Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Political activists in Myanmar posited that a third of the people in the government, including Thein Sein, were reformers; a third still favored military strong-arming; and a third were on the fence. “If you make the wrong choice in this environment, you lose big,” Mitchell observed. Thein Sein has never been a heroic figure, but he has pushed back against hard-liners; one of his associates told me that he wanted to make the changes irreversible. Since 2011, he has met with Suu Kyi numerous times, but onlookers believe she doesn’t trust him. “She is extremely decisive, and she often treats his cautiousness as indecision,” one diplomat said. “She didn’t hope for the compromise she has been handed; she hoped for a revolutionary reversal.” The popular narrative in Myanmar speaks of “The Lady and the hunters”—of Suu Kyi and a corrupt military. Ma Thanegi characterized the stereotype as “the beautiful-victim-and-the-thugs story that has served her so well.” Once Thein Sein reined in the hunting, The Lady had to sully herself with politics, even before achieving official power. That imperative was not entirely welcome.

Turnout for the 2012 by-election had been huge. Everyone I met agreed that if a proposed election were held in 2015, the hint of self-determination would ensure an avalanche of voting. The urgency of that excitement echoed what I had heard in South Africa in the lead-up to the pivotal 1994 elections, for which millions of people waited in line for three days to vote. In Yangon, however, I heard near-unanimous concern that the election would be rigged. Suu Kyi’s NLD seemed destined for victory, but members of Thein Sein’s Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) appeared to be banking on the very real possibility that the NLD might prove incompetent at governing, and that—as in Korea, Taiwan, and Mongolia—overthrown oppressors might reorganize and win in elections. Among the most surprising reformers in the ruling party has been Shwe Mann, speaker of the Parliament. When he took that role, it was assumed that he would endorse the military agenda as his predecessors had. Instead he sought to transform Parliament into a forum for actual debate and refused to hew to edicts from on high. But Shwe Mann told Derek Mitchell, “We tried socialism; we tried a military government; both failed. We believe democracy will make us strong. If the people don’t have a voice in their affairs, it will be an unstable country, and no one will invest here.” Suu Kyi, by then a member of Parliament, formed an alliance with him, by which he effectively acknowledged that the only path to long-term relevance was to stick with her.

It’s hard to overstate the status of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (daw is a term of respect, Aung San is her father’s name, Suu Kyi is her given name, and she is commonly called simply “The Lady”). “She is not treated like a rock star,” Derek Mitchell averred. “She’s treated like the Second Coming.” Her father spearheaded the revolution and masterminded the multiethnic pact through which Burma achieved independence from the British; after his assassination, he achieved mythic status. Suu Kyi was raised by her mother, Khin Kyi, first in Rangoon (now called Yangon), then in India and Nepal (where Khin Kyi was successively appointed ambassador).

Suu Kyi received her degree from Oxford University in 1969. After a brief sojourn in New York, she returned to the UK, eventually marrying Michael Aris, a British fellow student at Oxford, with whom she had two children. By happenstance, she was visiting Burma to care for her hospitalized mother when the 1988 uprising began, and after a few weeks, she gave her first speech, asking for “unity.” When the revolution was squashed, she banded together with some of her father’s former acolytes in the pro-democracy movement and made a sacrificial decision that took on the shimmer of revelation: to stay in Myanmar rather than return to England to be with her husband and sons. Commanding more and more attention, she was put under house arrest a year later, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Although she was released from 1995 until 2000, after which her house arrest was reinstated, she was never permitted to travel freely. These circumstances contributed to her aura of virtue, and she has proven to be perceptive and charismatic. I have never met anyone who was unimpressed after meeting her. Thant Thaw Kaung, who works with her, said to me reverently, “You cannot find another such person in the whole world.”