Burma’s Spring: Real lives in turbulent times (17 page)

I arrived for my appointment two hours early, in sunglasses and a baseball cap, like a celebrity trying to avoid the attentions of the paparazzi. My trusted taxi driver Kyaw Swar had zipped right up to the gates of the NLD office and I hoped the eye-watering glare of the midday sun had obscured my hurried entry. In a small rucksack I had a spare set of clothes, and my plan, if I was followed after the interview, was to
take a taxi to the British embassy in the hope I would be mistaken for a diplomat. I would go to the busy library there, change in the ladies’ and emerge a few hours later, hopefully looking different. My scheme didn’t sound very sophisticated, but the MI agents hadn’t impressed me with their competence so far. On the other hand, I knew journalists who had been detained and deported having been identified for movements considerably less incriminating than visiting the NLD office. And if I, as a Rangoon resident, was caught it would be a lot more serious – I would implicate those around me and in particular my husband’s aid organisation. I hadn’t said anything to him about it the evening before. I knew he would worry if I told him about the interview, so I had decided to wait until it was over – easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, I told myself.

Like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, the party’s chaotic headquarters had come to life again after many years. During Suu Kyi’s incarceration, party members only opened the office for meetings on national holidays. Now it was buzzing with activity: well-dressed ladies sat behind a trestle table selling hastily produced Aung San Suu Kyi memorabilia, another woman stirred a vat of curry by the door. Opposition activists, invigorated by their leader’s release, sat in small groups, their hands waving about as they discussed policy and the future. One man armed with a roll of tape busied himself covering every available space left on the pale green, mildewed walls with newly printed posters of the Lady. To my disappointment, I saw that I was not the first journalist to arrive. Other foreigners were standing against the filing cabinets, sweaty and silent. At first, there was tension among us, the usual camaraderie between journalists replaced by suspicion and competitiveness. No one wanted to talk. Instead I chatted to Peter, an NLD volunteer, who had taken on the job of signing us all in. Now twenty-seven, he was the son of a political prisoner and had joined the NLD as
soon as he was old enough. While devoted to the cause, his membership of the outlawed opposition movement was causing him serious personal problems, he told me. He couldn’t get a girlfriend. Well educated, not badly off and certainly good-looking, his political activities made him just too risky to hang out with. He looked across the crowded room at two slender young women in tightly wrapped sarongs who were laying out tin cups by the water dispenser. ‘But maybe I will find one here,’ he grinned.

I was third on the list behind the Associated Press and a reporter and photographer from
El Pais
. We all kept asking Peter to repeat the running order and to tell us again how long we would have. We needed the reassurance. If these were the first media interviews the Lady was giving, we just had to see her that day. I looked at the young, male cameraman opposite me – unwashed, unshaven, and looking like he had slept in his jeans and T-shirt – and wondered whether he thought this was appropriate attire to meet the ever-immaculate Lady. I had at least worn a skirt and made an effort to look smart, but we had all by now succumbed to the intense, humid heat. Clicking our digital recorders on and off, we looked feverish and slightly deranged, our hair plastered down on our heads. Two men arrived to install a new fridge at the bottom of the stairs. Straining for its metaphorical significance, we all took frantic notes.

There was a commotion at the open door and I realised that at last she was here. The crowd parted to make way, and she stopped only to bow her head and clasp the elderly hand of a shaven-headed Buddhist nun. Then she swept past and up the enclosed wooden staircase to her ‘sitting room’, which Peter had told me had been hastily cleaned, painted and carpeted the day after her release. The first batches of journalists were called up, and then, after another hour or two of waiting, I was finally
summoned up the stairs to the holding area outside her office door. Dry-mouthed, I sat on a rickety fold-down chair and contemplated the peeling paint and bare concrete floor. I fiddled with my damp, flat hair. I could hear the wail of a baby from the shop next door. Then the door opened to the light-filled room, and there was the Lady, shaking the hands of the reporters in the group before me. I removed my shoes (as is the Burmese custom) and stepped inside. ‘No, no, not there, sit down here next to me,’ she commanded, warm and bossy at the same time. Suu Kyi told me she had hardly had time to breathe since her release five days earlier. I knew she had many more pressing matters on her mind, but for half an hour she fixed her full attention on me.

