Comment: An icon for our age Aung S

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Subject: Comment: An icon for our age Aung San Suu Kyi's impossible choice

puts her on par with Gandhi 
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Comment: An icon for our age Aung San Suu Kyi's impossible choice puts
her on par with Gandhi 
The Guardian; Manchester; Mar 19, 1999; MADELEINE BUNTING; 

Start Page: 
          20

Abstract:
IF you asked a cross-section of women who were the great female icons of the
20th
century, you'd obviously get Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Onassis
and maybe
Grace Kelly, and Hillary Clinton. A long way down the list you might get
Aung San Suu Kyi.
But the Burmese opposition leader meets all the usual criteria for iconic
status of beauty
and grace, and at the same time, offers a far more profound inspiration.
(Icon, after all,
as a devotional aide in the Orthodox church is an image of unique power to
inspire.)

Surely, she will come to be recognised in the same breath as the tiny band
of figures of
compelling moral authority - perhaps the only woman to stand alongside
Gandhi, Martin
Luther King and Nelson Mandela. It is more than 10 years since she left her
two teenage
sons and husband, Michael Aris, to return to Burma and nurse her sick
mother. She was
propelled into leadership of the Burmese opposition movement after the bloody
repression of the country's nascent democracy movement, and has remained there
ever since.

Perhaps it is also partly because we are all too familiar with the conflict
between the
personal and the public in political lives - it has become one of the
dominant themes of
Western politics. But we understand that conflict in terms of politicians'
inability to
prevent their personal lives compromising their public integrity. Clinton
failed to control
his lust, or Mandelson, his greed. Suu Kyi has dramatically re-cast the
whole issue. By
placing her commitment to her countrymen before her personal happiness and
that of
her family, she is making a massive investment in a shared endeavour of
bringing
democratic ideals to Burma.

Full Text:
Copyright Guardian Newspapers, Limited Mar 19, 1999


IF you asked a cross-section of women who were the great female icons of the
20th century, you'd
obviously get Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Onassis and maybe Grace
Kelly, and Hillary
Clinton. A long way down the list you might get Aung San Suu Kyi. But the
Burmese opposition
leader meets all the usual criteria for iconic status of beauty and grace,
and at the same time, offers a

far more profound inspiration. (Icon, after all, as a devotional aide in the
Orthodox church is an
image of unique power to inspire.)

Surely, she will come to be recognised in the same breath as the tiny band
of figures of compelling
moral authority - perhaps the only woman to stand alongside Gandhi, Martin
Luther King and
Nelson Mandela. It is more than 10 years since she left her two teenage sons
and husband, Michael
Aris, to return to Burma and nurse her sick mother. She was propelled into
leadership of the
Burmese opposition movement after the bloody repression of the country's
nascent democracy
movement, and has remained there ever since.

IT is hard to imagine the conflict of loyalties with which she must have
struggled between her
responsibilities to her sons and husband, and those to her people. Now that
her husband is seriously
ill with prostate cancer, the conflict is even more agonising. If she leaves
Burma to visit him, there is
a strong chance she will be barred from returning.

Meanwhile the Burmese authorities have indicated that they will not grant a
visa to Aris, who may
not be strong enough to cope with the journey. There are few people who have
chosen to make
such huge personal sacrifices for their country and ideals. What makes this
so astonishing is that she
has made this choice every day for more than 10 years. It would have been so
easy for her to call it
a day, go into exile and maintain the struggle from the comforts of North
Oxford.

Given the frustrations of achieving change in Burma, given her family
responsibilities, no one could
have challenged such a choice. Sure, Mandela, King and Gandhi faced
incremental choices to take
the risks which led to imprisonment and assassination, but there is
something in the ongoing choice,
the clash of personal and public duties which makes her plight so compelling
and so poignant.

Perhaps it is also partly because we are all too familiar with the conflict
between the personal and
the public in political lives - it has become one of the dominant themes of
Western politics. But we
understand that conflict in terms of politicians' inability to prevent their
personal lives compromising
their public integrity. Clinton failed to control his lust, or Mandelson,
his greed. Suu Kyi has
dramatically re-cast the whole issue. By placing her commitment to her
countrymen before her
personal happiness and that of her family, she is making a massive
investment in a shared endeavour
of bringing democratic ideals to Burma.

For her, life is not a personal project to achieve happiness and fulfilment
which may, or may not lead
her into politics, it is not even the traditional female role of nurturing a
family. It is about a faith in a
cause which is in striking contrast to Western cynicism; most of us have
lost faith in any cause,
salvation has become strictly personal.

Aris is impressive in his own right. How many other husbands would have
stood by their wives for
10 odd years, and brought up the children? It's a crucial supportive role
that women have often
played, men rarely. Aris in his moving introduction to a book of essays
about and by his wife, writes

how she said to him, `I only ask one thing that should my people need me,
you would help me to do
my duty by them.Sometimes I am beset by fears that circumstances and
national considerations
might tear us apart just when we are so happy in each other that separation
would be a torment . . .
And yet such fears are futile . . . If we love and cherish each other as
much as we can while we can,
I am sure love and compassion will triumph in the end.'

To read this in the context of Aris' prostate cancer is deeply moving. It
would appear that Suu Kyi's
faith in the triumph of love and compassion - at least, in this life - might
have been misplaced. It has
echoes of the horrible bleakness of Cordelia's death at the end of King Lear.

It also has echoes of that other Asian Buddhist politician, the Dalai Lama.
Will their politics of
non-violence triumph against the oppressors? Both are faced with the growing
frustration of their
followers. The Dalai Lama has just marked 40 years since the Chinese invaded
Tibet, and he has
few political achievements to show for his patience.

Likewise Suu Kyi in her stalemate with the military dictatorship which
continues to imprison, torture,
kill and rape opponents. A former aide wrote last year that her `approach
has been highly moral and
uncompromising, catching the imagination of the outside world. Unfortunately
it has come at a real
price for the rest of us'.

But she repeated her faith last year to John Pilger: `No matter the regime's
physical power, in the
end they can't stop the people; they can't stop freedom. We shall have our
time.' The horrifying bit is
that, although they might not be able to stop the people forever, they can
do it for a long time, and at
terrifying cost in the suffering of thousands of people. Lastly, on the more
prosaic level of female
icons in the West, interviewers of Suu Kyi speak rapturously of her
serenity, humour, determination
and grace. She is very photogenic, dresses beautifully and decorates her
hair with flowers. She
loves to play the piano and read poetry; a picture builds up of a woman who
has made impossibly
hard decisions without becoming hard.

SHE is a woman who demonstrates huge strength, but who hasn't compromised
her femininity (why
is that word so often considered perjorative?) in doing so. Remember that
strand of seventies'
feminism which argued for the recognition of the power in women's capacity
for compassion,
empathy and gentleness? It got binned as too much mother-earth, and everyone
went on
self-assertion courses and began plotting to become chief executives. That
is precisely where Suu
Kyi offers yet another challenge to our most comfortable assumptions: she
has applied those
`feminine' qualities not to her mothering, but to her political ideals.