Aung San Suu Kyi by Jesper Bengtsson

Author:Jesper Bengtsson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2012-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

9

Family Life in a Knapsack

The contrast could not have been sharper between the cosmopolitan life Aung San Suu Kyi had lived when she was growing up and the daily life she would later have to get used to during the years in house arrest. But still she seems to have taken the whole thing calmly when she was isolated in the house on University Avenue in July 1989. Most of those around her had been arrested during recent months. She had learned to live with the risk.

“My only worry was that my sons got back safely to England, especially if Michael was not allowed to come and get them,” she said later.

However, the junta had no plans of stopping Michael. They hoped that he would take both the children and Suu Kyi with him back to Oxford. If Aung San Suu Kyi left the country, they could prevent her from returning. A one-way ticket out from Burma, and they would be rid of that problem.

Michael’s journey at the end of July was given almost greater international attention than the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi a few days earlier. He has written about it in Freedom from Fear. Suu Kyi was still a relatively unknown politician belonging to the opposition in a country that nobody in the West had bothered about for decades. Michael was no celebrity either, but he was a Western academic who disappeared without a trace for twenty-one days in one of the world’s toughest dictatorships. The scenario fitted hand-in-glove with Western media logic.

When Michael landed at the shabby, badly maintained Mingaladon Airport in Rangoon, the whole runway was occupied by soldiers, military vehicles, and officers, all waiting for the tall Englishman to descend from the plane. He was immediately taken to the VIP lounge inside the main building, where an officer told him that he was to be allowed to visit his wife and sons, but only if he accepted certain specific conditions. He was not permitted to leave the house on University Avenue and he was not permitted under any circumstances to speak to the press or anybody from the British Embassy during his stay in Burma. He agreed to these demands. His only aim with this visit was to see his family again and to take their sons with him back to Oxford. Contrary to what the generals thought, he did not believe for one minute that Suu Kyi would accompany them back home. “She had decided this was her task, and I had no ambition whatsoever to talk her into something else,” he said later, as quoted in the New York Times.

After the brief interrogation at the airport, he was put into a military vehicle and driven away. No outsider knew anything about his whereabouts. It was as though he had gone up in smoke. The international press wrote about the English academic who had been kidnapped by a junta refusing to answer questions about where he was being “held prisoner.”

The military drove

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