The Burmese activist will be honoured at events in Dublin today, writes SANDY BARRONin Rangoon
AUNG SAN Suu Kyi’s European trip, including today’s six-hour stop in Ireland, is being overshadowed at home as Burma experiences its worst communal and sectarian fighting in years.
About 30,000 people are displaced and 50 reported dead since simmering tensions – between Rakhine state’s majority Arakanese population of mainly Buddhists and minority Rohingyas who are Muslims – erupted into violent clashes and torching of homes earlier this month.
While the army restored relative calm in recent days, the tensions underline the challenges ahead for peace and democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi on Burma’s tentative road to reform.
Following the delivery of a moving Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo on Saturday, Suu Kyi will be recognised today for her steadfast efforts on her country’s behalf at Dublin’s star-studded Electric Burma concert.
On the eve of her 67th birthday, U2’s Bono will present Suu Kyi with Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award. Youth and media will be among the rock concert’s followers in Burma’s largest city Rangoon, where musicians and artists have long injected vitality into the struggle for political freedom.
Veteran activists and politicians will be interested in the Dublin stop for strategic and historical reasons.
Suu Kyi wishes to convey “reciprocal appreciation and thanks” to people in Ireland for their long support, said U Tin Oo, her oldest and most senior political ally.
Their efforts had “inspired her work”, said the co-founder and key leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) party which won 43 out of 45 seats in recent byelections, heralding a new era of participation in parliamentary politics.
Irish governments, Amnesty and Burma Action Ireland campaigners, trade unionists and U2 are among those who have backed Suu Kyi and highlighted the plight of Burma’s ethnic refugees and political prisoners.
In 2000, Suu Kyi’s youngest son, Kim, accepted the Freedom of Dublin award on behalf of his mother who was under house arrest. Today she will sign the honorary roll of freedom in the company of Lord Mayor of Dublin Andrew Montague before addressing the public. She is earlier due to meet Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore and President Michael D Higgins.
Octogenarian U Tin Oo recalled that in his student days he and Gen Aung San, father of Suu Kyi and leader of Burma’s independence struggle, were keen to learn about Irish political figures such as Michael Collins.
“We were interested in how Irish people were so close to the British, but not the same,” he said. Suu Kyi has jested about how British colonials tended to refer to the Burmese as “the Irish of the east”. Irish links with Burma originate mainly with colonial-era missionaries and civil servants. U Tin Oo’s extended family, for example, includes relatives with the name Donovan who are descendants of an Irish clerk and his Burmese wife.
Dublin-born colonial administrator Maurice Collis’s books on Burmese culture and history are still circulated here and shops are selling a new Burmese-language translation of his autobiographical Into Hidden Burma. First published some 60 years ago, the book’s title still resonates as Burma, officially known as Myanmar, experiences a new opening tempered with many unknowns.
President Thein Sein has released many political prisoners, increased media freedom, introduced new labour laws and brokered ceasefires with more ethnic groups. In response western countries have suspended or lifted most economic sanctions, opening the way for additional foreign investment and aid.
Yet a great deal appears to depend on just one man, the president, and his personal rapprochement with Suu Kyi, while the army, quasi-civilian government and bureaucracy structures remain opaque.
Along with western governments, a handful of prominent former activist and academic exiles have decided that getting behind President Thein Sein’s reformist efforts is a gamble worth taking. The former exiles’ Vahu Development Institute is working on mainly economic policy issues with a key presidential adviser. Land and labour disputes are emerging as major challenges in the cripplingly-poor country.
Other exiles and released political prisoners remain more tentative, preferring to “wait and see”. U Tin Oo describes the NLD party as “warily, cautiously, optimistic”. In an era of unleashed new expectations, the NLD will also face more scrutiny. Some say Suu Kyi’s party, many of whose members have experienced jail and other trauma, will need to move beyond a “bunker mentality” and open up to wider viewpoints, expertise and strategic thinking ahead of what could be enormously significant national elections in 2015.
Meanwhile, some of the deepest scepticism around the current situation centres on the army’s war with the ethnic Kachin Independence Army which has resulted in some 60,000 displaced in a year of fighting.
The government’s willingness to address the grievances of Burma’s ethnic nationalities is seen as its greatest test ahead.