CHARACTER STUDY
Mommie dearest
David Scott Mathieson
WENDY LAW-YONE Aung San Suu Kyi: Politician, Prisoner, Parent
TLS Books: 2023
In early 1997, I smuggled Aung San Suu Kyi’s first ever laptop into Myanmar. After some amateurish cloak-and-dagger moves around Yangon, then still the capital, I dropped the equipment off at the home of a senior official of her political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). Weeks later I visited Aung San Suu Kyi, still under house arrest, at 54 University Avenue, where a small army of ‘gardeners’ on the street turned out to be the local goon squad: military intelligence agents who questioned and photographed me but let me in.
Aung San Suu Kyi was then the world’s most famous political prisoner, having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just several years earlier, but obviously bored if she granted a gormless graduate student a couple of hours of private chat. She was polite, a tad wintry in disposition, but laughed several times too, and agreeably answered my questions on political issues and the nature of the ruthless military regime, the State Law and Order Restoration Council.
I was an ardent fan of her resolve and poise in standing up to this stone-age dictatorship. Despite some misgivings over some of her political decisions, I remained a supporter until about 2012, when, two years after her release from nearly twenty-two years of house arrest, she entered parliament and revealed herself to be a more accomplished political prisoner than a politician. She then spent the next several years attaining the longawaited national leadership while, at the same time, jettisoning almost every principle she espoused.
The writer Wendy Law-Yone’s new study, Aung San Suu Kyi: Politician, Prisoner, Parent, is a palimpsest biography, a series of vignettes and episodes in the long public imagery of an iconic résistante to tyranny, who eventually became a democratically elected autocrat and apologist for mass murder. Law-Yone traces the origins of Aung San Suu Kyi’s political outlook to her father’s legacy as a martyr, which she explains has a different connotation in Burmese, as ‘azani’, or dying in the line of righteous duty. This goes part of the way in explaining her transition from articulate and resolute leader, who mesmerised followers with regular stirring speeches over her gate, to increasingly brittle airs and finally to a pronounced imperiousness, “a touch of Ecclesiastes in her cadence”, as Law-Yone wryly observes.
The book starts with Aung San Suu Kyi’s emergence during the 1988 uprising, which vanquished the moribund socialist system and ushered in a more brutal round of military rule that would last until 2011. Put under house arrest in 1989, she nevertheless directed the NLD on the first of three landslide elections. She was at first referred to as Auntie, and eventually as Amay (Mother) Suu by 2010: the Mother of the Nation. The narrative moves through her experiences under house arrest, her meditation and flashes of weakness and despair, culminating in her defence of the atrocities against the Rohingya Muslims in The Hague in 2019, the 2020 election victory and the subsequent coup and sentencing of Aung San Suu Kyi to thirty-three years in prison on a slew of fabricated charges.
She initially professed modesty when in conversation with journalists—it was a mutual love affair for many years, the frisson of defying a dictatorship—and with
Claude Truong-Ngoc
Aung San Suu Kyi, October 2013
diplomats, biographers and numerous foreign acolytes. But it was always the kind of ‘my modesty is superior to others’ variety. As Law-Yone writes, “She was no saint, no magician, she insisted. She was just an ordinary person going about her business, seeking personal perfection while trying to lead her people on the path to salvation through a revolution of the spirit. What was all the fuss and drama about? She didn’t like drama, she kept saying.”
But as Law-Yone ascribes, “one particular drama, the stuff of archetype and myth, that qualified her for the ultimate sanctification as Mother Suu, Matriarch of Myanmar”: her decision not to leave Myanmar during the long years of house arrest, even when her husband died in 1999. Aung San Suu Kyi’s many detractors often forget the vicious misogyny and racism spat at her by the military regime’s propaganda machine, especially over her British husband, even using her children’s foreign citizenship to disqualify her from the presidency in the 2008 constitution.
