The Lady’s patience starts to pay off
Apart from the very fact of its taking place, the most remarkable aspect of the just-completed election campaign in Myanmar was the adoration heaped on pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Wherever Suu Kyi went she was engulfed by crowds wanting to be near the woman known to her compatriots as Aunty Suu or The Lady.
What Nelson Mandela is to South Africa, Suu Kyi is to Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
Like Mandela, Suu Kyi has been harassed and imprisoned for her beliefs. He spent 27 years in prison. She spent 15 of the years between 1989 and 2010 under house arrest.
Like him she refused offers of early release in return for her political silence. In her case, sticking to her principles came at a particular cost. In 1998, her husband Michael, who had assumed responsibility for raising their two sons in England, was diagnosed with cancer. Suu Kyi was told she could say goodbye but only if she returned to England – he would not be allowed into Myanmar. With his full support, she refused to do so, knowing she would be denied permission to re-enter the country.
Like Mandela she never allowed enmity towards her jailors to cause her to lose sight of her ultimate goal – freedom for her people.
And, like Mandela, she has experienced the ultimate irony of being courted by the regime that imprisoned her. It needs her to extend an aura of legitimacy to its rule and to prove to the rest of the world that it has really mended its ways.
‘‘If it looked as if she was going to lose, I think the Government might stuff ballot boxes in her support,’’ a foreign diplomat joked in the lead-up to the vote.
There was never any chance of such subterfuge being required. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy swept 43 of the 44 seats up for grabs in the nationwide by-election caused by the promotion of existing MPS to government positions.
The party is still vastly outnumbered in Myanmar’s 664-seat Parliament but, for the first time since the ruling junta ignored the results of the 1990 election that delivered Suu Kyi’s party 59 per cent of the vote, Myanmar is headed in the right direction.
Political prisoners have been released from jail, voters have been permitted to express their views without interference from the authorities, and Western countries have begun relaxing crippling.
Myanmar 2012 is the rare instance in which gentle diplomacy appears to be working after decades of obduracy by an inward-looking military regime.
Take a bow US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who have both made recent visits.
However, no-one knows better than Suu Kyi how fragile the seeds of democracy are.
‘‘We are at the beginning of a road,’’ she said before the vote. ‘‘Many people are beginning to say that the democratisation process here is irreversible. It’s not so.’’