(Adds details on by-election results, reaction, quote)
By Andrew R.C. Marshall
YANGON, April 2 (Reuters) – Soe Thein is a pious man. Every
evening he kneels before a Buddhist shrine in his Yangon home to
pray for the only woman he believes can lead Myanmar to a
brighter future.
“I pray for Aung San Suu Kyi’s health and long life,” says
Soe Thein, formerly a political prisoner and senior member of
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD).
“Who could replace her?”
Suu Kyi’s role in a reforming Myanmar will be no less
essential after sweeping the board in Sunday’s historic
by-elections. The NLD won all 44 seats it contested, claimed the
party on Monday, in a parliament still dominated by the military
and the rival party it created.
But after two decades in opposition, much of it spent as a
prisoner of the former junta, Suu Kyi now faces a slew of
unfamiliar challenges. She must find her place in a perhaps
hostile lower house while nurturing her crucial relationship
with reformist President Thein Sein and managing the
expectations of a nation impatient for change after decades of
isolation, poverty and military misrule.
“Converting people’s expectations into political reality is
the big challenge now,” says analyst Richard Horsey, a former
United Nations official in Myanmar. “And for a country as poor
as Myanmar, that means addressing the plight of families and
their ability to put food on the table, educate their children
and look after their health.”
Just 17 months ago, Suu Kyi was under house arrest and her
party outlawed. Sometimes portrayed as stubborn and unrealistic,
her rapid journey from prisoner to parliamentarian is the result
of a bold and pragmatic engagement with President Thein Sein
that remains critical to Myanmar’s reform process.
And she has done this, so far, without eroding the adoration
and moral authority she commands across Myanmar. A people who
once referred in fearful undertones to “The Lady” packed the
streets outside the NLD’s Yangon headquarters on Sunday night to
shout for “Mother Suu.”
“The pace of change has been breathtaking,” says Robert
Cooper, counselor to the European Union’s foreign policy chief
Catherine Ashton and a long-time friend of Suu Kyi’s, as he
toured polling stations on Sunday with other EU delegates.
How will a woman famous for unyielding moral stands — in
1998 she sat in a car for six days on a country road after
police stopped her visiting party members — fare in the
political arena of negotiation and compromise?
The next step in Suu Kyi’s extraordinary life could reveal
what Horsey calls the “essential tension” between her principled
and pragmatic sides. “There has to be give and take in
politics,” he says. “It remains to be seen whether she will be
able to make that transition.”
Cooper, who attended Oxford University with Suu Kyi,
disagrees. “She’s always been pragmatic, but she’s not had an
opportunity to engage,” he says. “And principles are quite a
good thing. It’s good that there is somebody who is not prepared
to accept second-rate standards.”
Even the NLD’s parliamentary toe-hold – it occupies only a
tiny fraction of the 440-seat lower house – could compel the
party to redefine itself after two decades spent opposing
military rule. Suu Kyi’s party was officially banned after
boycotting a fraudulent 2010 election that installed Thein
Sein’s quasi-civilian government a year ago.
AT ODDS WITH THE MILITARY
The turning point came in August, when Suu Kyi was invited
to meet Thein Sein, a former general, in the capital Naypyitaw.
Both risked alienating their respective support bases by seizing
an opportunity for reconciliation. Within months, the NLD was
legal again and preparing to run in Sunday’s by-elections.
Although Thein Sein and Suu Kyi haven’t met since, their
relationship seems almost symbiotic. Suu Kyi said last week that
the former general “genuinely wishes for democratic reform.”
Horsey notes that Suu Kyi’s party political broadcast on
nationwide television on March 14 was “remarkably similar” to
Thein Sein’s speech two weeks earlier to mark the anniversary of
his government taking office.
Both stressed the importance of the rule of law, the
fragility of ongoing reforms and the challenge of solving half a
century of ethnic conflict.
“It’s very important that they continue to have a good
working relationship because they rely on each other to maintain
the momentum of these reforms,” says Horsey.
Suu Kyi’s “very first priority” upon entering parliament
will be amending the constitution, says NLD campaign manager
Nyan Win. This could put her on a collision course with
Myanmar’s powerful and largely unreformed military.
Myanmar’s constitution, adopted after a heavily rigged
referendum in 2008, reserves a quarter of parliamentary seats
for the military and allows the president to hand power to the
armed forces chief in an ill-defined emergency.
In a speech delivered less than a week before the elections,
armed forces chief General Min Aung Hlaing vowed to protect a
constitution that guarantees a “political leadership role” to
the military.
That clashes with Suu Kyi’s vision. The military must
realise “the future of this country is their future, and that
reform in this country means reform for them as well,” she told
a news conference on Friday outside her lakeside home in Yangon.
