Letters from Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi.

Year End

This is the last of the weekly Letter from Burma series that began in November 1995 and I would like to start it on a note of gratitude. The intervening 12 months since my first letter have been most eventful. There were weeks when so much was happening I could not complete my letter by the agreed deadline. But the Mainichi Shimbun did not once reproach me for my failure to deliver on time; instead, Mr. Hiroshi Nagai and other members of the staff demonstrated a fine understanding of the difficulties with which I had to contend. For this understanding, and for the opportunity afforded me to bring the Burmese situation to the attention of the world outside Burma, I would like to express my sincere thanks to the newspaper.

As one deeply involved in the movement for democracy in Burma, it was always my intention to concentrate on the political aspect of life in the country. However, politics is about people and I have sought to bring out the human face of our political struggle. I have written of the effect on ordinary people of such official requirements as the compulsory reporting of overnight visitors to the authorities concerned. I have discussed what inflation means at the common, everyday level of an ordinary breakfast. I have written about friends and colleagues, about the activities of my party, the National League for Democracy, and about the trials, in more than one sense of the word, of political prisoners. I have described traditional festivals and Buddhist ceremonies which are an integral part of life in Burma. I have tried to present politics as multifaceted and indissolubly linked to social and economic issues.

In recent months, I have had to focus increasingly on the challenges the NLD had to face as persecution of its members and supporters reached new heights. The political climate has been very volatile since the end of May when the government took hundreds of NLD members of Parliament, elected in 1990 but never allowed to exercise their function as representatives of the people, into temporary detention. (There were some whose "temporary detention for questioning," as the authorities put it, were converted into long prison sentences.) One does not quite know what is going to happen from one day to the next but one can predict that every time the NLD plans a major party activity the government is bound to overreact.

It is not just the activities of our own party that bring down the heavy attention of the authorities upon us. The activities of others also provide them with an excuse for hampering our work. Toward the end of October, students of the Rangoon Institute of Technology staged demonstrations against the way in which some of their numbers had been handled by the municipal police during an incident in a restaurant. As a result, the road to my house was blocked off for the third time within a month (the first two blockades were related to NLD activities) and U Kyi Maung, one of our deputy chairmen, was taken in for questioning by the military intelligence. A number of young men who were known to be our staunch supporters were also taken into detention for some days and subjected to severe interrogation.

We have now come to expect that the road to my house would be blocked off late on Friday evening or early on Saturday morning to prevent our weekend public rallies from taking place. The blockade is lifted either on Sunday night or Monday morning or Tuesday, as the spirit moves the authorities. On the evening of Sunday, Dec. 1, the road was unblocked and it seemed as though the scene was set for a normal week. But as I observed in one of my letters, "normal" is not a very appropriate world for describing what goes on in Burma today. When Tuesday morning dawned all seemed as usual, but before 7 a.m. the road had been blocked off once again. And I was prevented from leaving my house. What was it all about? There had been another demonstration led by the students of the Rangoon Institute of Technology. We heard that they were later joined by students from the Rangoon Arts and Science University. Immediately the authorities seemed bent on finding some way of linking this development to the NLD.

The students of Rangoon University established a tradition of social awareness and political activism during the colonial days when they were prominent in the independence movement. The years of authoritarian rule blunted the political awareness of our young people but did not kill the instincts that lead them to seek justice and freedom. If there is student discontent, the authorities should seek to redress the ills that lie at the root of this discontent: the protests of the young often reflect the general malaise of their society.

The end of the year is a time for assessing past events and preparing for the future. It is a time for us to decide that we should resolve the problems of our country through political rather than military means.