Aung San Suu Kyi, the accidental heroine

By PETER POPHAM

It was 11 days ago that the United Nations' special envoy, Razali Ismail, who has been trying for more than a year to bring Myanmar's military regime and its democrats to an understanding, predicted that "something big" was about to happen.

In Myanmar politics, that could mean only one thing: the liberation of the democracy leader and 1991 Nobel peace prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, from the house arrest that has kept her confined in her Yangon home for most of the past 13 years.

Leaders of Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), quickly confirmed that this was indeed the breakthrough Ismail was hinting at.

Suddenly, change was in the air.

While foreign journalists are normally barred from Myanmar, at the beginning of last week visas were being dished out to any correspondent who asked for one.

Today the military Government said it had freed the political icon after 19 months of house arrest.

Suu Kyi has for so long been cooped up alone in the family home on University Avenue under its luxuriant canopy of trees, gazing out at the lake. The amount of furniture has gradually shrunk, sold off to pay the expenses of her incarceration. The garden is still heady with the fragrance of frangipani and jasmine. The world has remained at arm's length, behind barricades and "keep out" signs.

There have been meetings with generals, she has been out and about once or twice, party men have been allowed to come in and confabulate. At the NLD's tumbledown headquarters in the middle of town, the foreign journalists tramp back and forth. But they have not been able to meet Suu Kyi.

Her political career began accidentally, took off like a rocket, but has been in the doldrums now for more than a decade. Though her father led Myanmar's struggle for independence and her mother was a senior diplomat, she seemed destined for the placid, well-ordered life of an expatriate academic and mother: settled with her British husband, the Tibetologist Dr Michael Aris, and their sons, Alexander and Kim, in Oxford. The only hint of how that life might dramatically change lay in her fascination with the life and work of Aung San, the heroic father she never knew because he was shot dead by assassins before she was 3, and whose name she added to her own.

In 1983 she wrote a monograph on his life and work. And long before she dived back into Myanmar life, she gave her husband an indication that destiny might one day inconveniently beckon. "I only ask one thing," she wrote to him in 1972, the year of their marriage, "that should my people need me, you would help me do my duty by them."

In the summer of 1988 Suu Kyi was back in Yangon, and swept up in the vast movement for democratic change that had suddenly erupted, and which quickly made her its leader and figurehead. But even then it was still in the narrow terms of academic life that she envisaged her role. In an article published in The Independent at the time, she wrote: "I am frequently asked ... how long I intend to stay in Burma. It has always been my intention ... to set up a chain of public libraries and to organise scholarship schemes for students. Whether or not I continue to engage in political activities ... I would hope to fulfil these aims."

From the beginning she was the reluctant heroine. What brought her home in 1988 was not politics but family. In March that year her mother suffered a massive stroke, and Suu Kyi flew home to Yangon to be with her. She stayed to nurse her throughout the year until Daw Khin Kyi died on December 27.

But the timing was uncanny. After 26 years in the deep freeze of the Burma Socialist Programme Party's cranky, isolationist dictatorship, Myanmar had broken out. The key event was the resignation of the dictator himself, General Ne Win, in response to popular protests against his regime earlier in the year. Ne Win threw in the towel and called a referendum to decide where Myanmar should go next.

For the first time in a generation, the people of Myanmar were free to take to the streets, to debate the country's future, to form parties and campaign for support; and Suu Kyi, the daughter of the nation's hero, delicate, poised, petite, formidably articulate, was as if by a miracle there in their midst to epitomise that freedom.

She saw her moment and seized it. On August 29, 1988 she addressed a huge rally at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, her first such event. After that she travelled all over the country addressing meetings, greeted by people everywhere as the spirit of Myanmar's new age, as "the talisman", as Aris put it, "of their future freedom". But for the old men who had kept the country under wraps for so long, the new emancipation was a nightmare. That summer they sent in troops to quell what they interpreted as an uprising that would lead inevitably to the disintegration of their fragile, multi-ethnic nation.

Hundreds died on the streets, but three successive heads of state were forced to resign by popular protests. Then, less than three months after his explosive resignation, the old dictator Ne Win staged a new coup and re-established military rule, adopting for his junta the vividly repulsive acronym Slorc - the State Law and Order Restoration Council.

But "the Lady", as Suu Kyi is universally known in Myanmar, could not be tidied away. Her presence alone in those torrid months had given the democracy movement a clear focus. And Ne Win and his lieutenants had gained a permanent headache.

"Mrs Michael Aris", they liked to call her, the "foreign stooge", the "Western party girl". And the task they set themselves was breaking her. If they succeeded, maybe the democrats would merely roll over and die. House arrest was the obvious tool: bottle her up in her comfortable home and wait till the world forgot all about her.

They tried it first in July 1989, after her 11 months of vigorous travelling and campaigning, and she was still there under armed guard on May 27, 1990, when the Slorc, in its most infamous blunder, sent Myanmar to the polls to prove in the privacy of the polling booth how much the people loved their army. The result was a landslide for the NLD, a personal triumph for Aung San Suu Kyi. The Western party girl was further from being forgotten about than ever.

The Slorc angrily rejected Myanmar's democratic verdict, came down hard on those who had made it happen, and kept Suu Kyi where she was. The long, bitter game of breaking her spirit has continued ever since. The nationality of her two sons was revoked and they were barred from visiting her. Her husband was prevented from making more than the occasional visit. The more stubborn her resistance, the crueller the tactics became.

In the late 1990s Aris became terminally ill with prostate cancer. He was not permitted to visit. She, however, was free to leave. Knowing that she could expect to find the door firmly barred on her return, she disdained the bait, and hardened her heart. In March 1999 Aris died.

Why has she taken so long to emerge this time? Perhaps because freedom alone means nothing now: her husband is dead, the childhood of her children flown.

Freedom must be the freedom to travel, to campaign, to move her country away from despotism towards democracy again. The Lady will have driven a hard bargain. She has nothing to lose but her solitude.

- INDEPENDENT