Freed at last?

Can you hear them dream? Forty-eight million dreams strung together one clear November evening with a single vision of a common future?

Can you hear them move? Does the movement of thousands to one tiny point in space cause a seismic shockwave?

A woman in lilac steps out into the light after 7 years isolation, 15 out of 21 years alone in her lakeside compound. The last time Aung San Suu Kyi was released, there followed an elaborate plan to assassinate her.

And this time? From totally incommunicado, barring a radio and a lone lawyer permitted to meet with her after applying each time to Naypyidaw, she walks out her door into the euphoria of thousands of followers, so loud in their greetings they drown out her first words. She invites them to a gathering tomorrow.

And then? The business commences anew. Without pause.

Here's to the possibilities beyond...and to the collective joy of Burma to see returned to them a leader deeply revered and beloved despite a litany of efforts to destroy her good name, her livelihood and her spirit. All this only a week after the roundly dismissed elections, replete as they were with violations and instances of fraud that friends inside risked all to compile.

To say so little so late, for my part, is not to diminish the significance of events. Only to point you to better roundups and shrink from offering thoughts too tinged in empathy.

Lots up ahead, so don't crack open the champagne just yet.

Aung San Suu Kyi responds to comments that she might be released when the terms of her house arrest end. Best summed as "all talk and no law = bad"

Ooh, and in an interesting twist, "Burma Media Gagged on Haiti Relief Effort". I was waiting for something of the sort. Any guesses why that might be? Anyone?

In case the irony's lost (because you might not have noticed the cyclone and its after-effects in a far distant country all of a year and a half ago), let's briefly pause and compare:

Haiti earthquake: kills 150,000, government buildings collapse, total devastation is among the worst seen in Western hemisphere.
Tropical Cyclone Nargis, May2-3 2008: savages Rangoon and the Irrawaddy Delta aka "rice bowl," kills 140,000, 2.4 million affected, rice economy devastated, early prospects of a year of lost harvests and reliance on handouts for survival. Government buildings in distant capital intact, however, and offers of aid and international largesse prove typical of global generosity when a natural calamity hits on a grand scale.

Now let's compare what happened:
Haiti: In swarmed the journalists along with US Marines and a massive influx of aid and aid workers. If obstructions and delays there have been -- and there have been -- these have been caused chiefly by a bottleneck at the airport, a collapsed port and other logistical and infrastructural impossibilities.

Burma: Offers of foreign aid rebuffed. Checkpoints thrown up. Visas for aid workers stalled or denied outright. Permits required for those inside. Not clear which set of ministries was responsible for which foreign organizations. Foreign journalists, if they get in, locate sites of damage and stories of woe chiefly as stowaways smuggled in under bags of rice. Calls to Sen. Gen. Than Shwe by UN Secretary General initially not returned. No matter. After three weeks, the US naval carriers positioned offshore and loaded with relief supplies turn around and steam off home, and Save the Children has cut a deal with a famous government crony to speed relief and supplies to the worst hit areas. Oh the scandal.

On a side note, a rare silver lining: Burmese do-gooders, something of a nascent wave of civil society activists, filled the vaccum by heading there themselves, returning with stories of confiscation, rotten rice handouts and bodies left rotting in the rivulets and rice paddies.
Also, with a new and bold sense of empowerment. To be continued...

Hello.
Reuters, Jan. 25, 2010: The pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will be freed when her house arrest ends in November, according to a government minister quoted by witnesses on Monday, but critics said that may be too late for this year’s elections. Maj. Gen. Maung Oo, the home minister, told a Jan. 21 meeting of businessmen and local officials that Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi would be released in November, a month after Myanmar is expected to hold its first parliamentary elections in two decades.

Mizzima, an Indian-based exile magazine, refracts this tidbit here through the dismissals of National League for Democracy party leaders, who respond that the announcement carries scarcely any significance because Maunt Oo delivers it word of mouth without the weight of an official announcement.

But notice that said article doesn't even amount to top billing on Mizzima's site (another version is buried inside the Irrawaddy under "Haiti Aid Response Far Better than Nargis" -- and more on that in second). When it comes to the hazy pronouncements of the junta on details of expansions to basic freedoms or the like, the news judgment of Burmese editors, much like general opinion, is apparently soaked in cynicism.

