasmine, Suu Kyi chose instead a traditional black lungi with a white jacket. She cried only when one of the monks reminded the audience that the essence of Buddhism is to treat suffering with equanimity.

The police did not stop the supporters from visiting Suu Kyi in her time of grief. But they took the names and addresses of all those who attended at the service to honour the husband from whom she had been separated since she left England to tend to her dying mother.

HERE'S A REVIEW of a good book about Myanmar (review by Chris Mitchell from splinters, via which I gathered much of this):

Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell In A Burmese Tea Shop by Emma Larkin

This could well be my book of the year. Ostensibly an attempt to retrace the physical origins of George Orwell's novel Burmese Days, Secret Histories is actually a superbly concise and deeply scary history lesson in the fate of pre and post-colonial Myanmar.

Governed by one's of the world's longest serving military dictatorships, which has managed to wholly destroy the infrastructure and prosperity of arguably Asia's most naturally wealthy country, Secret Histories provides a ground-level view of the perils of living in modern-day Myanmar. Emma Larkin, a British woman who speaks fluent Burmese (sadly her biographical sketch is, indeed, too sketchy to ascertain much else), follows the geographical path of Orwell's five year residency within Burma, revisiting the cities and outposts of one of the former British Empire's most far-flung territories.

Along the way she exposes quite how much Myanmar has become the living embodiment of Orwell's 1984. All politics, teaching and literature are ruthlessly policed and scrutinised, with imprisonment for the smallest misdemeanours regularly meted out. Torture and disappearance are the norm. Corruption and unemployment are rife, and Myanmar's one sole beacon of hope, the activist Aung San Suu Kyi, is still under house arrest. (Larkin explains the reverence surrounding Suu Kyi is due to her being the daughter of Aung San, who is widely considered the hero-father of the nation who led Burma's independence from the British; her continued refusal to be intimidated by the murderous tactics of the regime have led them to repeatedly smear her as a "foreign devil" thanks to her marriage to Englishman Michael Aris).

Secret Histories, like Anna Funder's Stasiland which describes life in the totalitarian communist state of East Germany, provides a personal perspective of a truly appalling regime that lets the reader begin to understand what it is like to live day to day under such an oppressive government. One thing that endeared me to the Burmans straight away was their love of reading, as described by Larkin: unsurprising due to the lack of real information which they receive, but also a national pastime and passion that has led numerous people to preserve secret libraries of books that have otherwise been banned by the authorities.

Whilst everyday life is undeniable misery in Myanmar, the people who Larkin describes are still full of life, some how finding the will to live and live fully despite their most restrictive of circumstances and to try and make tiny but vital movements towards making their country become free again.

This book is transformative - before I began reading it I knew virtually nothing about Burma - at the end of its 230 pages, I feel I've gained at least a valuable gloss on its modern history and, wholly secondary to that, an insight into what drove Orwell to write - it was on his return from Burma to England that he horrified his family by announcing his intention to resign from the colonial service and become a writer.

Secret Histories is truly a vital book, and, with Stasiland, seems to be opening up a new genre (I'm hating myself for writing these words): female writers providing a personal perspective of political troubles; not personal as in their own perspectives, but in that they piece together the histories of the states they're writing about through the stories of those who have lived within it. This strikes me as a vital counterbalance to our more traditional, and of course wholly necessary, overview histories.

IF YOU WANT the book, just click Secret Histories by Emma Larkin into the Amazon search box on upper right and order it. In any event, say a prayer for Suu Kyi today, even if you're an atheist (like me). She's one of the wonders of our age.