It was impressive to watch the two most famous women in Asia meet in Seoul last week. Aung San Suu Kyi, the top opposition leader of Myanmar (Burma), paid a visit to President-elect Park Geun-hye and they exchanged words on freedom and democracy and cooperation between their countries. Beyond their commonness as daughters of great national leaders, however, they shared little with regard to the political path that brought them to where they are today.
Logging a total of 15 years under house arrest and several instances of jail confinement since the late 1980s, Suu Kyi has become an icon of political repression standing next to Nelson Mandela. When Suu Kyi met Park for the first time on Jan. 29, she could be envying the Korean president-elect but she might also be imagining herself in a few years.
What Park Geun-hye stands for is a very unique process of political compromise and accommodation in the course of transition from a post-war military dictatorship to democracy and subsequent power equilibrium. Whether the Burmese people can emulate our path and whether or not they even want to, we cannot tell.
I bought Aung San Suu Kyi’s book “Freedom from Fear and Other Writings,” and spent hours online in search of information that could help in thinking about these questions. The saga of her father Aung San to gain independence from the British and Japanese occupiers, her marriage with Michael Vaillancourt Aris, a Briton, and his death from cancer away from his loving wife, wove an extraordinary life as a leader and as a woman.
We first heard the name Aung San in 1983 when a North Korean bombing attack on the entourage of then-President Chun Doo-hwan at the mausoleum of the Burmese national hero killed 17 high-ranking officials, including several Cabinet members. Years later when the Burmese people staged what was called the “8888 Uprising” against the military rule on Aug. 8, 1988, we learned that the national hero’s daughter named Aung San Suu Kyi was at the center of the protests.
Koreans at that time had ended a military-backed rule but they installed an ex-general as president due to the split candidacy of the pro-democracy forces. The ensuing developments in Burma ― the election victory of the National League for Democracy led by Suu Kyi winning 53 percent of votes, total denial of the election results by the generals and the house arrest of the opposition leader ― were appalling but such news had also made us gratified at what we had achieved.
Suu Kyi’s father Aung San, a born leader from his days at Rangoon University, organized the Burma Independence Army to fight against the British with the help of the Japanese at the start of World War II. Then he formed the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, which later became Burma’s governing party, and led an open rebellion against Japan as commander of the Patriot Burmese Force in cooperation with the British Army.
After the war, Aung San was elected president of the AFPFL and negotiated with the British to gain early independence. In January 1947, his delegation agreed with Clement Attlee on the process of independence and back in Rangoon, Aung San successfully arranged the participation of various ethnic groups in the Union of Burma. On July 19 the same year, six months before the coming of independence, Aung San, aged only 32, and several other nationalist leaders gathered for a convention were shot to death by henchmen of his political rival.
Suu Kyi grew up under the good care of her mother Khin Kyi, who served as Burma’s ambassador to India and Nepal. Suu Kyi graduated from a college in New Delhi and continued her study at Oxford University where she met her future husband Aris, who was majoring in Asian culture. They married in 1971 and lived happily abroad with two sons until 1988 when she returned to Burma to tend to her ailing mother.
Aris recalled in his introduction to “Freedom from Fear” which he edited: “It was a quiet evening in Oxford, like many others, the last day of March 1988. Our sons were in bed and we were reading when the telephone rang. Suu picked up the phone to learn that her mother had suffered a severe stroke. She put the phone down at once and started to pack. I had a premonition that our lives would change forever.” Aris visited his wife only five times until his death in 1999. Suu Kyi was barred from attending his funeral.
Between 1988 and 2010, Suu Kyi was for most of the time confined to her dilapidated lakeside house in Yangon, defying the generals’ calls to leave the country. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and many other international honors but was unable to actually receive them. Continued external pressures and the junta’s own calculation of their ability to keep the state in control led to the release of Suu Kyi in November 2010.
The encounter of Park Geun-hye and Aung San Suu Kyi in Seoul offered us a chance to look back on the different courses Korea and Burma have taken after they both gained independence at the end of WWII. And we are now again pondering what brought us to the choice of Park Geun-hye to give the state mandate.
Throughout the 15 years since Park was first elected National Assemblywoman, her image was superimposed with that of her father, a dictator who is credited for the industrialization of the nation. On Dec. 19, 2012, many Koreans longed for the past that they identified with Park Chung-hee as they were discontent with the present. They did not bother much to check the candidate’s dedication to democracy or capabilities of managing the state.
Asia has had quite a few women national leaders, including Indira Gandhi, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Benazir Bhuto, Corazon Aquino, Megawati Sukarnoputri, and now Park Geun-hye and Aung San Suu Kyi, for whom the legacies of their husbands or fathers were their biggest political assets. In that way, they do not mix well with Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel in the West.
Park now has five years to make her own entry into history and we do not know when Suu Kyi will ever be rewarded for her long democratic struggles and have her time to lead her nation. I would only send my best wishes to the two women in their quest for dedicated service to their peoples.
By Kim Myong-sik
Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer of The Korea Herald. ― Ed.