Will they won't they and if they do, what then?
Enough with the cryptic. There's talk, rumor really, that Aung San Suu Kyi may be released from house arrest in time to organize her party's campaign ahead of Burma's first elections in twenty years, scheduled for some time in 2010. The fact that her last release in 2003 coincided with a botched, if heavily choreographed, attempt to assassinate her as she traveled around the country, and that the new constitution carefully bars her in all but name from running suggests another question to the junta entirely: so what? Could this all be a clever ploy to seem magnanimous but instead defang an icon?

What role the hairpin turns of fate in a mass movement? What power human agency? And what if revolt becomes revolution off an accident of history?

Two decades ago, separated by a year and a continent, two scintillating surges of people's power sought freedom from their respective repressive systems. Both ignited off the microscopic and tipped into the monumental. Both saw fear turn into mass defiance. Both froze their governments into paralysis.Vast collective euphoria seemed in each a portent of victory.
But there fate bifurcated. One regime turned and bit back, mowing down the crowds with impunity and with a force that froze its people into permanent pain and nostalgia for that one brief shining moment in Burma when change almost, just about, nearly, then never, came to pass.
The second fell and along with it crashed an empire. The Berlin Wall tumbled, defeated by a storm of East Germans on the wings of an accident. A bureaucrat misspoke, suggesting an immediate liberalization of travel across the East-West divide. And the people, their energy coiled back like a spring across years of oppression, made a run for it en masse. Down tumbled the bricks, picked apart, hammered, smashed to bits in a fury, their graffitied chunks scattered to the winds as relics of a vanquished era.

What if a single Stasi agent or GDR soldier had panicked and opened fire? Would the Berlin Wall have turned instead into a mass gravestone for swarms of protesters? What if the soldiers in Burma had refused to follow orders?

Fast forward twenty years. Rangoon, to visitors, appears frozen as if by a magic spell. Another mass protest in Aug-Sept. 2007 tried anew the recipe that worked so well for Eastern Europe in 1989 but failed so conclusively for Burma in 1988. Again it ended in a bloodletting.
And so today, on the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 21 years after Burma's own botched pro-democracy uprising and two years after the monk-steered protests that we all prematurely dubbed the Saffron Revolution, the question bears asking: what role luck in a mass protest? Do you unfurl again a banner, confident that the whole country will rise behind you? Do you risk another life lost in a vain show of martyrdom? Or do you cut your losses and pour your creative energies into long-term strategies of subversion, less dramatic, more incremental, a legacy for future generations ?
Not so much philosophical abstractions in a country where dreams of change land you in jail.

And so it begins...
A new US policy, opening salvos of dialogue with Burma's poker-faced band of generals and a meeting between Aung San Suu Kyi and a US assistant secretary of state. Hopeful signs of change to come or mere hot air?

Few would be so sanguine as to predict the forthcoming installation of a hot line between Suu Kyi in her lakeside prison and the junta in a bunker beneath Naypyidaw (not the best occasion, admittedly, for chatting about the absence of decent fiberoptic cable connectivity anywhere in the vicinity of Rangoon). Much less is there a chance of Suu Kyi's release ahead of Burma's greatest unfurling enigma in 20 years -- the looming elections of 2010. This is the first set of multiparty elections, we remind you, since 1990, when Suu Kyi's newly formed party, the National League for Democracy swept to victory, shortly after the mass uprisings of 1988 in surprisingly free and fair conditions. But the junta, caught by surprise, annulled the results shortly thereafter. To be crude, all else follows...(well almost, but for that we'd have to bury deep into modern history with the military coup that took place in 1962.)

