The Lady and the Peacock (64 page)

The following year Yettaw, now fifty-three, still apparently obsessed with Suu and determined to warn her in person, made his second attempt. He arrived in Rangoon on May 2, 2009, and checked into a small downtown
hotel. The following evening he took a taxi to the spot near the American Embassy where he had emerged from the drain the previous year, and followed the route he had taken then in reverse: walking through the drainpipe and along the lake shore to the back entrance to 54 University Avenue. And this time, oddly enough, despite all the security, he had no trouble meeting Suu.

She reportedly pleaded with him to leave at once; he refused, complaining of exhaustion and cramp (even though, contrary to newspaper reports but according to the court record, he had not at that point done any swimming that night). He stayed two nights in the house, eating at least two meals, and leaving various unexplained items there, including two chadors. He was said to have spent a lot of the time praying. He eventually left at around midnight on May 5th, swimming across the lake with the aid of his famous flippers and two empty five-liter water bottles.

He was arrested five and a half hours later while swimming in the lake close to the home of the American chargé d'affaires on Pyi Road, at the opposite end of the lake to Suu's house. He admitted having come from Suu's house. How he had spent the intervening five and a half hours has never been clarified—and Yettaw has yet to agree to be interviewed at any length.

This story begs several questions. As he was apprehended during his first visit, and was clearly breaking several Burmese laws, why was he not arrested there and then? How was he able to pay a second visit to her home? After meeting Suu in May 2009 on this second visit—just two weeks before she was due to be released from house arrest—why did he not return to his hotel by the far more convenient land route? And how did he pass the hours between bidding Suu farewell and being arrested?

Yettaw's visitation was bad news for Suu. Her latest and longest spell of detention had begun in 2003, and was renewed every six months after that, year after year. But under the law used to confine her, the “Law to safeguard the state against the dangers of those desiring to cause subversive acts,” which was passed in 1974 after the U Thant uprising, five years was the maximum term allowed. In 2008 the regime extended her house arrest for another year; the UN's working group on arbitrary detention ruled that this final extension was illegal under both Burmese and international law.

Unless it wanted to incur more of the same sort of opprobrium, the regime would have to release the nation's hottest political prisoner into the blinding glare of international publicity at the end of May 2009—a year or more ahead of the general election which was intended to crown Senior General Than Shwe's constitutional marathon, step six of the famous road map.

With the “Saffron Revolution” and the popular anger it had channeled less than two years in the past, Suu at large would present the regime with a serious problem. Yet to keep her detained in defiance of its own laws would be to put all its budding claims to be a legitimate, constitutional force in jeopardy.

It was thus highly satisfactory for the regime that Suu was caught in the act of committing what, by their lights, was a criminal offence.

Indeed, it was so satisfactory that it is very hard to believe that the incident was not craftily set up. There is of course no proof either way, but the whole incident reeks. A Western diplomat, who requested anonymity, was quoted by
Newsweek
as saying that when Yettaw was in Thailand, before his second visit, two agents of Burmese Military Intelligence—in its new, post-Khin Nyunt incarnation—approached him posing as members of the NLD and told him the Lady was ready to receive him.

The main charge against Suu was that she had violated the terms of her detention by allowing a visitor to stay at her home overnight. In the old days Burma had no hotels because hospitality was freely offered to travelers, even those with no claim of family or friendship. It is typical of the way military rule has corroded the traditional morality and practices of the country that what was once a basic rule of life is now a crime.

Both Yettaw and Suu and her companions were put on trial for the alleged offences. Yettaw was charged with entering a restricted zone and breaking immigration laws. The trial was held inside Insein Prison, where Suu and her companions were remanded for its duration, Suu in prison officers' quarters. Foreign journalists were as usual refused visas that would have allowed them to attend, but fifty-one ambassadors and other foreign diplomats attended some of the hearings, along with a couple of dozen local journalists.

Suu pleaded not guilty to the charges, blaming Yettaw's appearance at her home on a failure of security. British ambassador Mark Canning, who
was in court to hear her testify, said, “She made it clear that the whole thing had been thrust upon her. When pressed about why [Yettaw] did it, she said they should ask him.” In answer to questions, she said she did not tell the military authorities about his intrusion. “I allowed him to have temporary shelter,” she said.
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“Mr. Yettaw's antics are a gift for Burma's military junta,” Phoebe Kennedy wrote in the
Independent
on May 27, 2009, “which can use them as a pretext to keep the popular figurehead of peaceful resistance locked up during and beyond elections due next year.”
⁵
A senior figure in the regime, Brigadier General Myint Thein, claimed the authorities had considered freeing her at the expiration of her detention order, but the situation had “regretfully” changed on account of Mr. Yettaw.

Yettaw was sentenced to seven years jail, and Suu and her companions to three years each. A coup de théâtre was provided before the verdict when a message came from Senior General Than Shwe in person, remitting half of the sentences of the three women: Suu's detention would be extended “only” by eighteen months, to November 2010. This act of leniency, it was explained, was on account of Suu “being the daughter of Bogyoke Aung San who sacrificed his life for the independence of Myanmar, viewing that peace, tranquility and stability will prevail, that no malice be held against each other, that there be no obstruction to the path to democracy.”
⁶

There was no such mercy for Mr. Yettaw, but after three months in jail he was sent back to the Ozarks, his release having been secured by American Senator Jim Webb, who repaid the junta by giving numerous interviews calling for the repeal of sanctions.

