Red Carpet Rolls Out for Democracy Leader Aung San Suu Kyi

The red carpet is rolling out across Europe for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel peace winner and democracy leader of Burma. Suu Kyi is meeting with world leaders. She will also share the stage with U2 frontman, Bono.

Anchor Lisa Mullins talks to Peter Popham, who wrote a biography of Suu Kyi about how she is handling her celebrity status.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is “The World”. Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi is embarking on an European tour this week. Among her stops, Norway, to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize she wasn’t able to receive back in 1991. Aung San Suu Kyi spent many years under house arrest in Myanmar, punished for her opposition to the country’s military rulers. That’s all changed now though as the Burmese government cautiously allows a democratic opening. Suu Kyi was released in November, 2010, and in April of this year she won her first seat in parliament. She’s going to be getting the red carpet treatment in Europe. In England, she’ll have the rare honor of addressing both houses of parliament. In Dublin, she’ll share the stage with Bono of the band U2 to thank him for his support. Peter Popham is the author of “The Lady And The Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi”. He met Suu Kyi twice and he thinks that her new life as a global celebrity and politician has its challenges.

Peter Popham: I think she’s moved into a completely new and different phase and the challenges she’s facing now are quite different from the challenges she has faced in solitude or as the leader of a movement. And, in fact, she’s already confronting these challenges and I think finding some problems because, for example, she went to Thailand earlier this month, it was her very first trip outside Burma, and she took part in a prominent economic forum there and went to a refugee camp. But she also managed to offend her most important ally, the Burmese President, who is also due to appear at the same forum and who only discovered very late that she was now planning to show up. In which case . . .

Mullins: How did she offend him?

Popham: Because of her star quality, he would have found himself playing the second billing to a person who was a prisoner of the Burmese state less than two years ago, so he cancelled the trip. So I think she’s now finding by trial and error that she’s into a phase where she’s going to have to use her political instinct and her diplomatic skills in a way that she hasn’t had to in the past.

Mullins: Well, to use your expression there, this kind of “star quality” that she has, what about in terms of what she has not only said, but done? Because she has been compared to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. as a champion of non-violent resistance.

Popham: Well, the comparison to Martin Luther King is very just because she has embraced non-violence in a very explicit way, and she wrote about the Revolution of the Spirit – a revolution founded on Buddhist religious values and which owes an enormous amount to Mahatma Gandhi, who is perhaps her most important inspirational figure. Her career is beginning to resemble Mandela’s now that she’s free and she has found an equivalent to Mandela’s white ally, Willem de Klerk, in the Burmese President, Thein Sein, who has turned out to be a strong ally of hers. And this is why she has got an enormous challenge on her hands to actually make good on her potential.

Mullins: What kind of comparison can you make, Peter, between the two interviews that you had with Aung San Suu Kyi? One of them was in 2002, the other one almost ten years later, this was just last year. When you spoke to her, did you notice anything different about her demeanor, her devotion?

Popham: Not really, no. I think it’s remarkable how little she has changed over the years physically, but also in her spirit and in the way she presents herself. The risk is that with all this attention she has been getting that she might become a bit regal, you know? A bit of a imperial sort of figure. I mean certainly in the early years she didn’t have any sense of being power hungry or sort of lusting for attention. There’s a nice description given by an assistant of how, after speeches that she made in 1989, addressing huge crowds and gaining their ovations, she would come down off the stage, pick up her needle and thread, and darn the trousers of her bodyguards or sew buttons on them. And so she didn’t have the sort of arrogance that often goes with people in positions like hers, but I think there’s a certain solitude perhaps because there’s nobody else in her party among her senior colleges who has got anything like her sort of experience. Most of them have never left Burma. So I think it’s possible that she is a bit short of close advisers who can actually help her to go on the right part.

Mullins: Well, as she launches this international tour, is there any risks that she takes that she will not be allowed back in Burma?

Popham: Thein Sein, the President, has played a pretty deft hand and his treatment of Suu Kyi, his respect for her and his allowing her to enter political life showed that he realizes her importance to the rest of the world as well as to the Burmese people. To try to do a U-turn at this point would be extremely damaging and self-defeating for him, but after this slightly negative experience in Thailand a couple of weeks ago, one hopes that the organization of the European part of the tour will be in better hands.

Mullins: All right. Thank you. Peter Popham, who is the author of the new biography Aung San Suu Kyi called “The Lady And The Peacock”. Nice to have you in the program.

Popham: Thank you very much, Lisa.

Mullins: We’ve got more online about the rapid changes in Myanmar. The limits of free speech, in particular, are changing so quickly that nobody in the country is quite sure what they can and cannot say. Former Burmese dissidents talk about that in our latest “World in Words” podcast. You can check it out at theworld.org/language.

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