The Lady and the Peacock (50 page)

This revolutionary idea became the seed of a mass movement, Burma's mass lay-meditation movement.
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This is the movement which has sent Burmese insight meditation around the world, while inside the country around a million people of all ages and classes and both sexes—twice as many as serve in the Burmese Army and around twice the number of full-time monks—come together under teachers like U Pandita, committed to meditation practice which for them is not only a quest for personal purity but a way of purifying society.

These organizations, like the one based at Panditarama, U Pandita's center in Rangoon, are now rich and powerful, owning large properties in the best parts of the cities, with the allegiance of huge numbers of people, including many professionals and indeed many army officers.

Because these organizations are centered around revered teachers, and have scrupulously avoided overt involvement in political activity, the junta cannot touch them. Intellectually and socially, they are the closest thing to liberated areas the country possesses: the only places people can discuss and reminisce without fear of being spied upon. Through all the violence of 1988 and 1989 and the wild political lurchings of the regime in the years that followed—through the abject failure of the junta in the past fifty years to foster any state institutions worthy of the name—they remained as solid and stable as befits organizations where all the members spend many hours every week cultivating mindfulness. And although, to repeat, they have never taken any political initiatives, in their solidity, wealth and freedom from the otherwise all-pervasive corruption, they retain a potential to influence future change in Burma: an abiding presence for good.

By listening humbly to U Pandita in the summer of 1989, by reading his book and getting up every morning to meditate, Suu herself became a part of that movement. In July 1988 she had made her great exordium with her maiden speech at the Shwedagon. One year later, in the silence and solitude of her home, she took a step that was, from the point of view of consolidating her identity as a modern Burmese, perhaps even more significant.

U Tin Oo, the former Minister of Defense who was the chairman of her party, meditated; indeed he had spent years as a monk after his dismissal by Ne Win. U Kyi Maung, the party's acting leader, was also an avid meditator, and in conversation with Alan Clements succeeded in putting the benefits of the practice in a nutshell. “You were quite surprised when I told you how much we laughed together on the day of Suu's arrest,” he said, referring to her house arrest. He continued:

It can be explained by the fact that the narrator had no regrets at all for what had happened in the past. The “I” and the “me” of the past are dead and gone. By the same token, the narrator of the present is not worried about what might happen to “him” of the future. In fact, “he” is not status-conscious at all. What I strive for is to live a life of complete awareness from moment to moment and to provide the best service I possibly can to all living beings without discrimination and with a detached mind. Does religion serve politics? I do not speculate. I just try to do my best.
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Now Suu had joined them. “Like many of my Buddhist colleagues, I decided to put my time under detention to good use by practicing meditation,” she wrote. “It was not an easy process.”
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But after getting hold of U Pandita's book, she improved. “. . . There were times when I did more meditation because I was getting better at it,” she said. “. . . Once you have discovered the joys of meditation . . . you do tend to spend longer periods at it.”
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What she learned from her teachers and from her hours every day on the cushions was, more than any other influence, to determine her political trajectory in the years ahead. “We want a better democracy, a fuller democracy with compassion and loving kindness,” she was to say years later. “We should not be ashamed about talking about loving kindness and compassion in political terms. Values like love and compassion should be part of politics because justice must always be tempered by mercy. We prefer the word ‘compassion.' That is warmer and more tender than ‘mercy.'”
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In particular, the special vehemence with which she had condemned Ne Win was a tone she would not use again.

“General Ne Win,” she had said in June 1989, “. . . was responsible for alienating the army from the people, fashioning the military into a body answerable only to him . . . U Ne Win is still creating all the problems in this country . . . [He] caused this nation to suffer for twenty-six years.”
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Those were the tough, hurtful, uncompassionate words that had led directly to her detention. “U Pandita spoke of the importance of
samma-vaca
or right speech,” she wrote years later of her audience with the teacher in 1989. “Not only should one speak only the truth, one's speech should lead to harmony among beings, it should be kind and pleasant and it should be beneficial.”
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If she had listened to U Pandita before making that speech, those harsh words against the tyrant might have gone unsaid. In which case, could she have escaped being locked up? It is another of Burma's haunting “ifs.”

O
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July 10, 1995, after 2,180 days in detention, Aung San Suu Kyi was suddenly set free. She emerged a changed woman into a dramatically different world.

The day after her release she met the press in Rangoon and read a statement about her hopes for the future. In photographs taken at that press conference she looks a different person. The flesh is taut on her cheekbones, demonstrating how austerely she has lived in her six years alone, but emphasizing her striking beauty, which the privations of detention have done nothing to undermine—no wrinkles, no shadow of fear or self-pity. In the moist heat of July her black fringe is damp on her brow, her cheeks and eyelids ruddy. She has always looked much younger than her years, and that is still true now, three weeks after her fiftieth birthday. But there is a maturity in her face not seen before. It is strange to speak of a fifty-year-old wife and mother-of-two attaining maturity, but that is the impression one gets, comparing this face with her face on the campaign trail in 1989. Then she was a girl on an amazing trip. Now she was a survivor who had emerged from a severe trial not merely alive but purified, as her meditation teacher had promised.

