It takes no courage to praise one of the bravest and most determined women in Asia. It takes a great deal of courage – and unbelievable grit – to be her.
Tomorrow, Aung San Suu Kyi, the elegant face of suppressed Burmese democracy, will hear whether she faces five more years of detention.
Suu Kyi’s resilience is, in a way, her principal crime: As the daughter of independence hero Aung San, she rose to international prominence in the late 1980’s, as head of Burma’s opposition National League of Democracy.
Clapped under house arrest as part of a cruel military crackdown in 1988, she watched from behind guarded walls as the NLD surged to what should have been victory in national elections in 1990.
As even the most casual reader of op-ed pages will recall, those elections were promptly cancelled. Suu Kyi’s triumph was stolen from her by Burma’s military junta. Her long years of detention began. Burma’s leading human rights advocate and most famous citizen has spent 14 of the last 20 years under arrest.
But she will not relent. She has refused to buy her freedom with exile, at immense personal cost. She hasn’t seen her two sons, who were stripped of their Burmese citizenship, in years.
Her British husband, Michael Aris, sickened and died while they were separated (the junta refused him a visa, and she would not leave for fear she would not be permitted back home).
Aung San Suu Kyi’s latest trial is due to conclude today, with a judgment tomorrow.
Such tidy things, show trials: Why waste time determining the outcome when you already know what it is?
“I’m afraid the verdict will be painfully obvious,” Suu Kyi reportedly said to diplomats in the courtroom earlier this week.
It is, of course, possible that Suu Kyi will be found innocent of the charge against her, but the fact that the charge was brought at all suggests she will not.
What is this charge? Two months ago, a middle-aged American man named John William Yettaw rigged himself up with homemade flippers and swam across a lake to Suu Kyi’s compound. Yettaw apparently had a dream in which the beautiful Burmese leader was going to be assassinated, and he wanted to warn her.
Yettaw’s arrival constituted a violation of the terms of Suu Kyi’s house arrest: By permitting the man to stay long enough to recover from his grueling swim, she was guilty of harboring a visitor.
Apart from the infuriating, Kafka-esque nature of her transgression – she tried to make Yettaw leave, and her guards are not being charged – Suu Kyi would immediately have realized the really fatal blow. She was, in theory, soon due to be freed, at which point, she could have begun again rallying her supporters.
The arrival of the soaking American gave the regime the perfect excuse to detain and silence this indomitable woman again, and keep her out of elections planned for 2010.
Suu Kyi is now 64 years old. In the slow decades of her confinement, enormous change has come to the world around her. During the time she’s been locked up, the Soviet Union fell apart, the world began using the Internet, and resource-rich Burma has been turned into a semi-owned subsidiary of the People’s Republic of China.
Her case points to the frustrating limits of international opprobrium. Right-thinking people across the world are united in their demand that she be freed. One government after another has condemned her detention.
Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. This week, Amnesty International bestowed on her its highest honor, the Ambassador of Conscience Award. And…so what?
These honors are not pointless, but they are poignant, because it doesn’t seem to matter what the world thinks: The Burmese generals are unmoved.
Yet so is Suu Kyi. A recent photo shows her slender, willowy figure seemingly untouched by age. According to diplomats attending her trial, she is in good spirits.
We like to think of grit as being an American quality. It is also a Burmese quality, and Aung San Suu Kyi has it.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
