The lady is a paradox
AutralAsian Sunday, April 13, 1997 1

REVIEWED BY ETHAN CASEY .

The personal and the political are inevitably intertwined, though not in the Maoists believe. It is, rather, the political that is personal. Aung San Suu Kyi has had plenty of time to reflect on the paradoxes she personifies. "People like to focus on a particular individual," she has said. "It makes the movement comes alive much more for them if they can focus on a particular individual than on a party, which is more impersonal. But that does not mean that they’re not aware of the fact that I represent the party."

Suu Kyi is notoriously bristly about her personal life, and with cause: Her relationship with her husband and sons is not the business at hand. Yet in any discussion of her significance, the personal aspect cannot be avoided. Suu Kyi obviously is enduringly concerned not only with the good of her country, but also with the legacy of her father, Gen Aung San, the Burmese independence hero. The two obsessions may well be compatible, and both are admirable, yet they are not identical.

The hard irony is that posterity has been kind to Aung San partly because his career was very short and, now, because his daughter has so ably carried his mantle into the present day. But political power is a dark thing, and Suu Kyi's supporters will need to decide, at some point, what exactly it is that they want. Those opponents of entrenched oppressive regimes who have succeeded in overthrowing and replacing them include Lenin, Castro and Aristide: All morally ambiguous figures at best. The legacy of the other kind of dissident - Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King - has been complex in a different way. Our history has not earned us the right to hope for a simple triumph of good over evil in Burma.

Suu Kyi herself seems alternately aware and willfully unaware of the complexity of her country's situation. She understands the costs, because she has paid them. In April, 1996 she told a journalist: "I don’t think Gandhi or Martin Luther King courted arrest for the sake of being arrested. I think what they were trying to show was that even atthe risk of imprisonment, one must do what one has to do."

Yet Whitney Stewart quotes her as saying: "The future of course is democracy for Burma. It is going to happen, and I'm going to be here when it happens."

Well, maybe. Burma is a crucible for our historical moment's most ominous unanswered question: Which will prevail, democracy or brute force? No one has yet proven wrong AJP Taylor's assertion that "In every state power rests with the armed forces; and whoever controls these forces controls, in the last resort, the state itself." The question in Burma is who will control the armed forces, and to what end.

The book under review is the only available biography of Suu Kyi that is based on first-hand research: Stewart interviewed Suu Kyi in November 1995 and received her blessing to write the book.

Readers should know that, like Stewart's excellent biographies of the Dalai Lama and Sir Edmund Hillary, this book is written for secondary school students. Even so, it is serious in intention and deserves acceptance as an intervention in the ongoing adult discussion.

Most interesting are the glimpses, too respectful to be intrusive, of Suu Kyi's early life and of her daily routine under house arrest.

"After listening to news, Suu Kyi exercised," Stewart tells us. "She did aerobics or spent 20 minutes on her NordicTrack. Before eating breakfast of fruit, occasionally an egg, and tea or milk, Suu Kyi bathed and sometimes read Buddhist writings."

With all that time on her hands, in fact, she did plenty of reading: "I read a lot of biographies. They taught me how other people faced problems in life. Mandela. Sakharov. Mother Theresa. People felt they had to send me books about people who were in prison."

Part of the personal cost of the public role Suu Kyi has accepted is evident from a television interview from which Stewart quotes: "I was under house arrest because of my politics, so politics became my whole life. Most of the time, I spent thinking about politics ... Once you're alone as a political prisoner, then politics is your whole existence."

Can real change be made to happen? Burma is perhaps the most telling political metaphor in today's world, and we in Thailand have front-row seats to witness its drama. We do well to watch carefully, humbly and long before claiming to understand. Stewart's thoughtful biography is a step in the right direction.