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Myanmar's Resistance Icon Is Off to a Rocky Start

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Myanmar's Resistance Icon Is Off to a Rocky Start DEMOCRACY IN MYANMAR Myanmar’s resistance icon is off to a rocky start as she embraces a new role as party boss in a fragile democracy. Suu Kyi’s precarious pivot BY ANDREW R.C. MARSHALL NAYPYITAW, OCTOBER 5, 2012 CAREER SHIFT: Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was a living symbol of resistance to military dictatorship during her years of house arrest. REUTERS/SOE ZEYA TUN SPECIAL REPORT 1 DEMOCRACY IN MYANMAR Suu Kyi’S PRECARIOUS PIVOT obel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is making a career Nchange, from icon of liberty op- posing Myanmar’s junta to party boss in a fragile new quasi-democracy. The transition hasn’t been easy. At a talk in London in June, a student from the Kachin ethnic minority asked why Suu Kyi (a majority Burman) seemed reluctant to condemn a bloody government military offensive against Kachin rebels. The conflict has displaced some 75,000 people. Suu Kyi’s answer was studiously neutral: “We want to know what’s happening more clearly before we condemn one party or the other.” The Kachin community was livid. The Kachinland News website called her reply an “insult.” Kachin protesters gathered outside her next London event. An “open letter” from 23 Kachin groups worldwide said Suu Kyi was “condoning state-sanctioned violence.” That a woman so widely revered should ROCK STAR: Suu Kyi autographing the blouse of a student in the new parliament building in the arouse such hostility might have seemed capital Naypyitaw. Fans flock her almost wherever she goes. REUTERS/SOE SEYA TUN unthinkable back in April. A landslide by- election victory propelled Suu Kyi and 42 other members of her National League for REUTERS TV while under house arrest. Democracy into Myanmar’s parliament. “I do not know,” said Suu Kyi. Her ram- Not anymore. Once idolized without ques- See the video on bling answer nettled both the Rohingya, prisoner to politician: tion for her courageous two-decade stand http://link.reuters.com/kub87s who want recognition as Myanmar citizens, against the old junta, Suu Kyi now faces a and the locals in Rakhine, who regard them chorus of criticism even as she emerges as a as invaders. The reply contrasted with the powerful lawmaker here. most urgent humanitarian issues: the fate of moral clarity of her Nobel speech, in which She has quickly become an influential 800,000 stateless Rohingya Muslims in re- she had spoken about “the uprooted of the voice in the country’s newly empowered mote western Myanmar. There, clashes with earth ... forced to live out their lives among parliament. Still, ethnic groups accuse her ethnic Rakhine Buddhists have killed at least strangers who are not always welcoming.” of condoning human-rights abuses by fail- 77 people and left 90,000 homeless since June. STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY ing to speak out on behalf of long-suffering Spurned by both Myanmar and neigh- peoples in Myanmar’s restive border states. bouring Bangladesh, which hosts 300,000 Suu Kyi’s moral clarity helped make the Economists worry that her bleak public ap- refugees, many Rohingya live in appalling former junta a global pariah. Her new role praisals of Myanmar’s business climate will conditions in Rakhine State. The United Na- as political party leader demands strategic scare foreign investors. Political analysts say tions has called the Muslim minority “virtual- ambiguity as well. She must retain her ap- her party has few real policies beyond the ly friendless” in Buddhist-dominated Myan- peal to the majority Burmans and Bud- statements of its world-famous chairper- mar. The violence erupted in June, days before dhists, without alienating ethnic minorities son. She must also contend with conflict Suu Kyi’s first trip to Europe in 24 years. or compatriots of other faiths. She must within the fractious democracy movement “Are the Rohingya citizens of your also engage with the widely despised mili- she helped found. country or are they not?” a journalist asked tary, which remains by far the most domi- International critics have seized upon her Suu Kyi in Norway, after she collected the nant power in Myanmar. ambiguous response to one of Myanmar’s Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in 1991 Her political instincts have been appar- SPECIAL REPORT 2 DEMOCRACY IN MYANMAR Suu Kyi’S PRECARIOUS PIVOT OPPOSITION LEADER: Suu Kyi striding the halls of parliament, where she quickly emerged as an influential voice.REUTERS/SO E ZEYA TUN ent to Myanmar watchers since 1988, when she returned after spending much of her A family of destiny and tragedy life abroad. Amid a brutal military crack- down, she emerged as leader of the democ- A month before Aung