In his 288 page book entitled “Courage: Eight Portraits,” U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes about Burmese political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi. An excerpt from Chapter Eight of “Courage”, published in 2007 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, follows:
“… To understand Aung San Suu Kyi’s courage we need to under-stand firstly her devotion to duty – and in particular, the influence of her father, Aung San, who secured Burmese independence from the British in 1947 but who did not live to see that independence come into force ± and secondly, and most important of all, the strength of Aung San Suu Kyi’s underlying belief in democracy and human rights. Her courage has shown itself not in the fearlessness of impetuous confrontation, but in a strength of character rooted in passionately held beliefs – beliefs that have sustained her through years of oppression and deprivation and cruel separation from her loved ones.
For Aung San Suu Kyi the turning point in this process occurred in the spring of 1988. `It was a quiet evening in Oxford like many others – the last day of March 1988,’ her husband, Michael Aris, recalled. `Our sons were already 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 and at once started to pack. I had a premonition that our lives would change for ever.’
Until that day Aung San Suu Kyi had been an academic and housewife, married to a professor, and bringing up two young sons in the tranquility of Oxfordshire. The next day she left England for a Rangoon in the grip of demonstrations and protests. As she tended her critically ill mother, she bore silent witness to the growing restlessness of the country’s youth. Within a few weeks of her arriving in the city, General Ne Win’s twenty-six-year-long dictatorial rule came to an end as he announced plans to allow the country to decide its fate in a referendum.
As pro-democracy fervour swept from Rangoon across the country, `She, like the whole country, was electrified,’ Michael Aris recalled. `The people at last had a chance to take control of their own destinies. I think it was at this moment more than any other that Suu made up her mind to step forward.’
But with mass demonstrations drawing millions of people on to the streets, General Ne Win orchestrated not the democratic transition people hoped for but a human rights crackdown which culminated on 8 August in what Desmond Tutu and Va clav Havel have subsequently exposed in a report to the UN Security Council as a massacre of the innocents: thousands of unarmed demonstrators – mostly students – gunned down in the streets.
Aung San Suu Kyi had arrived in Rangoon at the beginning of April 1998. She had no weapons, troops or band of followers, but she saw at first hand the brutality of the military and she knew the fate awaiting the countless demonstrators rounded up on the streets. Yet it was precisely because she wanted for others in her own country the freedoms she enjoyed in the United Kingdom that at this point, the point of greatest danger, she stepped forward.
Standing in front of half a million protestors on 26 August, speaking under a poster of her father by the Shwedagon Pagoda, Aung San Suu Kyi told the crowd: `I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on.’ Within weeks, Aung San Suu Kyi and colleagues had established the National League for Democracy, and she became its general secretary. When her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, died in December of that year, the funeral procession turned into a peaceful protest, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s life changed irrevocably as she embarked on an exhaustive tour of the country, demanding democracy and human rights.
While Aung San Suu Kyi’s decision to lead the protest was made in the days of turmoil following the repression of August 1988, it was a decision that had been twenty years in the making – though she would have been surprised to become not only a focus for a nation’s hopes but also a symbol of unbeatable courage around the world.” For more, click here.