John Yettaw, Suu's unbalanced intruder, returning to Bangkok after release from Insein prison in 2009.

*

John Yettaw is Everyman: The whole world wants a part of Suu, wants to warn her, award her, co-opt her, write about her, possess her, exploit her, empathize with her, love her, be loved by her. The brave, frail beauty locked up year after year like some princess in a dismal fairy story has taken possession of our collective unconscious, in defiance of the remoteness of her country and the obscurity of its politics.

Suu is one with brave fellow Nobel Peace Prizewinners Shirin Ebadi and Mairead Maguire, and in the courage she has shown in overcoming great
obstacles is comparable to Malalai Joya, the woman Afghan MP, and the indomitable Pakistani lawyer Asma Jahangir—but just to list those names is to appreciate the chasm between them and Suu. She is in a league of her own, far more famous than any of them. Which car-maker would dream of using any of the other women on that list to sell their cars, as Chrysler and Lancia have done with Suu? What manufacturer of designer lamps would use the image of another of these women in their advertisements year after year, as the Italian firm Artemide has made use of Suu—“There is a light on earth” runs the copy—without even feeling the need to print her name?

Despite her instinctive hostility to the idea, Suu has become an A-list international celebrity; but again she cannot be compared with any other star because it is her inaccessibility that keeps her celebrity voltage so high. Yes, she will accept the role of Guest Director of the Brighton Festival in the UK; she will humbly accept the latest of the sixty-six honorary degrees (and similar) and fifty-seven international prizes (and other miscellaneous tributes) that, at the time of writing, have been showered on her. And though she will never turn up to receive them in person, for more than twenty years she has had the best alibi in the world.

The upside of Suu's fame is that it gives Burma's democracy struggle a prominence in newsrooms around the world that, in her absence, it would absolutely lack. The Dalai Lama has had a comparable importance for Tibet's struggle against China. The downside is that, unlike the Dalai Lama, for many years she has had no direct control over how her name and image are used.

Campaigners have been understandably eager to use her smiling or troubled face to lend heft to their appeals, but in trying to grab one minute of the attention of American teenagers, for example, the realities of Burma have on occasion been buried under a “fight the evil ones” rhetoric more appropriate to
Star Wars
. Exploited in this way, Suu risks being reduced to a cipher of Western self-righteousness, graphic shorthand for how great it makes us feel to empathize with a beautiful woman horribly put-upon by bullies in uniform. She is the love interest in our
Rambo
version of the Burmese democracy struggle. The result is a rising tide of cynicism about such campaigns and the real economic interests they often further. Look at the difference between the economic profiles of Bangkok and that of Rangoon, and imagine how much money remains to be made once the
latter is fully wrenched open. The Chrysler ad featuring Suu climaxes with the car they are trying to sell smashing down a wall. The subtext is not hard to fathom.
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Because for many years she had no control over how her name and image were exploited, Suu finds herself at the center of debates over Burma for reasons that have everything to do with her image but nothing to do with her. In April 2011, for example, Andrew Marshall, a Bangkok-based journalist, picked up on Suu's celebrity status to write in
Time
magazine, “In our celebrity-obsessed age, it is perhaps inevitable that a nation's struggle for democracy is re-cast as a one-woman reality show . . . Realpolitik, though, is no match for romance.” Celebrity, reality show, romance: By singling out the meretricious ways in which Suu's persona is sometimes exploited, Marshall sought to undermine her importance.

He was taking his cue from a new report on Burma by the International Crisis Group (ICG): An indication of Suu's relative insignificance, he suggested, was in the fact that her name “appears just six times” in the twenty-one page ICG report which concluded that the time was ripe, after November 2010's election, for the world to start re-engaging with Burma. All that stands between us and that sensible objective, Marshall suggests, is our trivial, immature obsession with a beautiful celeb.

A more craven way of playing into the Burmese regime's hands is hard to imagine. As discussed in the last chapter, the road map to what is sometimes translated as “discipline-flourishing democracy” and which led to 2011's elections was the most substantial political achievement of the regime since 1990. But it was also fraudulent through and through. The regime's success in holding elections and obtaining the result it needed is very far from indicating that Suu and her party have become irrelevant. In fact the truth is exactly the opposite.

In the past the generals have repeatedly behaved as if they believed that all they had to do to make the Burmese forget about Suu was to lock her away. After having this wishful thinking punctured repeatedly over the space of fifteen years, they finally realized the bitter truth that Suu remains central to mass resistance to their rule, no matter how long they lock her up for.

Digesting this unwelcome fact, they saw that the only way their proxies could win an election was if it was comprehensively fixed; with the NLD
and Suu in particular not only out of the way but out of the running. And that, with a degree of care and finesse unusual for them, is what they then contrived.

The ICG conclusion quoted by Marshall is that Burma's election presents the West with “a critical opportunity to encourage [Burma's] leaders down a path of greater openness and reform.”
⁸
But this is simply to do the regime's bidding and accept the illusion of change for the real thing. It is to accept the bank robber's claim that he earned his fortune honestly as good grounds for investing in his company—even though you watched him while he robbed the bank. The only reason for doing that is because you have for many years been looking for even the flimsiest excuse to do business with these people. And sadly that is true of the ICG, a lavishly financed think tank which fulfills a useful function in some countries but which has been unreliable about Burma for a decade.