Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi appeals to conscience

The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin tries to imagine the position of Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, as she protests non-violently once again, in the Gandhian style, against the arbitrary nature of the military regime. Aung San Suu Kyi was elected to lead the nation in 1990, in an election which the military themselves organized but then never honored, so she has never been allowed to assume her rightful position.

HONG KONG (JP): You don't feel as energetic as you once did, as you hit your head against the political equivalent of a solid brick wall -- when instead you could be living with your family amidst the ivory towers of Oxford.

Your children are growing up fast, but they cannot see you. Your husband has been very understanding, but he often cannot see you, too. Your family misses you for they cannot get a visa to come and see whenever they want to do so.

Your opponents hope this visa deprivation will force you to go to visit them in England. But for the last nine years, you haven't dared to leave the country to go and see your loved ones. You would probably never be allowed back if you did.

You have put family values to one side because, for the last eleven years, you have insisted on immersing yourself in the dust of the arena, battling one of the nastiest, most repressive and unproductive military regimes on earth.

Eight years ago the struggle suddenly all seemed worthwhile. After three years, and one terrible massacre, the regime held a general election. They organized it. They made the rules. Everyone expected they would get the result they wanted. Yet your political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) still secured a landslide victory, winning 80 per cent of the seats, much to everybody's surprise.

It seemed like a dream come true, a real promise that your sad country would be finally enjoying some of the progress gained by nearly all other nations in your region.

But the new freshly elected parliament was never called into session. The military quickly concluded that they had made a mistake.

Instead of the military handing over power, you and all your party members were subjected to a fresh round of persecution and suppression. You didn't suffer as much as some of your party colleagues, some of whom died in jail, but you have been subjected to a long period of house arrest. The circumstances of house arrest still continued even when you were ostensibly released from it.

You are still not free to see whom you want, when you want.

Occasionally the outside world takes notice of you, and of your benighted country, and protests the massive injustices that continue to done to it. But the foreigners quickly forget, and you are left desperately trying to think of ways to make them remember, and wishing that great democratic nations were more self- confident in the power that is their's if they only realized it.

So here you are, sitting this time in a minibus amidst the soaring daytime temperatures, near the village of Anyarsu, some 17 miles west of Yangon where the military has stopped your vehicle, preventing you from visiting your party members and duly elected MPs in the rest of the country.

Similarly, on July 24th you set out from home, asserting your right to visit your party cadres around the country, seeking to consult with them for the first time in many years. But before you could reach your first destination the military stopped your car, and then you were parked on a rickety bridge for six exhausting days before your military opponents forcibly overpowered you and drove you back to Yangon.

Now it is the same story. You demand the right to proceed. The opponents of democracy want you to go back.

So you are left wondering, wondering whether ASEAN and the democratic nations in the developed world, -- will they take some notice, speak some strong words, make some truly forceful protests?

And even if they do, what then? Is it even remotely possible that the military regime will change course? that even at this late stage, having run the country (over which they have misruled for 36 years) well and truly into the ground, that the military will listen to foreign protests when they do not allow their own people to protest at all? hat the military can ever admit in even the slightest way that they are mistaken?

Can they ever trust the people to be forgiving towards them? or must your beloved country slowly but remorselessly sink into the anarchy of bitterness and bloodshed, bloodshed and bitterness? So is it worth it?

Why hit your head against the brick wall? Why bother? Why continue? Why persist?

I have tried to imagine what Aung San Suu Kyi may have been thinking during her latest self-imposed ordeal, her non-violent Gandian protest, but, as I do so, I am almost certainly making a basic mistake. Almost certainly, Aung San Suu Kyi does not succumb to all the doubts which I have ascribed to her.

Journalists try to see all sides of a problem. Suu Kyi belongs to that rare breed whose vision espies a necessary course of action, and then sticks to it, come what may. If she was going to give up, she would have done so long ago. But I doubt if any thought of surrender crosses her mind.

She misses her family, certainly. But she has her duty to do for her larger family, and she does it as best she can. If you want any proof that Aung San Suu Kyi might be a formidable Myanmar Prime Minister, you have it right there. Her addiction to duty, her persistence, her indomitable will, mark her out as that rare kind of leader, which Myanmar so desperately needs, but has never had.

This almost incredible sense of duty stems from the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi is unequivocally her Father's Daughter. Aung San, the dominant leader in Myanmar's independence movement, was assassinated not long after Myanmar set out on the path of nationhood. It is one of Asia's great what ifs? but we will never know what would have happened if Aung San had enjoyed the same post- colonial political life-span in office as those enjoyed by Nehru or Sukarno.

But Aung San Suu Kyi is absolutely determined -- call it genetic fate if you like -- to try and finish at least some of the work which her father started.

So it is that Aung San Suu Kyi continues to highlight her objection to the fact that she, as the duly elected leader of Burma, is not even allowed to travel freely within the country which gave her National League for Democracy (NLD) a thumping majority eight years ago -- in an election which the military itself organized, and then rejected. Similarly the military regime arbitrarily decided to change Burma into Myanmar without ever getting the nation's duly elected representatives to ratify that act.

Now Aung San Suu Kyi has called for the 1990 Parliament to finally meet by August 21st. The hardline military response is that this call itself is an illegal act.

Suu Kyi's acts cannot be censored outside Myanmar, even though they are censored within Myanmar.

Like Gandhi on the Salt March, like Mandela on Robbin Island, Aung San Suu Kyi appeals to the global conscience.

Will that conscience take notice? does it care?