Paul J. Balles considers the courageous steadfastness of Burmese Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years. He argues that it is time for the world to increase and intensify the pressure on the Burmese military junta to free her to lead her people.
On Tuesday 11 August, a Burmese court sentenced Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to 18 months of extended house arrest. She has often been referred to as a symbol of the Burmese people’s struggle against military dictatorship and human rights abuses. She has been under house arrest now for 14 of the past 20 years.
In 1991, Francis Sejersted, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said to an audience that had assembled to honour Aung San Suu Kyi for her outstanding work for democracy and human rights:
The occasion gives rise to many and partly conflicting emotions. The Peace Prize Laureate is unable to be here herself. The great work we are acknowledging has yet to be concluded. She is still fighting the good fight. Her courage and commitment find her a prisoner of conscience in her own country, Burma.
That speech was delivered more than 18 years ago during the 1991 presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize, and Suu Kyi is still a "prisoner of conscience in her own country".
In Norway to receive the prize in Suu Kyi's absence were her husband Aris and two sons, Alexander and Kim, whom she had left behind in England when she travelled to Burma in 1988 occasioned by her mother's illness.
Once back in Burma, she felt the call of duty to her fellow citizens, partly inherited from her father, assassinated democracy leader who had also given human rights and the protection of human dignity the central position in his thinking.
It had to be difficult for Suu Kyi to leave her husband and sons in England. Her husband accepted the fact that a time would come when Suu Kyi would need to return to Burma to fulfil her destiny there. Also, there must be times when a mother feels a calling to sacrifice herself and the motherhood of her own children for the children of her clan, tribe, nation or the world.
The needs of the young people of Burma energized a cause with a stronger calling than only those of her own children. Suu Kyi was unable to be with her boys through much of their teen years.
In a March 2003 article in Parade magazine, Suu Kyi wrote about her travels across Burma and how she asked people why they wanted democracy. Their answers were often "We just want to be free." She commented:
When I ask young people what they mean by freedom, they say that they want to be able to speak their minds. They want to be able to voice their discontent with an education system that does not challenge their intellect. They want to be able to discuss, criticize, argue; to be able to gather in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands to sing, to shout, to cheer. Burma's young people want to play out the vitality of their youth in its full spectrum of hope and wonder – its uncertainties, its arrogance, its fancies, its brilliance, its rebelliousness, its harshness, its tenderness.
Her own position has combined what the Nobel committee referred to as her "sober realism and visionary idealism". For that to be translated into practice, they added, "one absolute condition is fearlessness". In his speech, Francis Sejersted reported:
The military regime had seized power in Burma in 1962. The disturbances that broke out in 1988 were a reaction to growing repression. In the summer of that year, at a time when the situation was very uncertain, Aung San Suu Kyi intervened with an open letter to the government, proposing the appointment of a consultative committee of respected independent persons to lead the country into multi-party elections. In the letter, she emphasized the need for discipline and for refraining from the use of force on either side, and demanded the release of political prisoners.
A couple of days later, she addressed several hundred thousand people in front of the large Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, presenting a political programme based on human rights, democracy and non-violence. On 18 September, after hesitating for a few weeks, the armed forces reacted by tightening the restrictions. The so-called "State Law and Order Restoration Council" (SLORC) was established, and martial law was introduced under which meetings were banned and persons could be sentenced without trial.
Thus, Aung San Suu Kyi became irrevocably committed to her people and her principles. Her people comprise no less than eight different nations of eight different ethnic groups. The military rulers want to maintain control over all, keeping seven of those ethnic groups as minorities to the Burmans. Suu Kyi has long held that all of her people deserve to be represented equally.
As might be expected, the ruling junta does not want Suu Kyi speaking to the people or encouraging a democracy involving equality. They would like her to leave the country so that they might prevent her return. But she won’t leave. So the military confines her to house arrest.
Her deep Buddhist training has made her uniquely fit to weather a life of confinement and isolation. She meditates daily, a discipline that provides insight into life beyond the external reality most of us perceive, and she hews strictly to Buddhist proscriptions against harming, hate, fear and ego.
Suu Kyi has been under house arrest many times since she returned to Burma. Though the junta has been in control of the country since 1962, they began to feel the heat of the National League for Democracy (NLD) opposition in 1988 following protests and elections that the NLD won and the junta refused to honour.
In 1999, her husband Aris, an Oxford University professor, developed cancer and attempted to get a visa to see Suu Kyi in Burma. He hadn’t seen her since 1996. The ruling junta refused the visa, and he died in Oxford without seeing Suu Kyi again.
The Burmese junta put Suu Kyi under house arrest again in May 2003 and allowed no visitors. Because of her status as a Nobel recipient known to the world, the military has only restricted her freedom. They do worse to her friends and supporters. A woman Suu Kyi visited and stayed with in northern Burma was interrogated afterwards and sent to prison for four months. Suu Kyi has appealed for the release of 1500 political prisoners suffering in military prisons.
One problem has been that people living in Burma have great difficulty communicating with the outside world. Active members of the NLD are off limits to outsiders. No one in Burma is allowed to own a computer. Visitors can occasionally talk with locals; and at times that has even included Suu Kyi.
Suu Kyi is probably lucky to be alive due to the timing of her active opposition and winning of the Nobel Peace Prize before the ruling junta could silence her permanently. Once she had won that prize, the worst the military dictatorship could do was to place her under repeated house arrest.
In a 1995 interview with Alan Clements, an American author who lived as a Buddhist monk in Burma for several years and who wrote the 1992 book Burma: The Next Killing Fields? Suu Kyi alluded to another interviewer who kept asking if she really was not frightened. "Why should I have been frightened?" she said. "I'm not sure a Buddhist would have asked this question. Buddhists in general would have understood that isolation is not something to be frightened of." Then she added, "You cannot really be frightened of people you do not hate. Hate and fear go hand in hand." On another occasion, she wrote:
Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day... A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant, or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity.
Her compatriots call her the 'iron butterfly', a name that evokes both her non-violent combat for democracy and the strength of her character.
Suu Kyi has been compared with Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi or the Dalai Lama in her rise as an international symbol of struggle against repression and brutality. She has faced the corrupt and illegitimate regime fearlessly.
I’m just as inclined to compare her struggle with that of Nelson Mandela who languished for years in prison with his wish to end apartheid. Mandela’s cause only came to fruition when the intensifying pressures of the world became too strong for South Africa to resist.
The Burmese military regime is clearly trying to silence Suu Kyi and prevent her from any involvement in the upcoming elections. It’s time for the world to increase and intensify the pressure on the Burmese military junta to free Aung San Suu Kyi to lead her people.
Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.
