The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : For a glimpse of Suu Kyi

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 13, 2006

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

For a glimpse of Suu Kyi

Sandeep Dikshit

ON A visit to Myanmar, we tried to get a glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Noble Peace Prize winner, put away from the public eye by the ruling military junta for 10 out of the last 16 years. That was an impossible desire. According to scraps of information gathered from the street, Ms. Suu Kyi has just an Indian-origin woman as cook for company besides weekly visits by the doctor. The phone has been denied to her and some say she has been permitted to watch the country's two TV channels, both run by the military junta.

With minders all around as we accompanied President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on the first-ever visit by an Indian head of state to Myanmar, the first attempt to strike out a path of our own was aborted due to the packed schedule. The next opportunity came early in the morning by when we knew the name of the road where her party office was located and presumably the place she has been confined to.

Assistance came from a taxi driver. As he confessed later, he had been an illegal immigrant in another country for several years and "so I have learnt to speak." Down the University Road, a security barricade, and a rotting boundary wall with many missing wooden planks suddenly jolted the grandeur of the villas on either side. The red banners of her party, which won 80 per cent of the seats in the country's only election in 1990, have started becoming tattered. Armed policemen lounged around the double barricades on either side of the house.

One glimpse of the house was not enough. The taxi driver pointed out to men on either side of the road. "Spies, all of them," he said, and drove further down before making a U-turn. At second sight, the house was even more run down.

Only shells remained of the buildings in the villa close to the road. The roofs had caved in and the wooden walls were crumbling. Further inside, as the ground sloped down to the lake, a building of grey stone suggested a more permanent and liveable residential feature.

The taxi driver and other people we encountered during visits to the pagoda are sure that Ms. Suu Kyi is confined in her party headquarters. Hopefully that is the case because the alternative for pro-democracy activists in Myanmar is the Insein prison, a special jail outside Yangon where several activists are reported to have died.

Is there frustration among the people for being denied their voice? It is hard to tell. But there is a loss of hope among diplomats. In January this year, United Nations special envoy to Myanmar Razali Ismail resigned over the military junta's refusal to let him visit Myanmar since March 2004. There is no further information to be had; leaving one to ruminate over Ms. Suu Kyi's poem:

In the Quiet Land, no one can tell

if there's someone who's listening

for secrets they can sell.

The informers are paid in the blood of the land

and no one dares speak what the tyrants won't stand.

In the quiet land of Burma,

no one laughs and no one thinks out loud.

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