My
Last Conversation With
Aung San Suu Kyi
By John Pilger
04 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
As
the people of Burma rise up again, we have had a rare sighting of Aung
San Suu Kyi. There she stood, at the back gate of her lakeside home
in Rangoon, where she is under house arrest. She looked very thin. For
years, people would brave the roadblocks just to pass by her house and
be reassured by the sound of her playing the piano. She told me she
would lie awake listening for voices outside and to the thumping of
her heart. "I found it difficult to breathe lying on my back after
I became ill, she said."
That was a decade ago. Stealing
into her house, as I did then, required all the ingenuity of the Burmese
underground. My film-making partner David Munro and I were greeted by
her assistant, Win Htein, who had spent six years in prison, five of
them in solitary confinement. Yet his face was open and his handshake
warm. He led us into the house, a stately pile fallen on hard times.
The garden with its ragged palms falls down to Inya Lake and to a trip
wire, a reminder that this was the prison of a woman elected by a landslide
in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by generals in ludicrous uniforms.
Aung San Suu Kyi wore silk
and had orchids in her hair. She is a striking, glamorous figure whose
face in repose shows the resolve that has seen her along her heroic
journey.
We sat in a room dominated
by a wall-length portrait of Aung San, independent Burma's assassinated
liberation fighter, the father she never knew.
"What do I call you?"
I asked. "Well, if you can't manage the whole thing, friends call
me Suu."
"The regime is always
saying you are finished, but here you are, hardly finished. How is that?"
"It's because democracy
is not finished in Burma . . . Look at the courage of the people [on
the streets], of those who go on working for democracy, those who have
already been to prison. They know that any day they are likely to be
put back there and yet they do not give up."
"But how do you reclaim
the power you won at the ballot box with brute power confronting you?"
I asked.
"In Buddhism we are
taught there are four basic ingredients for success. The first is the
will to want it, then you must have the right kind of attitude, then
perseverance, then wisdom . . ." "But the other side has all
the guns?"
"Yes, but it's becoming
more and more difficult to resolve problems by military means. It's
no longer acceptable."
We talked about the willingness
of foreign business to come to Burma, especially tour companies, and
of the hypocrisy of "friends" in the West. I read her a British
Foreign Office press release: "Through commercial contacts with
democratic nations such as Britain, the Burmese people will gain experience
of democratic principles."
"Not in the least bit,"
she responded, "because new investments only help a small elite
to get richer and richer. Forced labour goes on all over the country,
and a lot of the projects are aimed at the tourist trade and are worked
by children."
"People I've spoken
to regard you as something of a saint, a miracle worker."
"I'm not a saint and
you'd better tell the world that!"
"Where are your sinful
qualities, then?"
"Er, I've got a short
temper."
"What happened to your
piano?"
"You mean when the string
broke? In this climate pianos do deteriorate and some of the keys were
getting stuck, so I broke a string because I was pumping the pedal too
hard."
"You lost it ... you
exploded?"
"I did."
"It's a very moving
scene. Here you are, all alone, and you get so angry you break the piano."
"I told you, I have
a hot temper."
"Weren't there times
when, surrounded by a hostile force, cut off from your family and friends
you were actually terrified?"
"No, because I didn't
feel hostile towards the guards surrounding me. Fear comes out of hostility
and I felt none towards them."
"But didn't that produce
a terrible aloneness ...?"
"Oh, I have my meditation,
and I did have a radio . . . And loneliness comes from inside, you know.
People who are free and who live in big cities suffer from it, because
it comes from inside."
"What were the small
pleasures you'd look forward to?"
"I'd look forward to
a good book being read on 'Off the Shelf' on the BBC and of course to
my meditation .... I didn't enjoy my exercises so much; I'd never been
a very athletic type."
"Was there a point when
you had to conquer fear?"
"Yes. When I was small
in this house. I wandered around in the darkness until I knew where
all the demons might be . . . and they weren't there."
For several years after that
encounter with Aung San Suu Kyi I tried to phone the number she gave
me. The phone would ring, then go dead. One day I got through.
"Thank you so much for
the books," she said. "It has been a joy to read widely again."
(I had sent her a collection of T S Eliot, her favourite, and Jonathan
Coe's political romp What a Carve Up!.) I asked her what was happening
outside her house. "Oh, the road is blocked and they [the military]
are all over the street . . ."
"Do you worry that you
might be trapped in a terrible stalemate?"
"I am really not fond
of that expression," she replied rather sternly. "People have
been on the streets. That's not a stalemate. Ethnic people, like the
Karen, are fighting back. That's not a stalemate. The defiance is there
in people's lives, day after day. You know, even when things seem still
on the surface, there's always movement underneath. It's like a frozen
lake; and beneath our lake, we are progressing, bit by bit."
"What do you mean exactly?"
"What I am saying is
that, 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."
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.