The Lady by the Lake

After reading the book Perfect Hostage, I wrote ..

A lady at the age of forty-one flew back from London to tend her ailing mother at Rangoon General Hospital on 2nd April 1988.

This trip had become a journey of no-return to her family in England. Since then she had to part with her husband, Dr. Michael Aris, and her two sons, Alexander and Kim. She had set her priority to stay back in her homeland to fight the junta to gain a ‘second independence’ for her people than to live a comfortable family life in England. “It is my aim,” she said, “to help the people in Burma attain democracy without further violence or loss of life.”What was offensive to her was the military regime’s denial of ‘the full enjoyment of human rights’, which undermined any notion of ‘full independence’. [Page 279, Perfect Hostage]

This lady is Aung San Suu Kyi( her name means ‘Strange Collection of Bright Victories’ in Burmese language). She is the daughter of the Independent fighter of Burma, General Aung San. General Aung San was assassinated with thirteen bullets of gunshot on 19th July 1947. In the space of thirty seconds, he and his four other ministers were killed immediately on the spot while they were having a meeting at the Secretariat in the government building at Rangoon.

Suu Kyi became the icon of Burma’s opposition to the Draconian rule of the military regime since General Ne Win assumed power on 2nd March 1962.

In the year 1990, her political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), had won with a huge majority in the first ever held General Election since the junta took over the reign of Burma in 1962.Out of a total of 485 constituencies, the NLD captured a staggering 392 seats. The magnitude of the NLD’s success was not just a landslide, it was a nationwide earthquake despite of the fact that Suu Kyi was under house arrest several months before the election was conducted. But the junta refused to honour the outcome of the election. Those elected opposition members from the NLD were intimidated, put into jails, or bought over. With this the junta hoped to make the NLD a spent force with Suu Kyi reduced to a general without soldiers.

Suu Kyi was under house arrest for three times with an accumulated duration of more than 6 years in her house at 54, University Avenue,Rangoon, near the Lake Inya(formerly known as Rangoon’s Lake Victoria). Utterance of her name was not encouraged and it could be an offence as the junta tried to erase her from the national consciousness. The people in Burma, out of respect for her, generally addressed her as ‘The Lady’ or ‘The Lady by the Lake’. Suu Kyi has become an eyesore as well as a pain in the neck for the junta as long as she remains in Burma as she has established herself as the de facto opposition leader of Burma. The junta cannot end her life with a bullet in the head or incarcerate her in the notorious Insein prison as she is the offspring of Burma’s National Hero, General Aung San, the architect of Burmese independence. The only way the junta could do was to provide Suu Kyi a one-way ticket to leave Burma which she refused to accept. At the time of her husband’s demise in the year 1999, the Burmese government allowed Suu Kyi to attend the funeral in England with the condition that she could not return to Burma after that. She again turned down the offer as she wanted to remain in the country to fight for her nation’s human rights and democracy.

It is not that Suu Kyi does not want to devote her time and her love for her family, it is rather her strong conviction to serve her country that she puts it in a simple statement, ‘I dream about my family all the time, but there are a lot of people here who need to be cared about and loved and looked after. They’ve become my second family.’

For Suu Kyi the struggle is a persistent and ongoing process until Burma becomes a truly democratic nation.