Asia’s captive heroine

NEXT MONDAY is the 61st birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner. Unless she is back in the hospital, where she was recently treated for a stomach ailment, she will presumably mark that birthday alone in the rundown villa on the shore of Inya Lake where she has spent more than 10 of the last 17 years under house arrest.

We don’t know what she will do, what she is writing or what she is thinking. Her isolation is almost total. According to recent reports, she sees only a housekeeper, the housekeeper’s daughter, a gardener and occasionally her doctor. It seems unlikely she will even be able to talk on the phone with sons Alexander and Kim, who live in the West.

We are told she spends time meditating, playing piano and keeping fit, but that is hearsay. The last foreigner to meet her was a United Nations envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, who visited Burma -- now officially Myanmar -- last month and said she was well. There were rumors at the time that her house arrest would be lifted, but a few days later, the military regime extended her detention for another year. So much for dialogue.

I will never forget meeting Suu Kyi in Rangoon -- now Yangon -- about six years ago, when she was still able to leave her house. I delivered a lecture about transitions to democracy -- which she interpreted -- to a brave group of activists of the National League for Democracy, or NLD. Such a meeting would be unthinkable today in a country that has gone backward while all around are going forward.

I’m sure she will be bearing her solitary confinement with fortitude, grace and the Buddhist life-philosophy that is so important to her. Yet I feel a terrible sense of frustration in writing about her and her country’s predicament. What new is there to say? That she is a heroine of our time, an Asian Nelson Mandela? That the Burmese generals run one of the worst states in the world, spending about 40% of the country’s budget on the military while most of their people live in poverty and disease? (The health system is ranked 190th out of 190 countries by the World Health Organization.) That dialogue with the NLD, which overwhelmingly won a democratic election in 1990, is the key to political change? All true. All said a thousand times already. All to no apparent effect.

But if she doesn’t give up, we have no right to. So here are three modest thoughts about possible ways to thaw this frozen conflict.

First of all, remembering Burma is itself a political act of the first importance. As the Czech writer Milan Kundera famously observed, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Forgetting Burma is just what its rulers want us to do. We have to keep hammering away. After all, though the comparison is hardly encouraging, Nelson Mandela was in prison for 27 years, and yet South Africa moved in the end.

Second, while paying all respect to Suu Kyi’s often-repeated call for tight sanctions against the military regime, we should think again about the mix of our policies. For example, is there more we can do to alleviate directly the suffering of the population from the effects of AIDS or heroin addiction without giving an unacceptable payoff to the regime? What mixture of carrots and sticks would have a chance of persuading the Burmese military to loosen up?

Third, if the internal key to change is the reopening of dialogue between the regime and the NLD, the external key is a change in approach by at least one of the country’s Asian neighbors -- because we in the West simply don’t have enough leverage to do it ourselves.

Where to begin? Surely in India, the world’s largest democracy and the country where Suu Kyi went to school. One hardly expects communist China to press for liberalization and democracy in its disgraceful little neighbor, but it is disappointing that democratic India has been so timid toward its Burmese neighbor. The shape of the conversation should not be (Washington speaking), “Hey, Indians, you must take our self-evidently correct Western template and help us impose it on Burma.” It should be: “We’re wondering whether you think, judging by your own values, that this is acceptable behavior in your own immediate neighborhood?”

This is the shape of the new world order, if there is to be one. If we are to achieve liberal ends in an increasingly multipolar world, then we do have to rethink how we say it, and to whom. And we have to listen more than we have for the last 500 years.