Suu Kyi’s confidence is unsurprising, says a diplomat in
Yangon, who asked not to be named. “She believes very strongly
in her powers of persuasion, which are formidable,” he says.
Soe Thein, a prominent journalist also known by his pen-name
Muang Wuntha, won a seat for the NLD in the 1990 election, whose
results the regime later annulled. He notes a dramatic change in
Suu Kyi’s public statements on the military.
“She used to be very confrontational,” he says.
REVAMPING HER PARTY
Harder to charm will be lawmakers from the ruling Union
Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), created by the former
junta. It still occupies most of the parliament’s 664 seats,
thanks to the 2010 election held while Suu Kyi was detained.
Suu Kyi has accused the USDP of harassment, vote-buying and
slander during its campaign. Soe Thein describes relations
between the two parties as “bitter and confrontational.”
The Nobel Peace Prize winner’s other key relationship will
be with the powerful and ambitious lower house speaker Shwe
Mann, a former general with an increasingly public rivalry with
the president. “Thein Sein and Shwe Mann need each other — and
they both need her,” says the Yangon diplomat.
Soe Thein agrees. “The government can replace Thein Sein
with someone similar or even better,” he says. “But we have
nobody else of Aung San Suu Kyi’s quality.”
Suu Kyi must also revamp her own party, a challenge
symbolised by the dilapidated state of its Yangon headquarters.
The NLD, say critics, is short on concrete policies and the
experts who might formulate them and challenge the party’s
sometimes stifling lady-knows-best culture.
Conspicuously absent from its ranks are the widely admired
leaders of the 88 Generation Students Group. Fearless and
charismatic, they spent years in jail for their vital role in
the 1988 pro-democracy uprising and the monk-led Saffron
Revolution in 2007, both of which were brutally crushed.
They have expressed loyalty to Suu Kyi amid persistent
rumours they will soon form a rival party.
“We accept the parliamentary process, but we cannot rely on
parliament alone,” says Ko Ko Gyi, who spent nine of his almost
17 years in jail sleeping on a bare concrete floor.
For now, he prefers “direct democracy,” citing as an example
the protests that apparently encouraged President Thein Sein to
last year scrap the $3.6 billion Myitsone dam.
ENDURING INFLUENCE?
The United States and European Union view free and fair
by-elections as the last test before they begin dismantling
economic sanctions against Myanmar.
With Western companies lining up to invest in Southeast
Asia’s last frontier economy, it is feared that the lifting of
sanctions could be complicated if Suu Kyi doesn’t give the the
by-election result her blessing.
“We’ll have to wait and see what she has to say,” says
Cooper, whose trip to Myanmar precedes a crucial April 23
meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council, chaired by Catherine
Ashton. “Ultimately we’ll make our own judgment, but of course
we will listen to her, as we will listen to others.”
Despite NLD gripes about the campaign, irregularities
reported on voting day have been minor. But that still might not
satisfy Suu Kyi, hinted campaign manager Nyan Win on Thursday.
Sanctions should only be lifted at “the right time,” he
says, without elaborating, adding that their removal depended on
not just the election but on Myanmar’s movement toward reform.
When sanctions do come down, Suu Kyi’s sway over Western
governments will diminish, believes analyst Horsey.
“The days of her having an overwhelming influence on Western
policy should be over,” he says. “What she says is only part of
the equation” now that she is an elected representative.
Suu Kyi has dismissed suggestions she would accept a
position in Thein Sein’s cabinet, since this would legally
oblige her to give up her parliamentary seat.
“I have no intention of leaving the parliament which I’m
trying so hard to get into,” she has said.
Her age and uncertain health alone will likely rule out any
bid for the presidency in 2015, when Suu Kyi will turn 70. She
fell sick at least twice during her arduous election campaign,
and looked and sounded frail at Friday’s press conference.
Yet the event, which involved her standing in sweltering
heat for over an hour, also seemed to energise her. She answered
dozens of questions with a familiar mix of bluntness and charm,
and at one point ordered unruly photographers to sit down.
Later this year, Suu Kyi will attend her first session at
the gargantuan parliamentary complex in the purpose-built
capital Naypyitaw. She already paid an informal visit to the
lower house two weeks ago, says campaign manager Nyan Win.
Suu Kyi says she will look for a second home in Naypyitaw,
which is a four-hour drive from the commercial capital Yangon.
“Because don’t forget I have a dog,” she says, “and I have to
take him with me.”
Tai Chi Toe, a gift from her son Kim, will be a welcome
distraction: Naypyitaw is reputedly so dull no foreign embassy
has moved there.
(Editing by Jason Szep and Jonathan Thatcher)
