On past form, Myanmar’s junta may soon snuff out the hopes it raises

IT WAS hard not to be moved both by the demeanour of Aung San Suu Kyi when she was freed from house arrest in Yangon on November 13th, and by the popular reaction to her freedom.
Her grace, courage and good humour seem undiminished. Meanwhile, the
thousands who flocked to her gate demolished the myth that she is no
longer central to Myanmar’s politics. Yet in the euphoria of the moment,
it was easy to forget that those politics, too, are in essence
unchanged. The foundations for the optimism she herself professes seem
flimsy.

Since she was first locked up in 1989, Miss Suu Kyi has twice before been “freed”, only for it to become apparent that she had in effect simply been moved into a larger prison, so strict were the limits on her
activities. This time she emerges into a changed world. Until this week
she had, for instance, never used a mobile phone or surfed the
internet. The political landscape in Myanmar is also altered, even if
the first elections for 20 years, held on November 7th, were designed to
strengthen the grip on power of the ruling junta, whose party has
claimed a massive victory.

The elections did at least allow a tiny flicker of pluralist light into the murk of Burmese totalitarianism. And for the moment, apparently caught unawares—yet again—by the abiding affection and respect Miss Suu
Kyi commands, the junta has let her hold meetings, grant press
interviews and act like the leader of the opposition. In return, Miss
Suu Kyi, though calling gently for a “peaceful revolution”, has shown
her accustomed generosity of spirit. She chided a journalist who spoke
of the junta’s “brutality” towards her. It has detained her for years on
trumped-up charges; jailed and tortured hundreds of her supporters;
orchestrated mob attacks on her; prevented her from seeing her dying
husband; restricted access to her children; and ignored or vilified her
in its stultifying official press. But, she said, it had treated her
well.

She sounded so reasonable that you might expect the junta to leap at the chance to open a serious dialogue with her. That seems very unlikely. If past form is a guide, the junta will not tolerate her
speaking out for long. During previous spells of “freedom”, it has
ignored her for a while, gradually tightened restrictions on her, and
then found some pretext to lock her up again. In 2003 it managed to
blame her for a massacre and, as she put it this week, “for allowing
myself to get beaten up”, when her convoy was attacked by pro-junta
thugs. Last year it extended her detention when an American (“a little
eccentric”, in Miss Suu Kyi’s words) swam across the lake outside her
house to meet her.

The latest sentence ended on November 13th. However arbitrary its repressive laws, the junta has always been perversely punctilious in carrying them out to the letter. So that deadline may have been why the
date of the election was set a bit earlier. Now the widespread joy at
Miss Suu Kyi’s release will have stoked the junta’s fears of her. She
alone has the popular following to mount a serious challenge to its
rule.

Her lineage, as the daughter of Aung San, Myanmar’s independence hero, was always in her favour. So was her charisma, which swayed huge crowds when she returned in 1988 from British exile to what was then
Burma in order to care for her sick mother. In the election of 1990, her
popularity helped the National League for Democracy to a landslide
victory, even though she was under house arrest at the time. (The
results were never honoured.) Her fortitude through two decades of
relentless persecution has earned the respect and loyalty of her
followers.

Yet she has critics among the junta’s enemies as well as the generals themselves. As a politician, after all, she has been a failure. The junta seems more firmly entrenched than ever, and, outside a small
flourishing elite, Myanmar’s people are as poor and oppressed as ever.
The rigged election and her own release speak more of the generals’
self-confidence than their weakness.

She is blamed for refusing to compromise with them. In 1995 she pulled the League out of a “national convention” drafting a new constitution. Eventually, as was always certain, the convention came up
with the answer the junta first thought of: continued military
dominance. This year again Miss Suu Kyi advised the League to boycott
the election. This led to its formal disbandment, and a split. Both
boycotts may well have been mistakes, though so crooked were the
processes that affording them any degree of legitimacy would also have
seemed repellent.

Glass rods and steel wire

The criticism of her inflexibility was always rather unfair, for two reasons. It treated her as a functioning politician when in fact she has been a prisoner with limited access to sources of information and
advice. Now, already, she has hinted at flexibility on a position that
has drawn most criticism: her support for crippling economic sanctions
against Myanmar.

Second, the true refusal to compromise has always been not hers but the junta’s. Here Banyan should confess a bias. He met Miss Suu Kyi several times in the late 1990s and remains in awe of her bravery,
dignity and even sense of humour. Those now portraying her as a
principled but rigid dogmatist forget that she used to face just the
opposite criticism. When she was “freed” in 1995, it was to preach
dialogue and compromise when many, buoyed by the electoral triumph in
1990, thought the junta might simply be swept away. Miss Suu Kyi’s true
rigidity was to stick to Gandhian principles and shun the violence that
the people-power revolution some hoped she would lead would have
entailed.

“They have to understand”, she told The Economist at the time, “that flexibility and weakness are completely different.” A steel wire, she said, is strong because it is flexible; a glass rod is rigid
but may shatter. In the years since, the junta has done its damnedest to
turn her into a glass rod. It has yet to succeed.

Asia