Remembering U Win Tin's comments on Suu Kyi and the NLD.

Veteran Burmese activist Win Tin says democracy icon Suu Kyi is too conciliatory

Khin Maung Win/AP - Myanmar's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and Win Tin, right, senior leader of her National League for Democracy, observe a making of hand weaving in Yangon, Myanmar.

By Simon Denyer, Published: March 13, 2013 (Washington post)

RANGOON, Burma — For most of two decades, while Aung San Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest, her deputy Win Tin was condemned to solitary confinement in prison, denied even pen and paper by his jailers.

When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to bring democracy to Burma, he was comparatively forgotten by the outside world.

But today, 83-year-old Win Tin is out of jail, free to write a weekly column and broadcast a weekly radio show, using satire to mercilessly mock the government, the military and their business allies. And, as Suu Kyi charts a course of compromise with the army, he is also one of the few people in Burma who commands enough respect that he can criticize her and get away with it.

“Some of us would like to push the military into the Bay of Bengal,” he said with a smile. “She only wants to push them into Kandawgyi Lake,” a reference to a lake in the heart of Rangoon, the former capital.
With this kind of uncompromising talk, Win Tin is a symbol of the extraordinary freedom — especially the freedom of speech and freedom from fear — that has come to Burma in the past few years. But he is also a prominent reminder that reform is only in its early stages, and that Burma is still a long way from becoming a full democracy and ending decades of military dictatorship.

More than four years after he was released from prison, Win Tin is still wearing a blue shirt, the color of his prison uniform, and says he will not wear any other color until every political prisoner in his country is free. His shirt also showcases his feelings about the broader changes that have yet to take place in Burma, a country renamed Myanmar by its military rulers.

“Although I am a free man, I feel my whole country is still in jail,” he said. “There are no great prison walls, but we are still in chains.”

Over the past two years, Burma’s military-backed regime has loosened its tight grip on the country to the extent that Suu Kyi, released from house arrest in 2010, was allowed to travel abroad in May 2012 for the first time in 24 years. In response, the United States has gradually lifted sanctions imposed after the violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in 1988, sending an ambassador to the country last year for the first time in more than two decades.

But the Burmese military is still calling the shots politically under a constitution it wrote that guarantees it a quarter of the seats in parliament, allows it to declare a state of emergency and dismiss a democratically elected government, and still blocks democracy icon Suu Kyi from becoming president, even if her party were to win an election. And with its former officers in key roles, the army still controls the bureaucracy and large swaths of the economy.

One of Burma’s leading journalists and writers, Win Tin spent decades struggling against the military regime and the growing censorship it imposed. He moved into politics when he helped launch a new political party, the National League for Democracy, with Suu Kyi after the 1988 protests. She and other NLD leaders nicknamed him Saya, which means “The Wise One.”
The party won a landslide election victory two years later, only to have the result annulled by the country’s military rulers and its leaders rounded up.

The regime was always reluctant to jail Suu Kyi, partly because of her status as the daughter of the hero of the nation’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule, Gen. Aung San, who is known as the founder of the modern Burmese army. They had no such compunction on dealing with her deputy Win Tin.
While she was confined to her home and kept away from her family for most of the period between 1989 to 2010, he was confined to a tiny prison cell — tortured, he said, through sleep deprivation and denied adequate medical treatment for a heart condition.

Their different experiences over the past two decades may have shaped their differing attitudes toward the military now, he said. “She thinks she can persuade all the military leaders to become her friends and come to her side,” Win Tin said. “But people suffered a lot [under military rule]. Without pushing the military out, we won’t achieve any democracy, any human rights.”

Long incarceration
 
Win Tin, with his round face, large glasses and healthy head of wavy white hair, is incisive, witty and charming. Although he walks slowly with the aid of a cane, he has seemingly lost none of the mental acuity that made him such a relentless foe of the military.

Win Tin recalls smuggling fragments of brick into his cell during his long incarceration, grinding them into an orange paste and using the paste to write poems and political thoughts on his cell walls, just to stay sane. Time and again, the military offered to release him if he would promise to renounce politics, but every time he refused.

Finally freed in 2008, he campaigned tirelessly for Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest; when she was briefly jailed in 2009 for violating the terms of her detention, he kept up a vigil outside the prison. Since she was finally freed in 2010, the pair have, however, found themselves drifting apart. While she advocated conciliation with the military, he took a
harder-line approach.

