An icon loses her way,
The champion of Burma’s democracy movement once had the moral stature of the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. But her ties to the country’s notorious gang of cronies may be changing that. RICHARD LLOYD PARRY looks at her evolution from icon to politician.
In a life like that of Aung San Suu Kyi, a private person who has spent much of her life in enforced isolation from the world, certain visual images stand out like the photographs in an imaginary album.
There is Suu Aris, as she then was, the beautiful young housewife, living a contented existence with her husband and two young sons before fate propelled her into Burma’s brutal politics. There is Suu Kyi the orator, addressing huge and hopeful crowds in the brief periods between the junta’s crackdowns and her own long periods of incarceration.
And then there is the famous house where she passed those years: the colonial villa at 54 University Ave., whose slow decay once seemed to symbolize the dwindling hopes of the democracy movement.
My own personal stock of mental images begins there, at the unforgettable moment in November 2010, when, with an expression of amused surprise, her face popped up above the high iron gate of the house and the crowd roared in celebration of her release.
As the Burmese government relaxed its grip over the next two years, there were many scenes that would previously have been unimaginable: Suu Kyi taking up her seat in Burma’s parliament, reunited with old friends in Oxford, and entertaining a succession of delighted foreign visitors, from Emma Thompson to President Barack Obama.
But recently came one of the most striking and telling photographs of all. It shows a smiling Suu Kyi standing alongside a tall, younger man in a crisp white shirt, who is beaming even more broadly. To look at, he might be a lawyer or doctor, or one of the young members of her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), who were elected alongside her to parliament. In fact, he is one of the last people you’d expect to bathe in the warm regard of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
His name is Zaw Zaw, a millionaire businessman with interests in tourism and construction, and he is one of a number of unexpected figures to have established ties with Suu Kyi in the recent months. Other names include military supplier Tay Za and construction czar Kyaw Win.
They are members of the group known contemptuously as the “cronies,” the loose cabal of compliant businessmen, despised at home and shunned abroad, who were one of the key props of the old military regime.
While Burma’s generals oversaw the dirty work of the military dictatorship — oppression, imprisonment and torture of dissidents — the cronies were fulfilling an equally important function. In return for their fawning support, they were awarded the big business transacted by the regime. Luxury hotels, timber, gems, construction of the new capital, Naypyidaw.
“This is supposed to be a freemarket economy,” Suu Kyi said after her release. “But it’s open to some and not to others ... the cronies have all the big spots in their hands and it doesn’t give other people a chance.”
Given this, it would be surprising enough if Suu Kyi was merely socializing with such people. In fact, as became recently clear, she is doing much more than that.
The NLD has admitted receiving roughly $300,000 from companies controlled by notorious cronies. About two-thirds of this came from a TV company owned by Kyaw Win, the rest was from a firm owned by Tay Za, a man described in U.S. diplomatic cables as “the regime’s top crony.”
Suu Kyi has, without self-consciousness, defended the donations: “Instead of spending their money on things that have no purpose, they have supported things they should,” she said last week. Zaw Zaw made the same point: “I don’t want to be a bad crony. I want to be a good one.” Others have been less relaxed. “NLD has found a new lucrative mission — crony-laundering,” wrote Maung Zarni, a leading dissident Burmese academic at the London School of Economics.
Suu Kyi, a woman justly celebrated for her uncompromising morality, her commitment to non-violence and her support for the underdog, has been remarkably tongue-tied about two of the most obvious outrages occurring in Burma at the same time as the continuing democratic reforms.
In Rakhine State, scores of people have been killed and more than 100,000 driven from their homes by a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims by Rakhine Buddhists. In Kachin State, the Burmese army has broken promises made by the president, Thein Sein, by launching a full-blooded assault on positions held by the Kachin Independence Army, which is resulting in the deaths of civilians.
Asked repeatedly about the violence, Suu Kyi has waffled about the importance of remaining calm, the complexity of the ethnic problems and the importance of reconciliation, but has refused to reproach the Buddhist ethnic cleansers or the Burmese army.
Gone is the fearless clarity. Instead, Suu Kyi has come to sound like any equivocating politician. And so, a shocking question arises: has Suu Kyi lost her way?
It is important to emphasize, in any consideration of her failings, the achievements of Suu Kyi, a figure of unmatched courage, morality and principle. At the age of 43, she turned her back on a life of comfort and privilege and submitted by choice to danger and confinement for the sake of democracy.
Unlike the Dalai Lama, she never ran away from persecution. Unlike Nelson Mandela, she always rejected the use of violence.
After her release, following months of unexpected liberalization by the new, notionally civilian president, Thein Sein, she made a crucial decision: to stand for election to the parliament she’d previously denounced as bogus. And like an exquisite statue coming to life, she stepped down from her plinth and into the mire of Burma’s emerging democratic politics.
Suddenly, she had to articulate not only principles, but policies, and to devise both long-term strategies and short-term tactics for bringing them to pass.
In two years, her party faces an election at which it stands an excellent chance of increasing its small share of parliamentary seats to a majority. But there is much that could go wrong before then.
Most alarming is the prospect of a slowing down, or clawing back, of the democratic reforms. The president has proved himself to be committed to reform, but it’s not clear how far he’s won the support of the army. A disastrous coup d’etat, or just a campaign of passive resistance to the changes by hardliners, is not impossible.
Suu Kyi needs Thein Sein; as far as possible, she needs to persuade the generals that neither he nor she is a threat. Hence her reluctance to state the obvious about the slaughter in Kachin.
For all Suu Kyi’s popularity, the NLD will still face determined electoral opposition from wellfunded pro-government parties. She needs both money, which the likes of Zaw Zaw and Tay Za will happily supply, and votes. Burma is a dazzlingly multicultural country, but the large majority of its people are Buddhists, many of whom support the harsh treatment of the Rohingya.
So here again, Suu Kyi is behaving not compassionately, not morally, but with a cold logic.
But however understandable, such utilitarian calculation is depressing, coming from one whose life has been based on the determination not to choose the easy option. If anyone could have found a way both to criticize and reconcile, surely Suu Kyi could.