How much power could Aung San Suu Kyi wield?By Qiu Yongzheng in Yangon Held under house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years, Aung San Suu Kyi is mentioned little by Myanmar's state media, except being described as a "betrayer" or "a puppet of Western countries." However, she has received frequent exposure in state media recently. In a rare case, Myanmar's state TV broadcast the handshake between Suu Kyi and US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell on November 4. In rare praise, Suu Kyi thanked the Myanmar government for allowing her to see Campbell, according to her lawyer, Nyan Win. Campbell and Ambassador for ASEAN Affairs Scot Marciel held separate talks in early November with Myanmar's ruling generals and Suu Kyi. Besides meeting with high-profile officials and international diplomats, Suu Kyi has requested to meet with the government chief Senior Gen. Than Shwe in a letter released November 17. She said that she would explain how she would cooperate in tasks "beneficial to the country." "A window of opportunity, with regards to the Myanmar dossier, seems to be opening up as a result of the recent encouraging events," Italian politician Piero Fassino, the European Union special envoy on Myanmar, said Friday. US President Barack Obama urged Myanmar November 15 in Tokyo to release Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, calling it the path that will bring Myanmar "true security and prosperity." He reaffirmed his attitude a day later at the ASEAN meeting in Singapore and discussed the release with Myanmar Prime Minister Thein Sein, according to the White House. "Suu Kyi will get more intensive exposure in the near future, and she will stage a comeback soon," Kyaw Nyein, a freelancer in Yangon, told the Global Times in October. "There is a plan to release her soon ... so she can organize her party," Min Lwin, a director-general with the Myanmar Foreign Ministry, told the AP on November 9 in Manila. He refused to elaborate, and it was not clear if he meant that Suu Kyi would be allowed to campaign. "The government is testing her return to public by a loosen-and-see method," Kyaw Nyein said, pointing at a front-page picture of Suu Kyi's meeting with a government official in the Seven Day News Journal. It is difficult to tell the waterside house apart from the other villas of high-level officials. When trying to approach the building through the road that circles the lake, the reporter was stopped by both armed police and plain-clothed officers. "The day that the road is reopened is the day when Suu Kyi steps out of that building," Kyaw Nyein said. Mixed feelings in Myanmar Daughter of Aung San, who negotiated Myanmar's independence from Britain in 1947, Suu Kyi graduated with a BA degree from Oxford and earned her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She had lived and worked outside of Myanmar for 28 years, before returning in 1988, at first to tend to her ailing mother. Later she led the pro-democracy movement, helped found the National League for Democracy (NLD), and became general secretary of the NLD. During Suu Kyi's 14 years of house arrest, she has been prevented from meeting her party supporters and international visitors. In Suu Kyi's supporters' eyes, she is a determined and unyielding "warrior." "Changes bring hope for development and reforms. If she could return to the political arena, she would at least bring changes," said a fourth-year student at Yangon Foreign Studies University. "We are expecting changes," a lecturer at Yangon University told the reporter. "But, is an immature politician, who studied in India and the UK and speaks with a British accent, going to bring us new hope?" "We've nearly forgotten her," a Myanmar guide said. "We have no chance to know her leadership style or her capacity for dealing with state affairs." Even some of Suu Kyi's diehard supporters are now asking if the NLD and its leader have been guilty of political naivety and moral high-handedness, leaving no tangible improvements in democratic reform in 20 years, an article in Britain's The Guardian stated. Nyo Ohn Myint, foreign affairs spokesman for the exiled wing of the NLD, recently described to Irrawaddy, an online magazine run by exiled Myanmarese, how the party was so pleased for winning in 1990 that it became "ambitious beyond reality." Suu Kyi began taking decisions unilaterally that were aimed at confronting and isolating the military, even though, as a decades-old organization and far more coherent than the NLD, it would need to be worked with. She also demanded that Myanmar be transformed into a pariah state – that the country be brought to its knees by sanctions imposed by her allies in Europe and the US. Suu Kyi's tactics did not work. In the West, sanctions felt good. But trade between Europe and Myanmar was less than 5 percent of the country's GDP. The US sanctions were ultimately hollow. Some supporters are accusing her of failing to have no successor, worrying about the already weakened democracy situation in Myanmar. Political power "Aung San Suu Kyi's political power lies in the long-term support of the West," a foreigner who lives in Yangon said. "She is a political card played by Western countries to put pressure on the Myanmar government. "Western countries adjust their foreign policies based on their national interests. As the US is starting to directly engage with the Myanmar government, it is difficult to say whether they will continue to play this card." The US and the 10-member Southeast Asian bloc agreed in a joint statement that military-run Myanmar's 2010 elections must be "free, fair, inclusive and transparent" to be credible, instead of directly calling for Suu Kyi's release. The comments reflect Obama's administration's policy turnaround toward Myanmar, abandoning Washington's long-time stance of political isolation toward Myanmar's undemocratic leaders, in favor of cautious diplomatic engagement, according to AFP. The US "realizes that if they are to retain American influence in this region, they must be able to match what China is doing," Bloomberg quoted Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, as saying. China's trade with Myanmar increased 26 percent last year to $2.6 billion, 240 times more than the $10.8 million in US commerce with the country, Myanmar government statistics show. "Suu Kyi is the key in Myanmar politics," Li Chenyang, director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, told the Global Times. However, the influence Suu Kyi could wield after being released is intangible. "She does not have subversive power for the time being." "Suu Kyi's return could improve public perception in the 2010 election and promote a political compromise in Myanmar," He Shengda, a Southeast Asian expert at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times. "How much political power could she wield depends on how much freedom she could earn from the Myanmar government." Sun Wei contributed to this story http://world.globaltimes.cn/asia-pacific/2009-11/488343.html |
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