The Lady and the Peacock

"This book is extremely topical, and Aung San Suu Kyi is a genuinely interesting character. How could a single individual remain so heroic over such a long time, and be prepared to accept effective imprisonment in her own home even when her husband lies dying abroad? It’s a gripping story at a human level, and is very well told here. Peter Popham has relied quite heavily on the diaries and testimony of a friend of Aung San Suu Kyi’s, who later became an apologist for the regime. But he is confident – and I believe him – that the diaries were written before this friend was arrested and turned, and so it gives a very interesting account of Aung San Suu Kyi’s character and development. Aung San Suu Kyi – and this is not damaging, in fact it may even be to her credit – is not fundamentally a political animal. In her early years at Oxford, she was not terribly interested in the politics part of her degree. I think her appeal is much more to do with the strong moral sense that politics and public life should be conducted decently, rather than about any particular political proposal that she may have. There’s an interesting debate about what the roots of her political belief are. Many people said that she believed in non-violent action as a moral principle – that everyone should stick to it for moral reasons. Then in her BBC Reith lecture earlier this year she said no, she believed that it was simply the most effective way of achieving change, not an absolute moral principle. That’s an interesting insight into how she is not quite the simple saint – there is a more complicated mind at work. This book is extraordinarily interesting now because of the remarkable events that are happening in Burma. We don’t yet know if they portend a major change, but I believe Aung San Suu Kyi is entirely right to test out what the regime is offering in the way of permitting her and her party [the National League for Democracy] to stand in elections, releasing prisoners and so on. It’s possible. It’s also possible, and perhaps more likely, that they are a slightly indirect result of it. Aung San Suu Kyi’s activities in the Saffron revolution contributed to Western sanctions against Burma. These sanctions had the unintended effect of driving Burma into the arms of China. That in turn had a further unintended effect, in that it made the Burmese leaders realise that the Chinese were uncomfortably close and might exert a lot of pressure on them – and it might be better to broaden their range of international contacts. So it’s possible that there’s an element of straight prudence and common sense in the Burmese decision to open up. The real difficulty, both before and after elections, is whether after all these years of suffering and isolation the National League for Democracy can develop the leadership with the skills necessary to actually run the country. I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s a question that emerges from Peter Popham’s analysis – the sense that the NLD is a rather fragile flower. Aung San Suu Kyi is their symbol, but they haven’t been able to build up depth in the sense of strong leadership. It’s going to be quite a test of her and her colleagues. I heard Peter Popham talk about this very recently. He retains some measure of justified scepticism about what is going on in Burma, but nonetheless I think he would be delighted if he were to be proved wrong. That is to say, if it turned out that the reforms we’re currently seeing in Burma do actually open up the way for a genuinely democratic process in the country. I think the fact that these five books have all appeared in a single year, 2011, tells you something of the centrality of this subject in world politics. Whether it’s the cases that are succeeding or those that are failing, they are an indication that people power is now seen as one of the basic means of achieving change when things in normal constitutional politics go wrong. Indeed, the demonstrations in Moscow on Tuesday [6 December 2011] confirm the key role of civil resistance as at least the initial default response when elections are perceived to have been fraudulent."