True Grit

Her Father's Blood

Aung San Suu Kyi and the Struggle For Burmese Freedom

We have just finished reading Peter Popham's biography of Aung San Suu Kyi.  It is a well-done biography of Myanmar's famous leader.  [Peter Popham, The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi (Croydon:  Rider-Ebury Publishing, 2012.]

The whole book is valuable for a whole lot of different reasons.  Suu Kyi, of course, is now a political leader in what is an increasingly progressive, emerging state, Myanmar (formerly Burma).  We have had the privilege of visiting Myanmar twice in recent years.  One does not have to travel far, nor meet many people, before one hears about Suu Kyi's work and exploits in helping Myanmar change from being a military dictatorship to a democratic republic. 

What sort of a person is Aung San Suu Kyi, then?  A remarkable one, is the straightforward reality.  Try this on for size . . . .

During one of the short occasions when Suu Kyi was out of prison and/or house arrest she was engaged in promoting freedom.  Her every move was being watched by the military authorities.  At one point a military commanders threatened her with death if she and her group continued to walk past them.   Aung San Suu Kyi and her group were walking along the side of the road.  Suu Kyi left her group and walked back to the middle of the road alone and then passed the soldiers whose weapons were raised and trained upon her. 

What on earth was going through her head?  Later she was asked that very question.  Popham records:

Why did Suu walk back into the middle of the road, risking death?  She explained that the captain's rejection of her proposal to walk at the side of the road struck her as "highly unreasonable."  'I thought, if he's going to shoot us even if we walk at the side of the road, perhaps it is me they want to shoot.  I thought, I might as well walk in the middle of the road . . . . I was quite cool-headed.  I thought, what does one do?  Does one turn back or keep going? My thought was, one doesn't turn back in a situation like that.'  In a later interview she said of that split-second decision, "It seemed so much simpler to provide them with a single target.  

Author Popham comments: 

It was this incident which, more than any other, created the mystique of Aung San Suu Kyi, while at the same time--in this land of the zero-sum game--effectively dismantling that of the army.  If anyone still doubted that she was her father's daughter, true-born child of the man who had defied both the British and the Japanese and come out on top, they could doubt it no more.  [Popham, The Peacock's Fan, p. 127.]