In 2012, their party decided to participate in a series of parliamentary elections under the military constitution. It was a decision Win Tin opposed, but once it was taken, he took part in the campaign.
The party won 43 of the 45 seats up for grabs, and Suu Kyi entered parliament.
These days, as she spends more and more time either in parliament or on foreign trips, Suu Kyi and Win Tin appear to have become increasingly estranged.

Suu Kyi is believed to be trying to negotiate a deal with military officials to amend the constitution so that she could one day become president. Apparently keen to win their trust, she told the BBC’s “Desert Island Discs” radio show recently that she is “fond” of the army.

But Win Tin senses danger in agreeing to small changes that would leave the military’s role still entrenched. “Some of us would like to withdraw this constitution and create a new one,” he said.

As foreign governments remove sanctions and investors come into Burma, the pressure on the regime to agree to further changes may dissipate. At the same time, Win Tin warns, his fellow pro-democracy politicians are already becoming comfortable with the limited changes the regime is offering, accepting a seat among the elite and losing their hunger for real change.

“Many journalists, many politicians may think the situation they are in is good enough,” he said. “They are quite contented, and they do not want to attack the government. They don’t want to be outspoken. That is a problem.”

Some foreign diplomats say they find Win Tin unyielding, out of tune with the new mood of compromise. At the headquarters of the rival National Democratic Force, his name does not go down well. Seeking compromise with the military, the party split from the NLD to contest general elections under the military constitution in 2010, and there is still some bad feeling between the two sides.

“He is a madman,” said Khin Maung Swe, the party’s 71-year-old chairman, who spent nearly as long in prison himself. “He just wants to die in prison as a martyr.”

But across town, other former political prisoners, such as 37-year-old Aye Aung, who was sentenced to 59 years in jail in 1998 but released last July, says Win Tin is right to stick to his principles. Suu Kyi, he argues, has been losing touch with the people since she joined parliament and is not taking a strong enough line with the army. The military is so rooted in power, he warns, “we need a revolution” to remove it.

Political prisoners remain
 
At formal events, Win Tin’s colleagues wear traditional collarless shirts and jackets; he says that he often feels “very awkward” in his blue shirt but that it can’t be helped. Although about 1,000 political prisoners have been released in a series of amnesties in the past decade, more than 200 remain behind bars from the era of the pro-democracy movement. More have been arrested in the past year, for taking part in unlicensed protests or for involvement in separatist movements.

The government last month convened a committee to review the cases of everyone still behind bars, fulfilling a promise made just before President Obama’s visit in November. But released prisoners complain that they are still routinely denied passports, as well as entry to universities to resume studies interrupted by long jail terms.

Despite his concerns, Win Tin ended a two-hour interview on an optimistic note. While he has reservations about her tactics, he still strongly believes in Suu Kyi’s commitment to democracy and obviously still respects her. If anyone can tame the generals, she can, he says.

Meanwhile, rising press freedom and growing political awareness among the people have created a powerful force for change.

At the headquarters of his own party, the 72-year-old party secretary, Nyan Win, said Win Tin’s viewpoints, and his warnings about the risks the party has taken, still command enormous respect.

“We don’t want to say his opinion is wrong. Maybe it is right,” he said. “We are trying to tame the lion, and there are many risks.”
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In Public Eye, Shining Star of Myanmar Loses Luster

By THOMAS FULLER

Published: March 9, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com)

YANGON, Myanmar — She endured years of house arrest and was steadfast as her political movement was decimated and her colleagues were tortured. But now, as the leader of Myanmar’s opposition in Parliament, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate, is courting her former jailers.

Soe Than Win/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar’s opposition in Parliament, at a news conference in Yangon last month.

With Myanmar sloughing off the legacy of five decades of brutal military dictatorship, the country is witnessing a political minuet between the army and Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the human rights champion turned politician who is fighting to keep her disorganized and fractious political party relevant — and her path to the presidency open.

To her critics, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s compromises are tarnishing her status as a near saint.

She has been quiet about the military’s bloody campaign against an armed ethnic minority group and recently went so far as to say she was “very fond” of the military, rattling some of her extremely loyal party members.

The remarks were tied to the army’s role in liberating the country from colonial rule, but the timing, coming as the military was pounding the rebels with airstrikes, rankled supporters who were under military rule for decades.

“To the outside world, nothing has really changed with her; she is Suu Kyi and all the beautiful things that go with it,” said Josef Silverstein, an expert in Burmese politics and professor emeritus at Rutgers. But “she is essentially making herself irrelevant. We have not heard Suu Kyi talk as Suu Kyi.”

