When Aung San Suu Kyi was asked to take part in demonstrations against Myanmar’s brutal treatment of activists during a 1988 student uprising, she replied: “It’s not my sort of thing.”
Yet more than a quarter of a century later – most of that time spent alone under house arrest and some on hunger strike – the 70-year-old known as “the Lady” is anticipating a political victory this weekend against the country’s army-backed government.
A luminary of the west, Aung San Suu Kyi waits at her family home on 54 University Avenue in the capital, Yangon, for what is being touted as the country’s first credible election in 50 years.
Many observers say her National League for Democracy (NLD) party will win on Sunday, taking the south-east Asian country further from the grasp of one the world’s most reclusive military regimes. It would be a momentous step for the often-stumbling democracy movement she has led since its foundation.
In Yangon, the former British colonial capital also called Rangoon, flying the NLD party flag – a red banner with a golden star and peacock – could have landed Burmese citizens in jail only a few years ago. But during the runup to this election, the flags have been splashed across buildings, spilling out of windows, adorning cars, and the excitement is palpable.
“I’m voting NLD,” shouted one man in his car, pulling an NLD flyer from his dashboard and waving it in the air on Friday, despite an official ban on campaigning so close to polling day. “There has been no change. The police are bad, they still want money … Next week we will have real change,” he said, laughing.
Despite such optimism, considerable obstacles remain, even if the NLD sweeps to power. While the the country has gradually opened up and the military has transferred some power to a handpicked and nominally civilian government since 2010 as part of political reform, it has also enshrined its rule in a constitution, protecting the top generals from the prospect of an NLD victory. A quarter of the seats in parliament are reserved for the army, as are the most powerful ministerial portfolios.
Most importantly, Aung San Suu Kyi is barred from the presidency due to a constitutional provision, drafted by the army, that excludes those with foreign children from the office. Her two sons hold British citizenship. But the Nobel peace prize winner announced boldly this week that if she triumphed at the weekend she would amend the constitution to become more powerful than the president.
“I have said I am going to be above the president,” she told journalists in her garden on Thursday. “I have already made plans.”
A few hundred metres down University Avenue, posters of Aung San Suu Kyi – some as a young woman and some with the grey in her dark hair – line a wonky, wooden shack turned tea shop. The stall’s owner, Khin Thein, has also taped photos of her in a glass counter containing melting chocolate bars and sweets.
“I’m 70 too,” said Khin Thein, sitting on a plastic chair and folding the newspaper he was reading. “She was born in June and I was born in August.”
He has never met Aung San Suu Kyi but over the past two decades he has seen her speak from behind the metal bars surrounding her dilapidated house by the lake down the road. “I last saw her a few days ago,” he said. “People were singing outside.”
Khin Thein is voting NLD, and looks confused when asked if he thinks they’ll win. “Of course, everyone will choose NLD. We don’t have democracy now. But we will.”
Stray dogs sleep outside in the shade of large trees, accompanied by chickens pecking at discarded crisp packets. Khin Thein once worked as a driver for the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation. He then opened the small stall as a bookshop “but books are too expensive, so it’s a cafe now. We sell alcohol too,” he said, pointing to a bottle of clear liquid labelled clear spirit.
Where others failed to take on the regime, Aung San Suu Kyi’s political assertiveness has given her an edge. But much of her domestic fame and support was carried down in her blood: her father was a revolutionary who led his country, then known as Burma, to independence in 1948. General Aung San is revered throughout the country and founded the Tatmadaw, the same Myanmar armed forces that Aung San Suu Kyi has dedicated her life to removing from power.
He was assassinated when she was two. She was raised in India before studying at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she met her husband Michael Aris, and had her two sons, Alexander and Kim.
“She was unlike any undergraduate I had taught before or have taught since,” recalled Aung San Suu Kyi’s former tutor, Mary Warnock, in an interview in 1997. “She was highly intelligent and articulate, though quiet and enormously polite.”
Lady Warnock wrote: “She was totally untouched by the sexual aspirations of her friends; naive in a way, but sure-footed and direct in all her dealings.”
Only when her mother suffered a stroke did Aung San Suu Kyi return to University Avenue and, by chance, became entangled in the 1988 uprising in which protesters were killed and universities closed. Protest leaders, desperate for the huge symbolic blow the daughter of the nation’s hero could deal against the regime, begged Aung San Suu Kyi to join and finally persuaded her.
She created the NLD and drummed up support on political campaigns trails around the country in 1989, with her assistant, Ma Thanegi, organising her tours.
“Left Rangoon 4:45am, 15 minutes late,” Ma Thanegi wrote in her journal. “I held her down by the shoulders on bumpy roads; fragile and light like a papier-mache doll.”
But Aung San Suu Kyi showed nothing but power at her first major speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda in downtown Yangon. “Her name is magic: because she is General Aung San’s daughter, there was no one out in the streets who was not curious to see her,” Ma Thenagi wrote.
Her party shocked the generals in 1990 when it won by a landslide in the election. The junta, which took power in a coup in 1962, nullified the results and arrested key NLD leaders.
Aung San Suu Kyi went on hunger strike when her colleagues were imprisoned in the notorious Insein Jail. She felt she was under house arrest rather than in jail because of her father’s status. Her husband and children were frequently denied visas to see her. Fearful that the regime would prevent her from returning to the country if she left, Aung San Suu Kyi missed Aris’s funeral in 1999.
In a 2010 election, widely dismissed as fraudulent and boycotted by the NLD, the Union Solidarity and Development party (USDP), the political group of the former military commander and current president Thein Sein, came to power.
Now a member of parliament, Aung San Suu Kyi has become less an activist and more a pragmatic politician. Rights groups this year have called for her to speak out on the plight of the persecuted Burmese Muslims, many of whom are unable to vote. Analysts speculate that Aung San Suu Kyi has decided it is politically unwise to make issue of the inter-ethnic violence as ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks will use to it rally their supporters against her in the polls.
She told reporters on Thursday not to exaggerate the problems of the country in response to a question about Rohingya, part of the country’s Muslim minority living in western Rakhine state.
The NLD has generated huge, cheering crowds at rallies this year, but without comprehensive polling it is hard to tell whether Aung San Suu Kyi still carries the same love she held in 1990; especially as the Burmese are feeling the benefits of a reformist government that has brought in foreign business. With most international sanctions gone, modern buildings now rise up in Yangon and a growing middle-class drive Mercedes cars through the capital. Sim cards, which less than 10 years ago cost about $3,000, are now $3 with 3G internet. Much of this has been credited to the ruling USDP.
“There are times when I think the NLD is going to win a landslide majority,” said Marie Lall, of University College London, who has worked in and out of Myanmar for the past decade. “And then there are times when I’m in Yangon and speaking to a lot of people who don’t like the NLD. The party has a lot of grassroots support across the country, but then the urban middle classes across the country don’t necessarily support them anymore.”
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