Impressive biography of Burmese rights advocate

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The Lady and the Peacock

The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi

By Peter Popham

Rider Books, 446 pages, $53

FREEDOM advocate and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is very near the top level of those honoured by the peace prize. Yet she, and her country, Burma, remain somewhat mysterious.

Her steadfast and heroic willingness to sacrifice her personal life for the good of her country comes through clearly in English journalist Peter Popham's impressive biography.

Popham, who writes for the British newspaper The Independent, presents insights into the history of Burma as well as chronicling Suu Kyi's two decades of determined activism.

Suu's fame in Burma began with her famous father, Aung San, who worked first with the Japanese and then with the British in the Second World War. A prominent and well-respected early leader of Burma, he was assassinated in 1947, two years after Suu Kyi was born.

Dictator Ne Win, who took over in the 1950s, sent his widow to India as ambassador. He hoped to remove Aung San's widow from a position of influence in Burma.

Still, Suu Kyi grew up in the revered shadow of her father, even in England, where she met her husband, Tibetan scholar Michael Aris. She returned to Burma yearly to visit her mother, and in 1988, she returned to take care of her mother after a stroke.

Within a short time, she was making speeches and travelling the country supporting a democratic, multi-party alternative to military rule.

Her new party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), was one of many groups vying for a spot in the elections promised by the military, which hoped to win because of its organized campaign in contrast to the fledgling and splintered opposition.

After a year of campaigning, she and most of the NLD leadership were arrested. Suu Kyi was confined to house arrest in 1989. The NLD would win a large majority in the 1990 elections, but the military would obstruct and dismiss the results.

The Lady and the Peacock gives a full account of the last 20 years of Burmese history. Popham rarely mentions the current name, Myanmar, disdaining it as a cynical attempt to present "change" to the international community.

The machinations of Ne Win's thugs, sometimes clownish, sometimes horrifying, highlight Suu Kyi's courage and determination. In spite of being separated from her family for years at a time, she continued to oppose the dictatorship.

When the government bragged that they were doing her a favour by allowing her parcels and mail from her family, she began to refuse them "to live in full solidarity with her imprisoned party colleagues."

The government would have allowed her to leave, but not return. When her husband contracted cancer and died, she remained in Burma, a symbol to the opponents of the regime. The dynamics of her family -- father and mother, as well as husband and sons -- are the most interesting aspects of this political biography.

The military even tried to reduce Aung San's cult of reverence, in order to diminish Suu's standing, but she remains a symbol of non-violent opposition to oppression. She has been released, and returned to house arrest, several times.

Some of Popham's attempts to humanize Suu work better than others. Quoting from a colleague's diary during one campaign trip and mentioning each day what Suu Kyi is wearing sometimes feel like a bit much.

It is impossible not to admire, and wish for better success than the book can report, this woman "haunted by the glory of what her father achieved, and how much was left unfinished at the time of his premature death."

She deserves her place in history alongside fellow honourees Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Andrei Sakharov.

Bill Rambo teaches at the Laureate Academy in St. Norbert.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 11, 2012 J9