The Lady and the Peacock Read Free

and minds by criminal economic and social policies. When this privileged expatriate flew to Rangoon in 1988 and found herself in the thick of the greatest popular uprising in the nation’s history, something clicked. Her people’s suffering was no longer something distant and academic: It was a cause she embraced, with the passion to change it. Choosing to form and lead the NLD and fight the election, she made a compact with her country: They were no longer separate, no longer divisible. The harder the regime tried to paint her as a foreign decadent, a puppet of the West, a bird of passage, a poster girl, the more fiercely she insisted that she was one with her countrymen.
    It is this decision—a moral much more than a political decision, and one from which she has not deviated in more than twenty years, despite every attempt to blackmail her emotionally—which has earned her an unwavering place in the hearts of tens of millions of Burmese. She could have flown away, and she never did. That has created an unbreakable bond.
    But there is far more to Suu’s career than simple commitment, however vital that element is. Suu had been thinking hard for many years about what it meant to be the daughter of the man who negotiated Burma’s independence. She had a profound desire to be a daughter worthy of him, to do something for her nation of which both she and he could be proud. The tragic first decades of Burma’s history as an independent nation, its fragile democracy snuffed out by the army, brought home to her how hard it would be to bring her nation into the modern world without doing violence to its innermost values. In the years before 1988 she had devotedmuch time and research to that question. Suddenly, against all odds, she had the opportunity, and the duty, to resolve it. She has not yet succeeded. But that is not the same as to say that she has failed.
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    Aung San Suu Kyi was born on June 19, 1945, in the Irrawaddy Delta, the third of three children, during the most tumultuous years in Burma’s history. Her father, Aung San, was at the heart of the tumult. Rangoon, the capital, had just fallen to the Allies, and her pregnant mother had sought refuge from the fighting in the countryside.
    Aung San was a boy from the provinces, shy, a poor speaker, with abrupt manners, and prone to long unexplained silences. 5 Short and wiry, with the sort of blankness of expression that leads Westerners to describe people from the East as inscrutable, he also had something special about him, a charisma. With a fiery temper and an iron will, he emerged at Rangoon University in the 1930s as one of the most ambitious and determined of the students dedicated to freeing Burma from the British.
    Burma was an imperial afterthought for Britain, annexed in three stages during the nineteenth century after one of the last Burmese kings had infuriated them by launching attacks on Bengal, the oldest and at the time the richest and most important part of the Indian empire. Annexing Burma was also an effective way to erect a bulwark against further French expansion in Indochina. But it was never central to British designs in the way that India had become: It was ruled from India as an appendix, and few British administrators took the trouble to try to make sense of Burmese history, philosophy or psychology in the way generations of Bengal-based East India Company officers had done with India. The British simply brought the country to heel, in the most brutally straightforward manner they could, by abolishing the monarchy and sending the last king and his queen into exile. They opened up to foreign enterprises opportunities to extract timber, to mine gems and silver and to drill for oil, and allowed Indian and Chinese businessmen and laborers to flood in.
    The process of being annexed and digested by a colonial power was acutely humiliating for every country that experienced it. Nonetheless,in many parts of the British