She was churlishly ungrateful to many people who supported her over the years. She expected total loyalty in her followers, but didn’t extend it to others. Her small inner circle of advisers insulated her with idolatry. She became increasingly withering to visiting diplomats and signatories, and dismissed entreaties from Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu and many others who were horrified at her studied insouciance at reports of atrocities against the Rohingya Muslims from 2012.
In the years leading up to the February 2021 coup, there was no doubt some of Aung San Suu Kyi’s speeches revealed an absence of empathy. Opening a road in the far north town of Putao in 2019, she told the local community, “I’ve noticed that most of the ethnic nationals are small in stature. I think you all require more nutritious food. I’m sure this road would allow much more nutritious food to be transported to you.” A few years before, she told people displaced by armed conflict to find work instead of expecting handouts.
Her tone-deafness culminated in her statement to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Her decision to attend the initial hearing, a case brought by The Gambia to determine potential breaches of the Genocide Convention, dumbfounded many. But her calculation was steadfastly nationalistic. As Law-Yone observes, her “appearance at the ICJ was seen by a great many in Myanmar as a patriot’s mission to defend her nation’s honour—to make genocide look respectable, as George Orwell might have put it”. Her defence of the charges? Yes, war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed, but not genocide.
The most powerful part of Law-Yone’s fine study covers the fatal miscalculation of Aung San Suu Kyi’s “fondness” for the military, inexplicable given how they had treated her and so many of Myanmar’s people for decades. “National reconciliation” was her elite rapprochement with the generals. “Suu Kyi’s devotion to the military makes for a rousing love story, but one bound to end in tears, seeing that the love has gone unrequited.”
The 2021 coup closed the circle on thirty-three years of misunderstanding the depth of cruelty of the army, paradoxically also a legacy of partial rehabilitation. “The military regime has ensured for Aung San Suu Kyi a higher earthly stature, if not a higher rebirth, by elevating her to martyrdom.”
This slight book is less an in-depth study than an elongated essay on character. Law-Yone’s penchant for the telling anecdote, the observation of, and connectivity to, the seemingly incidental, and insight into the public and private personality makes this book a seminal contribution.
There have been a number of biographies of Aung San Suu Kyi of mixed quality, mostly on the hagiographic to laudatory spectrum. Luc Besson’s film The Lady is unwatchable; even Michelle Yeoh couldn’t save that turkey. Law-Yone’s study may be brief, but it will be indispensable in understanding the rise and fall of such a pivotal but flawed figure.
The hatred of Aung San Suu Kyi from many of her international critics is incandescent to the point of irrational. It’s now almost impossible to have a balanced assessment of her legacy, although two things are inescapable: she still enjoys significant domestic support and, regardless of her arrogance and incompetence, no one deserves thirty-three years in prison.
I never spoke with Aung San Suu Kyi again after my 1997 visit, despite living in Yangon for several years, four of them as the representative of Human Rights Watch (HRW). She refused to meet the HRW board of directors and Executive Director Kenneth Roth when they visited in 2014, although we all met then-President Thein Sein and numerous government ministers. In 2016, with a colleague from Geneva, we tried to secure a briefing to explain the as-yet unreleased satellite imagery of several hundred Rohingya houses obviously torched by the rampaging army. Her foreign advisers rebuffed us, conditioned as they were to genuflect to Mother Suu’s superior wisdom.
I saw her at numerous campaign rallies, at the twenty-fifth anniversary ceremony of the 1988 uprising, at the Yangon airport a number of times and at a memorial service for the prominent lawyer Ko Ni, assassinated by military-connected ultra-nationalists in early 2017. I returned to 54 University Avenue for the disastrous press conference with the foreign media ahead of the landslide 2015 election victory, where she repeatedly deflected questions over the plight of the Rohingya.
The closest I came to her again was when her car passed through huge crowds at an election rally in Yangon, as she smiled and waved at her supporters. When she spotted me, seeing not the impressionable student of 1997, but a foreign meddler of some kind with a camera dangling around his neck, she scowled and looked away. ☐
David Scott Mathieson is a writer based in Southeast Asia
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