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Undercover in Myanmar



Undercover in Myanmar

BEN HAMMERSLEY describes how he tricked the secret police to meet her

The Statesman (New Delhi)
September 7, 2000

WHETHER Aung San Suu Kyi likes it or not and she does not, she is an
icon. Under house arrest again, she is said to be safe and well, but her
supporters are concerned.

Last Saturday, the Nobel Peace laureate and 13 members of the National
League for Democracy were forcibly taken to Yangon. Nothing has been
heard from them since, and the authorities show no sign of granting
access to the Opposition leader who has fought for 12 years to bring
democracy to Myanmar.

"I'm no icon. That's a phrase I don't like," she insisted when I met her
in June. It was easy to understand the potency of her personality, why
she frightens Myanmar's ruling junta and why they make it so hard for
people to contact her.

Interviewing her is even trickier. Once you have made an appointment,
using contacts in two other countries, and fraudulently acquired a
tourist visa, smuggled recording equipment past military Intelligence at
Rangoon Airport, and spent the next week evading their colleagues in
your hotel bar, you are still only at the sweaty halfway point.

Getting a recording or a photograph of Mrs Suu Kyi out of Myanmar is
almost impossible. My interview was recorded in three ways: on a tiny
"memory stick" taped to the inside of my thigh; a dicta-phone tape that
went into my pocket as bait. A disk for my photographs from an Agfa
digital camera was small enough to drop between the lining and the outer
core of a pack of cigarettes, which went into my pocket with some Thai
coins, so that when the disk set off the metal detector at Rangoon
Airport, I could empty my pockets and walk through.

The woman who is the primary target of this huge security offensive is
small and thin with flowers woven into her hair. But with her
Oxford-educated voice and pristine Myanmarese clothes, Mrs Suu Kyi is
the kind of woman in whose company you instinctively sit up straight.
She will suddenly deflate a political argument with a giggle but her
determination remains intact. The West, she asserts, should boycott
Myanmar. No tourism, no business, she says. "The question asking whether
tourism is the best way for a poor country to try to get rich is a moot
one. This regime is not interested in handling tourism in any way except
to get as much money out of it as possible.

"The military regime is not going about economic reform in the right
way. The economic disaster that Myanmar is facing has come about not
because of anything that the NLD has said but because this regime does
not know how to go about instituting sound economic management.

"The majority of the people get poorer. There was a lot of investment
from Western countries, but it did not make the people richer. You see
wealth concentrated in a few people, and a lot of (these) people are
connected to the regime."

Despite being a legal party, NLD's members face daily harassment or
worse. With phone lines tapped, Internet use illegal, fax machines
compulsorily licensed, and their travel disrupted, it is hard for an
Opposition to exist, much less be effective.

The NLD's headquarters are in a ramshackle two-storey building on the
edge of Yangon. There is scant electricity, and no equipment, bar a few
old typewriters. Posters of Mrs Suu Kyi cover cracks in the walls. Party
members mill about waiting for a meeting or the mothers-and-baby
mornings where smuggled-in vitamins are distributed.

But the determination of the members is evident. The day I was there,
the building's owner was released from detention. Elderly, diabetic and
suffering from arthritis, she had been jailed for a week without drugs
as the military tried to force her to evict the party. She had refused,
explaining that she and her husband have pledged the building rent-free
until democracy is restored.

Doesn't this kind of pressure ever make Mrs Suu Kyi want to give up?
"No," she insists. "I have always said that as long as there was one
person remaining who was prepared to work for democracy, I'll stay. I
believe we will achieve democracy, but I can't promise that it will be
in my lifetime. I'll do my best." Brave words that I would find hard to
take out of Myanmar.

When I got to Rangoon Airport, they went through my stuff twice. The
Custom official thought the memory stick recorder was an "electric
razor."
--- The Times, London.