Woman of the world

Saturday, June 16, 2012

In 1996, a journalist met a political prisoner in Rangoon.

He got hot and sweaty during their interview. When she noticed, she jumped up and turned on the fan.

He was a BBC correspondent, she was the leader of a peaceful opposition movement. She had just been released after seven years’ house imprisonment, but would go on to spend the best part of the coming decade under some form of arrest. The correspondent was Irish journalist Fergal Keane.

His first meetings with the prisoner are described in his book Letters to Daniel. The woman, he writes, was “physically tired, but radiating confidence”. “Her hair is always garlanded with jasmine, white and yellow, occasionally too a pink rose rescued from the wild green of the garden.”

Flash forward 17 years, and the whole world knows the woman with the jasmine in her hair. She is Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Laureate and an international symbol of peaceful resistance on a par with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Today she will accept the Nobel Prize in Oslo, and give the Laureate speech she was prevented from making in 1991. She will then tour Europe, including Ireland, not only as a Nobel Prize-winner but as an elected political leader, the head of the Burmese opposition party, the NLP.

When she touches down in Dublin on Monday, it will be to receive the Freedom of Dublin City and to be guest of honour at a concert organised for her by Bono and Bob Geldof.

Her life has changed completely, but have her new circumstances changed her? Not at all, says the journalist she turned the fan on for. “I don’t think she’s changed at all as a person. I first interviewed her 17 years ago in 1995 and I last interviewed her a few weeks ago, and I had a long chat with her then and the fundamental principles that she lives by are absolutely the same. She struck me as being obviously much more aware now of the wider world, she’s had time to meet diplomats and visitors from abroad, but she is the same essential person.”

The same essential person maybe, but one with real political power in the offing. Aung San Suu Kyi won her first ever parliamentary seat in April. There’s a way to go yet, but it looks like she and her party have a strong chance at the 2015 elections. If they do win, she will preside over the Burmese transition to democracy. Keane is convinced it’s a transition that will be peaceful, if The Lady has anything to do with it.

“There’s one thing you really have to realise, and that’s this; non-violence for her isn’t just a tactic, it’s an absolute principle. I cannot see her taking people out onto the streets to face a military that she knows will shoot people. She’s seen situations like in South Africa. I covered that, and the ANC won, and people were brought out onto the streets and large numbers were shot. She followed that, she knows what happened, and that’s not something she will ever do. She’s not a saint, and I don’t want to say she’s a saint, but she is a true believer when it comes to human rights, and to democracy; they’re not just phrases for her.”

That the woman who is legendary for walking into the guns of Burmese soldiers will not allow her followers to do the same is not surprising, but the hope now is that, with Aung San Suu Kyi leading a peaceful opposition, such clashes may be avoided. Having reported on Burma extensively in the last few years, Keane believes her success may have caught the government on the hop initially, and it’s up to Suu Kyi and her allies to capitalise on their momentum.

“I don’t think the people at the top of the military have any idea of the pace with which things can start to move, they were pretty shocked by the scale of her success at the by-elections, they were taken aback by the kind of reception she received internationally. Now it’s all down to the relationship that is going on between her and the president, and if that can be managed, and they can negotiate their way through the next two years, then Burma will be at peace.”

If, as Fergal Keane says, the Burmese military was taken aback by the international reception of Suu Kyi, then they shouldn’t have been. It’s a story made not just for headlines, but for the most romantic kind of history: A beautiful, articulate dissident who preaches non-violent protest becomes a victim of military opression, confined in one way or another for the best part of two decades.

According to Keane, her willingness to undergo solitary confinement and the privations that went with it — she didn’t see her children for a decade and she wasn’t with her hus-band when he died of cancer in the UK in 1999 — have not only immortalised her but may also be key to her future success.

“Her strength is her ferocious stubbornness in not giving in. There were many periods over the years when she could have taken the option of just leaving. Going into exile. But she refused to do that, and that, of course, is what people admired. It gives her some traction now.”

But even though, he is clearly a fan of the Nobel Laureate and all she has achieved. Keane says it is important to realise she is a working politician now and the narrative around her will have to change.

“The story works up to a point, and that point was the moment she was released. It’s just like Mandela. She’s out there now, and she’s a pol-itician, and she’s campaigning for votes. At that point, you become subject to a much more critical analysis. And I think that’s what you’re seeing. When that byelection campaign was unfolding around us, it was her personality and presence which won that campaign. It’s her personality and presence that is most likely to win the presidential campaign. But there will be more critical analysis also. There will be challenges, there will be confrontations.”

All of this is still ahead of Aung Sun Suu Kyi and her supporters. For now though, it’s all about the tour. All eyes have been on her since she made her first trip outside Burma last month. It’s always big news when charismatic political campaigners go on tour, and they don’t come more charismatic than The Lady.

It makes it even more momentous that the last time her passport was stamped, the Berlin Wall was still standing.

It’s not surprising to Keane that Ireland is part of the itinerary. He says we’ve always been on her radar. “Her father (Bogyoke Aung San) was very much part of a revolutionary generation, who would have been well aware of the ideas that a figure like de Valera was articulating, he would have been aware of those ideas about Ireland, and about Irish sovereignty. And, of course, she is an avid reader, and a reader of poetry, I know that Irish literature has crossed her path.”

And has Fergal Keane briefed her about the hotspots of Dublin? “I’ll be seeing her in Oslo, and I think I’ll just tell her to enjoy herself, and I will say its a pity she’s not going to Cork.” Home