*

She sat straight backed, of course, in a fitted grey blouse and long silk
tamein
, her hair pulled back in a ring of tiny yellow roses. Where to begin? Worried about the constraint of time, I made the mistake of ploughing through my list of questions, some of which others at the paper had sent for me to ask. We skipped too quickly from her routine in detention to her policy on sanctions to the recent elections. I jumped around topics instead of following up on the things that really interested me – her feelings about being separated from her family, and her ambitions now she was free. My approach suited her down to the ground. Suu Kyi did not want to get into the intricacies of her personal life; no journalist has really managed to crack the invisible, protective wall she has built around herself. She batted away questions that sought to delve into her feelings about the sacrifices she had made, the missing years with her family. Compared to Burma’s thousands of other political prisoners, flung into squalid jails across the country, detention in a lakeside villa wasn’t so bad, she tried to argue. ‘It embarrasses me to talk about the personal cost to me when I see what other
political prisoners have to put up with,’ she said. ‘Whatever I have had to undergo is nothing. Of course, one always thinks that one’s family is lovelier than every other family in the world. That’s only natural.’

Suu Kyi spent much of her early life abroad with her diplomat mother after her father’s assassination when she was aged just two. As a student in England, she met her future husband, the academic Michael Aris, and settled down with him on a street of substantial terraced houses in north Oxford. The couple had two sons, Alexander and Kim, and visitors to the Aris family home recall a noisy household, full of laughter and the exotic smells of Suu Kyi’s Burmese cooking. ‘It was a normal family life with a father and a mother and children and a house and a dog,’ Suu Kyi told me, matter-of-factly. ‘We had normal friends; whatever we did seems very normal in comparison with what I’m doing now.’ In the spring of 1988 (when her sons were fifteen and eleven), Suu Kyi was called back to Burma to care for her dying mother. It was a visit that would change the course of her life. She arrived at a time of political unrest – students, office workers and monks had taken to the streets in protest at the oppressions of military rule. ‘I didn’t consciously choose politics over my family, I just chose to get involved,’ she explained. ‘At that time, in 1988, there was this tremendous upsurge of people power, and everybody for a short time was involved in the uprising, and I just thought of it as a citizen’s duty to be part of the movement.’ This was new territory for everyone, and she could not have guessed at the personal toll it would take. But once she had dipped her toe into Burmese politics, there was no going back.

On 26 August, Suu Kyi made her first public speech, beneath Shwedagon, and half a million people braved the monsoon rain and mud to hear her. The crowd was struck by her extraordinary charisma, determination and her resemblance to her
father. Overnight, she became the democracy movement’s leader. The military rulers felt intensely threatened by this wisp-like, passionate woman and in less than a year, the newly established State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) ordered that she be placed under house arrest. That was the start of what would be a total of fifteen years of incarceration in her mother’s decaying villa. ‘They put barricades on our street on both sides of my house. The chairman of the Township Law and Order Committee came to my house with lots of other people and read out the detention order placing me under house arrest. That was it. Then they searched my house from top to bottom.’

Suu Kyi recalled the crushing sense of being completely alone. Security agents were camped in her lakeside garden, among its blooms of frangipani and jasmine. Her phone line was cut; she had no television, no computer. Just a radio. ‘I was alone in the house and all the security people were camped in the garden. In
my
garden. And apart from the times when my family was allowed to visit me I hardly saw anybody from the outside,’ she said. ‘The first years were the worst. They threw me into the deep end. And after that I could swim beautifully.’ She smiled wryly.

Her husband Michael had returned to Oxford with the boys, but during her first stint of house arrest they were allowed to visit during the school summer holidays. The last visa was granted in the monsoon season of 1995. Michael Aris later wrote that those days he spent with his wife at the tropical lakeside house were ‘among my happiest memories of our many years of marriage. It was wonderfully peaceful… I did not suspect this would be the last time we would be together for the foreseeable future.’ In fact, it was the very last time. Two years later, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The Burmese authorities denied him permission to visit his wife again, and Suu Kyi made the painful decision not to travel to England,
knowing that if she did she would never be allowed to return to her homeland. Michael Aris died on his fifty-third birthday, in 1999. ‘My family accepted that I could not go back, and they understood. I don’t think they were happy about it, but neither was I,’ Suu Kyi told me. ‘But I was never in doubt about what I should do, and neither was my husband.’

