Aung San Suu Kyi

STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM: Aung San Suu Kyi

By JESPER BENGTSSON

Fourth Estate, 2011, 308 pages, $35 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Aung San Suu Kyi’s entry into political activism in Burma in 1988 quickly met the fate of so many other pro-democracy opponents of the Burmese military dictatorship – decades of arrest and harassment. Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for 15 of the past 21 years but as Jesper Bengtsson’s biography of the 65-year-old Suu Kyi shows, her resistance and courage, like that of so many other Burmese, has not faltered.

Born in 1945, Suu Kyi had a relatively privileged background, educated at private schools in Burma and Oxford University in England before becoming an academic in London.As the child of a father who was the anti-colonialist leader of Burma’s independence struggle from Britain, Suu Kyi’s political passivism whilst abroad for 25 years ended when she returned to her dying mother in Burma in 1988 at the time of Burma’s greatest ever popular uprising against the military junta when millions took to the streets to oppose the regime which had overthrown Burma’s first and only democratically elected government in 1962.

Suu Kyi helped found the National League for Democracy (NLD) which recruited a dizzying three million members. Although placed under house arrest, Suu Kyi was the leader from jail of the NLD’s stunning success in the 1990 elections which the military junta misguidedly thought would, aided by intimidation of NLD activists, return a junta-linked civilian front government.

With the NLD winning 80% of the seats in parliament (and the NLD-aligned ethnic minorities 14%), the junta retreated to form, annulling the election result, imprisoning activists and crushing dissent. Suu Kyi’s third period of house arrest from 2003 was most recently ended in 2010, when a rigged election left the military in control behind a civilian façade, whilst offering a drip-feed of democratic reforms to neutralise the NLD and preserve majority military control of politics and the economy.

Suu Kyi’s response to the regime’s latest reformist enticements, notes Bengtsson, has been ambivalent. Whilst she distrusts the junta’s talk about political liberty (a concept advanced before and as surely abandoned as soon as popular pressure for political change has built up), Bengtsson argues that Suu Kyi’s decades-long strategy of seeking dialogue with, rather than the overthrow of, the junta could be a political weakness the junta is able to exploit.

He notes, for example, that Suu Kyi missed the chance to proclaim an alternative centre of power after the NLD’s 1990 election win, even after Buddhist monks had offered the NLD a new parliament in a monastery (traditional Burmese centres for political activism) in Mandalay. Suu Kyi’s embrace of the more politically naïve Buddhist concept of ‘mutual forgiveness’ overrode the radical thrust of Buddhist resistance to the regime. When Buddhist monks rose, and lost, against the regime in 2007, the NLD again did not provide political leadership to a mass uprising.

Bengsston notes that this hesitancy with regard to revolutionary political action reflects the NLD’s lack of a detailed political program behind its banner of ‘democracy’ which in its abstract form can encompass a military-friendly or fully-fledged parliamentary democracy to ensure a more stable class rule of capital. Nothing in Suu Kyi’s political background has shown a desire for socialist democracy to tackle Burma’s chronic poverty and extreme class inequality.

It may be hard, however, to fairly assess Suu Kyi’s political philosophy given her decades of enforced isolation under house-arrest, and Bengsston has had just one interview (in 2011) with Suu Kyi. Although thin as a complete biography or political evaluation of Suu Kyi, what Bengsston’s book does quite well is to portray Suu Kyi’s undoubted courage, her refusal to allow fear to rule her life. She has repeatedly placed her body in danger, in solidarity with her NLD comrades who have been brutalised by the junta.Suu Kyi, as Bengsston concludes, is the “unifying power” for all opponents of the junta’s dictatorship and she deserves the support of all genuine opponents of tyranny.