“No, No, not there, sit down here next to me,” commands Aung San Suu Kyi. She is keeping up a punishing schedule of meetings and interviews, briefings from her colleagues and phone calls from world leaders, while all the time worrying about whether her son will be granted a visa to visit her.
The warmth and authority of her opening instruction is typical of the woman who has combined those qualities to such potent effect, maintaining her status as the icon of Myanmar’s democracy movement through two decades of detention.
Now she is out, and working hard. “I have so much to do, I barely have time to breathe!” she sighs, sitting straight-backed in a neat grey blouse and long silk skirt, her hair pulled back in a ring of tiny yellow roses. We are in her office - a small, freshly painted room at the top of the stairs in the distinctly shabby headquarters of her National League for Democracy (NLD).
Suu Kyi, 65, was released a week ago last Saturday from her latest, seven-year stint as a prisoner in her Rangoon home to a euphoric reception from thousands of her supporters. She has challenged them to help her bring about a “peaceful revolution” in Burma, which has been under military dictatorship for half a century.
“I can’t do it on my own,” she said. “I think my release has created a tremendous release of energy, of opportunity, and I want people to grab that and try to push the limits.” Suu Kyi said she had noticed some small changes, new freedoms, since her last release in 2003, and she urged her supporters to push for more. “Now they are allowed to put me on the cover of the newspapers. That’s new,” she said.
Back to politics, and Suu Kyi talks about the election earlier this month. Her party refused to take part in the poll, the first in Burma since the NLD won a landslide victory in a 1990 election, which the Generals annulled. This time, the junta rigged the vote to ensure that its proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, was the overwhelming winner.
Suu Kyi’s next move is to consult, catch up, engage and try to revitalise the democracy movement, which has stagnated without her. Her remarkable perseverance and commitment to principle have won her many admirers in the West, among them David Cameron, who called her earlier this week.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner said she was hopeful that she could turn Western leaders’ supportive words into actions, and would try to win the support of Burma’s neighbours China and India, whose close business ties to the regime have helped to ensure its longevity.
“If we want to do more we will have to tell them more clearly what we would like them to do,” she said. “That’s why I am now trying to catch up on what has been going on in the past seven years to see how our friends around the world can join in to give greater emphasis to the movement for democracy. Then, of course, we will try to get our Asian neighbours to be more supportive.”
Suu Kyi said she was assessing the impact of Western sanctions against Burma, to see whether they are hurting ordinary Burmese people more than the junta leaders and their business cronies against whom they are targeted. Her opinion would heavily influence policymakers in Europe and the US, who in the past have looked to Suu Kyi for guidance on how to deal with Burma’s military regime.
But through all her political plans, and a schedule befitting a world-famous political dissident, her thoughts turn frequently to her younger son, Kim, who is waiting in Bangkok for a visa to see his mother for the first time in a decade.
Since her release, Suu Kyi has avoided direct criticism of the military junta led by General Than Shwe, but is aware that her appeals for democratic change may well bring her back into confrontation with Burma’s Generals, and back into detention.
While Suu Kyi is free, many of her supporters are worried about her safety, saying that hundreds of thugs have been hired by the government to incite violence at her rallies. They believe the authorities may be plotting an attempt on her life, as they did in 2003, when Suu Kyi’s convoy was set upon by hired thugs in Depayin, in the north of the country.
Suu Kyi’s response to concerns about her safety seems sweetly naive: “I’m not particularly concerned about my own safety. Not in the sense that I don’t care whether I’m safe or not, of course I want to be safe, but I don’t spend time and energy thinking about that. I don’t want my supporters to be hurt in any way. But I don’t think in Rangoon in broad daylight if there are many people around... they wouldn’t get away with it as they did in Depayin.”
For now, she has her security detail to protect her - the young men in NLD T-shirts who waited for two days, arms linked in solidarity, for her release. “This is my security, you might say, some of them are NLD youth, and some of them are just friends. But I don’t know how strong they are, some of them look quite small to me.”
— The Independent