Making the transition from dissident to politician was never going to be easy in an impoverished country perennially divided by ethnic conflict. The path from icon to leader, successfully navigated by Nelson Mandela of South Africa and few others, is fraught in a country like Myanmar, which fought a civil war in 1948 that lives on in ethnic insurgencies and allowed the military an outsize role that still continues.

The reverence for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi inside Myanmar is difficult to overstate. Her sacrifices for her country are legend: she chose to stay in Myanmar even as her husband was dying abroad, fearing the military leaders who kept her under arrest would not allow her to return to her struggling nation. Her grace under duress helped win her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, which she was only able to pick up last year after the generals decided to begin a shift to democracy.

But the adulation for her has set a particularly high standard, and her stature has intimidated members of her party from challenging her views. Even party members say their National League for Democracy is in disarray — suffering from an array of problems including what one called a “leadership vacuum” in the middle ranks. The party is holding its first-ever national congress this weekend.

“Nobody dares to speak out in front of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and that is a very bad thing,” said U Win Tin, a senior party member. “It’s not out of fear; it’s out of admiration.”

Supporters note that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is making a careful calculation in allying with the former generals who run the country. The political reality is that the military still wields enormous power. The military and the ruling party formed by the military together control the vast majority of seats in Parliament, and the military retains extensive business interests.

“I don’t like the army,” said U Kyi Win, a former political prisoner who is now a delegate at the party congress. “But for the future of our country, we have to work with them. We cannot have democracy without the involvement of the military.”

The changes in the country have been highly personalized, dependent on a good working relationship between the former general who runs the country, U Thein Sein, and Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.

“I think she needs to be credited as a stabilizing force and as someone willing to view former adversaries as partners for the common good,” said David Steinberg, an expert on Myanmar at Georgetown University.

Working with the military is more than a political calculus; it is also in her blood. Her father, Aung San, who was assassinated when she was 2 years old, was the founder of the modern Burmese Army.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi defends her current relationship with the military, saying that she wants to pursue “negotiated compromise” and that retribution will not serve the country well. She argues instead for “restorative justice” — addressing what ails the country instead of meting out punishment for the sins of the past.

But representatives of minority groups say that should not preclude her being more active in trying to achieve national unity. They have criticized her for refusing to spend at least some political capital to help solve the conflict between Kachin rebels and the Myanmar Army, even as it grew particularly bloody in December and January. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said in January it was not the purview of her committee in Parliament. 

Some of her harshest critics say her refusal to take on the military establishment is all about politics, and her ambitions for higher office. “She’s only thinking about becoming president of Burma,” said Pu Zo Zam, a leading voice of the country’s minority groups, using the name for the country preferred by many in the opposition. “She was a national hero for us. Now she’s only talking on behalf of her party.”

Party officials acknowledge that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi needs the army’s support to change a rule in the Constitution that bars anyone with a foreign spouse from becoming president. Her husband was British.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 67, said recently that she would be open to the job of the presidency “if that is what the people want.” Many see the next elections, scheduled for 2015, as the last chance for her to run.

There appears to be consensus among analysts that she would have a very strong chance of winning: outside ethnic minority areas, her popularity still verges on adoration.

But some party officials are visibly uneasy when explaining the new approach to the military.

“It’s truly very risky,” said U Monywa Aung Shin, a top party official from central Myanmar. “The people and party members are asking many questions about her strategy.”

Mr. Monywa Aung Shin said he mostly agrees with those who say the party has “no choice” but to seek accommodations with the army. But he spent 12 years in prison under military rule and winces when he talks about the “new strategy.” He said he was only “75 percent sure” that it was the best way forward.

There are also some outright dissenters in the party.

Mr. Win Tin said the army should “admit what they have done in the past.”

“I don’t accept the army’s leading role in politics,” he said.

Myanmar’s citizens are following the political maneuverings like spectators at a high-stakes chess match, one move at a time.

“Burmese politics is power politics,” said Min Min Oo, a member of the National League for Democracy from western Myanmar. “The role of the military is essential.”

The context for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi today is that after years of persecution, her party is in disarray. Mr. Monywa Aung Shin called it a “laughingstock.”

The party lacks talented managers, is rived by infighting and factionalism, and is nearly broke.

In recent months, the party has raised money for charitable causes from prominent businessmen who during the years of military rule were known as “cronies” because they helped implement the junta’s projects in return for favors. The move raised concerns in part because Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi often talks about responsible investment.

But party officials say they are desperate.

“For the time being,” Mr. Kyi Win said, “we need to accept help from anyone.”

Wai Moe contributed reporting.

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