“When I knew I was going to be free, I didn't know what to think,” she said a few days later. “But once I met my colleagues I was very very happy. The first person I saw after I was free was U Kyi Maung, who led our party to victory in 1990, and his wife, and the moment I saw them, then I was really happy. But before that I didn't know what to think. I thought, I'm going to be free—that means I'm going to have to work a lot harder!”
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Greeting her release—which made news all over the world—Archbishop Desmond Tutu exulted, “Aung San Suu Kyi is free! How wonderful—quite unbelievable. It is so very like when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison on that February day in 1990 and strode with so much dignity into freedom. And the world thrilled at the sight.”
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In her words to the press, Suu also evoked South Africa. “During the years that I spent under house arrest, many parts of the world have undergone almost unbelievable change, and all changes for the better were brought about through dialogue . . . Once bitter enemies in South Africa are now working together for the betterment of the people. Why can't we look forward to a similar process?”
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But if she put her hopes of dialogue in the form of a plaintive question rather than an affirmation, it was for good reason. Her counterparts in the freedom struggles that had gripped the world during her years locked in her home—Mandela, Tutu, Havel, Walesa and the rest—were now major players, some of them already in power. But Suu's release had been so sudden and unexpected—for herself as much as for the rest of the world—that she could only guess what it might lead to.

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Freedom meant she could get together with those of her colleagues in the party's Central Executive Committee who had also been released, return with them to the NLD's decrepit office and get down to work, putting back together the pieces of the party which had been shattered by SLORC since the election. “What I need,” she said, one month after her release, “is a proper office for our democracy party. All I've got is a single old typewriter.”
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It also meant she was besieged by requests for interviews. Before her house arrest she had been a figure of sympathetic concern to the rather small number of people around the world interested in Burma. But in her years away she had become a superstar.

It all started modestly enough. “Dear Suu,” read the letter from Rachel Trickett, sent to her care of her husband two weeks after Burma's election in 1990, “It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the Governing Body of St. Hugh's College . . . voted to elect you to an Honorary Fellowship.”
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A woman given to bitterness might have raised an eyebrow at this accolade from a college that had twice prevented her from changing subjects then cursed her with a third-class degree, before barring her from undertaking a second BA. However, as Suu was by this time no longer receiving letters, it is unlikely that she heard of the honor till the middle of 1992, when it would have been buried under weightier tidings.

Not long after her college's announcement came the news that the European Parliament had decided to award her the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, named after the Soviet Union's most famous dissident when he was still internally exiled in Siberia. The same year she was given the Thorolf Rafto Prize for Human Rights. But an award of even greater moment was in the offing.

It was set in train in December 1989 when John Finnis, professor of Law and Legal Philosophy at Oxford, sent the nomination off to Oslo. Others backed her as well: Václav Havel, one of her most important and eloquent supporters down the years, eventually became her sponsor. Then on October 14, 1991, the committee in Oslo announced that Suu was the new winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

To suppose that the announcement might have induced SLORC to change their ideas and initiate negotiations is to misunderstand their psychology. But the generals were not unaware of its significance: It was a major declaration of international support, at the very moment when they were doing everything they could think of to make the world forget her. It is said that General Saw Maung, chairman of SLORC at the time, took the award as a personal humiliation, and never recovered. It was two months later that he had an attack of mania on the golf course. Four months after that he was forcibly retired.

As Suu was unable to receive the award in person, Alexander and Kim accepted it for her at the ceremony held in Oslo on December 10, 1991. Explaining why Suu had been chosen, the chairman of the committee, Professor Francis Sejersted, gave a speech that was both subtle and strongly felt.

The occasion, he said, “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 absence fills us with fear and anxiety . . .”

Lacking power and even the faintest prospect of power, what sort of function did a figure of her evident courage and resolution fulfill? “In the good fight for peace and reconciliation,” Sejersted went on, “we are dependent on persons who set examples, persons who can symbolize what we are seeking and mobilize the best in us. Aung San Suu Kyi is
such a person. She unites deep commitment with a vision in which the end and the means form a single unit . . .”

He noted how strongly she had been inspired by her father and Mahatma Gandhi. And he made the difficult but essential point that, for visionaries as courageous as these, success was not necessarily to be measured in the terms that worldly politics admits. “Aung San was shot in the midst of his struggle,” he reminded the audience. “But if those who arranged his assassination thought it would remove him from Burmese politics, they were wrong. He became the unifying symbol of a free Burma and an inspiration to those who are now fighting for a free society . . . His example and inspiration . . . over forty years after his death, gave Aung San Suu Kyi the political point of departure she needed.”

It is the profoundest thing that can be said about her struggle, and the one that confounds all those who demand to know, even today, what are her chances of gaining power. To figures like Gandhi, Aung San and his daughter, the categories of life and death are only of relative importance.

Professor Sejersted also addressed any possible charges that by awarding her the Nobel Prize, Norway was somehow claiming her for the West. “In its most basic form the concept of human rights is not just a Western idea, but one common to all major cultures,” he said. And he quoted favorite lines of Suu's, expressing the preeminence of moral values in terms peculiarly well-suited to the Burmese heat:

The shade of a tree is cool indeed

The shade of parents is cooler

The shade of teachers is cooler still

The shade of the ruler is yet more cool

But coolest of all is the shade of the Buddha's teachings.

Alexander, now eighteen, stood up to speak in his mother's place. It was an intensely moving moment, given the cruel manner in which Suu's destiny had forced the family apart, with untold emotional consequences for him and his fourteen-year-old brother. In his speech, Alexander showed a keen understanding of why his mother had made the choices she had. “Although my mother is often described as a political dissident,” he said, “we should remember that her quest is basically spiritual. As she
has said, ‘the quintessential revolution is that of the spirit' . . . ‘To live the full life,' she says, ‘one must have the courage to bear the responsibility of the needs of others . . . one must
want
to bear this responsibility . . .'”