San Suu Kyi was born, forgot that she was the daughter of Burma’s racy movement. She spent most of the next on June 19, 1945, her family moved into a national hero, Aung San.” two decades in jail or house arrest and yet two-story mansion near Yangon’s Kandawgyi Suu Kyi returned to Yangon in 1988 to remained the movement’s inspiration. Lake. Built on a small hill, it resembles the nurse her dying mother and was swept up in a “I don’t like to be referred to as an icon, house from Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, but with a pro-democracy uprising against military rule. because from my point of view, icons just sit real-life history of horror. Soldiers crushed it, and Suu Kyi spent most of there,” she said in a lecture on September An older brother drowned in the garden the next 21 years imprisoned in her own home. 27 at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gov- pond, while a younger sister died in infancy. Aris was diagnosed with prostate cancer ernment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then, in July 1947, six months before his in 1997 and, refused a visa by the junta, “I have always seen myself as a politician. country gained independence from the died without seeing his wife again. Visits by What do they think I have been doing for British, her father, General Aung San, was Alexander and Kim were also stopped. the past 24 years?” assassinated. He was 32. Suu Kyi was two. Kim, now 35, was reunited with his Suu Kyi declined multiple interview re- After the assassination, the government mother soon after her release from house quests from Reuters for this article. granted the family land on the shore of arrest in 2010. Alexander, 39, lives in Myanmar’s reforms have accelerated nearby Inya Lake. Suu Kyi grew up at this Washington State, but didn’t see Suu Kyi since she was freed from house arrest in now-famous address: 54 University Avenue. during her whirlwind U.S. trip. November 2010, days before an election She was educated in Delhi and Oxford, Nor did her estranged brother Aung San stage-managed by the military installed a where she met and later married Michael Oo, now a U.S. citizen living in San Diego. quasi-civilian government. This year, it has Aris, a Tibet scholar. They had two children, They have fought a 12-year legal battle over freed dissidents, eased media censorship and Alexander and Kim, and for the next 15 years the house on University Avenue. A Yangon started tackling a dysfunctional economy. she was an Oxford housewife. court in June awarded Aung San Oo a half- Myanmar’s emergence from authoritarian- Since childhood, Suu Kyi had been share in the two-acre property, but Suu Kyi’s ism is often compared to the Arab Spring. Yet “deeply preoccupied with the question of lawyers said she will appeal. its historic reforms were ushered in not by de- what she might do to help her people,” stabilizing street protests, but by former gener- Aris wrote in 1991. “She never for a minute Andrew R.C. Marshall SPECIAL REPORT 3 DEMOCRACY IN MYANMAR Suu Kyi’S PRECARIOUS PIVOT als such as President Thein Sein. out of their huts to cheer for “Mother Suu.” She is also adapting to life in Naypyitaw, Suu Kyi’s role was pivotal. A meeting Kawhmu’s problems - household debt, the isolated new capital built from scratch by she held with Thein Sein in the capital of lack of electricity, joblessness - are Myan- the junta, where she lives in a house protect- Naypyitaw in August 2011 marked the mar’s writ small. “Some villages around here ed by a fence topped with razor wire. In the start of her pragmatic engagement with a have no young people,” says Aung Lwin Oo, Lower House of parliament, the colourful government run by ex-soldiers. She pro- 45, a carpenter and member of the National garb worn by many ethnic delegates lends a nounced him “sincere” about reforming League for Democracy. “They have all left to festive atmosphere. Sitting near Suu Kyi is Myanmar, an endorsement that paved the work in Thailand and Malaysia.” an MP from Chin State who wears a head- way for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary dress of boar’s teeth and hornbill feathers. UNGLAMOROUS WORK Clinton’s visit to Naypyitaw last Novem- Men in green uniforms, however, domi- ber and, earlier this year, the scrapping of Suu Kyi’s first stop that day was the Bud- nate one side of the chamber. Myanmar’s most Western sanctions. dhist monastery. There, she prayed with the constitution, ratified after a fraudulent A saint-like reputation for unwaver- monks and met representatives from two referendum in 2008, reserves a quarter of ing principle can be unhelpful in politics, villages to settle a money dispute. Then parliamentary seats for military personnel a murky world of compromise and nego- she ate lunch with NLD members at a chosen by armed forces chief Gen.
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