During the seven years of her last detention, the authorities delivered to her just one letter from each of her sons, by then in their late twenties and thirties. Suu Kyi relied on ‘inner resources’ and a strict daily routine. She rose each day at 4.30 a.m. for early morning meditation. Each day was devoted to what she regarded as work, listening to the radio, making sure she was up to date with news. Losing touch was what she feared most. ‘If I missed something, there was no one to say, “Did you hear about that?” So I had to listen to everything. That was my job.’ She read avidly, and played her out-of-tune piano.

From this peaceful solitude she had been thrown, overnight, into a maelstrom of constant company and constant demands. She was tired, but unwilling to slow down, worried as she was that her freedom could be short-lived. She had talked by phone to Barack Obama and David Cameron; she had held meetings with the senior brass of her party, trying to move the stagnant democracy movement forward. That was her one aim, she said: democracy and nothing less. Of course, at that time, Suu Kyi didn’t know what her freedom really meant; after all, she had been there before, only to be locked up again. She was still distrustful of the generals, and dismissive of the recent elections they had held. Why had she been freed? Her guess was as good as ours. ‘I think they had simply run out of excuses to keep me locked up,’ she said. In fact it was more calculated than that. Her release turned out to be the beginning of a controlled evolution by the generals that steered Burma towards a political transition
while avoiding violent regime change, shielding the senior generals from retribution for their injustices. At that time, though, Suu Kyi just knew that her release had generated a burst of energy, and she was desperate to harness it. ‘There are so many young people who support us, full of energy and vigour and vim. But they have to learn not to be afraid of political contacts and politics. They need to have courage.’

Her aide knocked on the door to signal our time was up. I gathered up my notebook and tape recorder, and remembered the gift I had for her in my rucksack. Sheepishly I took out the white, ribboned box and put it in front of her on the wooden coffee table. ‘I just thought, well, you might have missed things like this,’ I said. She smiled a brilliant smile. ‘Oh thank you! That is terribly kind. You know, after all these years, I’ve realised that kindness is the thing I appreciate the most.’ She ushered me to the door.

*

I next saw Aung San Suu Kyi a week later at Rangoon airport. Her younger son Kim had been granted a visa in Bangkok and was on the first flight. The wires had reported his departure from Thailand so I jumped in Kyaw Swar’s taxi and we raced to the airport as fast as the Toyota Sprinter would carry us. When I arrived she was already there, at first standing in the arrivals hall with all the other families who had come to greet the early morning flights. But then Suu Kyi, a celebrity even to the servants of the military regime, was approached by an airport security officer and escorted through customs, past the baggage carousel, to a seat next to the passport counters. We could see her through the glass wall, sitting very still on the bench, her back to us. For the thirty minutes that she waited, her hands in her lap, she was not Burma’s democracy leader, nor a prize-winning dissident. She was simply a mother, waiting to be reunited with the son she had not seen for a decade. When she spotted thirty-three-
year-old Kim skipping down the steps from the airline gates, she stood up, smiling. She couldn’t take her eyes off him as he queued to clear immigration. He bounded towards her and greeted her with a quick hug. She held his arms and stepped back to look properly at her son, almost a foot taller than her. When he took off his jacket to show her a tattoo of a peacock on his upper arm – the symbol of her National League for Democracy – she laughed.

Kim Aris had become the father of two children since he last saw his mother, but on that day he looked very much like a son – in a scruffy khaki T-shirt and jeans, a rucksack on his shoulders. His mother, by contrast, looked typically elegant, dressed in pale green silk. It occurred to me that his outfit may have been more thoughtfully chosen than it appeared to be. Emblazoned on his T-shirt was one of the monsters from the classic children’s book
Where The Wild Things Are
. Perhaps Kim wanted to remind his mother of the family life they used to share in Oxford, or perhaps he just wanted to make her laugh.