Anyway. With no date announced, no electoral law, no clear proof of the junta's thinking beyond the speculative and the educated guessing, no decision on whether Suu Kyi's party will run or boycott, trust no-one to predict for sure the widening of Burma's narrow political space. It is, in short, too soon to break out the champagne. And the junta have a wily ability, history suggests, to offer a sop of appeasement to their most vocal and powerful critics. Rewind to 1994, when Congressman Bill Richardson flew in for the first of two trips to set up dialogue between Suu Kyi and the junta, under the aptly wily intelligence chief Gen. Khin Nyunt (purged in 2004, and down with him came crashing his Soviet-style intelligence apparatus...). Same again in 2000, argues Bertil Lintner.
The underlying assumption here is that Suu Khi is the linchpin of the opposition, however fragmented, diffuse and ragged its organization. Some I know of in Rangoon would beg to differ. Ah, there's the rub. Suu Kyi's role bears further discussion, controversial by any stretch insofar as it would awaken the wrath of tides of outside activists and exiles .

But we digress.
The point here is the old US policy of isolating the regime -- in half-hearted concert with the West while Asia adopted a wholly different approach of commercial engagement -- has proved a conclusive failure. Dialogue is a start. To what? Stay tuned.

With all the controversy surrounding the announcement of this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, I found myself drawn to searching the catalogue of past recipients and to parsing the reasons and motivations that might have led the Nobel Committee in Norway to this year's conclusion. Here's one:

He will receive the Nobel Peace Prize today because he, too, has become a witness for truth and justice. From the abyss of the death camps he has come as a messenger to mankind - not with a message of hate and revenge, but with one of brotherhood and atonement. He has become a powerful spokesman for the view of mankind and the unlimited humanity which is, at all times, the basis of a lasting peace. Elie Wiesel is not only the man who survived - he is also the spirit which has conquered. In him we see a man who has climbed from utter humiliation to become one of our most important spiritual leaders and guides. The Nobel Committee believes it is vital that we have such guides in an age when terror, repression, and racial discrimination still exist in the world.
-- Presentation Speech in 1986 to Elie Wiesel, by Egil Aarvik, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee

A guide, ergo a light and an example. A voice whose particular concerns translate into a universal doctrine of humanitarianism.

That was 1986. Five years later, different words for another laureate. Not only would a young rising star join the firmament of Nobel-graced greats, this one would also add to a select club of laureates forbidden to recieve the prize in person -- after Carl von Ossietzky (ill in a Nazi concentration camp), Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa.
It had been only two years since Aung San Suu Kyi burst into Burmese consciousness. Her first political act was born in fire; in the heated summer of 1988, amid the mass and already bloody demonstrations in Rangoon, she wrote an open letter to the government calling for a consultative committee of respected independent persons to lead the country into multi-party elections. Two day later, she stood before the golden peak of Shwedagon Pagoda and addressed thousands. Hers was a political program based on human rights, democracy and non-violence. Within a year, in July 1989, she was placed under house arrest. But by then her party, the National League for Democracy, had congealed into a force, the better to contend with a military junta that had transformed itself on Set. 18, 1988 into a 'State Law and Order Restoration Council' (SLORC -- often confused with drones, robot councils or any of various oxymoronic state ministries in Orwell's 1984).

Of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Chairman Francis Sejersted said this:

For a doctrine of peace and reconciliation to be translated into practice, one absolute condition is fearlessness. Aung San Suu Kyi knows this. One of her essays opens with the statement that it is not power that corrupts, but fear. The comment was aimed at the totalitarian regime in her own country. They have allowed themselves to be corrupted because they fear the people they are supposed to lead. This has led them into a vicious circle. In her thinking, however, the demand for fearlessness is first and foremost a general demand, a demand on all of us. She has herself shown fearlessness in practice. She opposed herself alone to the rifle barrels. Can anything withstand such courage? What was in that Major's mind when at the last moment he gave the order not to fire? Perhaps he was impressed by her bravery, perhaps he realised that nothing can be achieved by brute force.

Violence is its own worst enemy, and fearlessness is the sharpest weapon against it. It is not least Aung San Suu Kyi's impressive courage which makes her such a potent symbol, like Gandhi and her father Aung San. Aung San was shot in the midst of his struggle. But if those who arranged the assassination thought it would remove him from Burmese politics, they were wrong. He became the unifying symbol of a free Burma and an inspiration to those who are now fighting for a free society. In addition to his example and inspiration, his position among his people, over forty years after his death, gave Aung San Suu Kyi the political point of departure she needed. She has indeed taken up her inheritance, and is now in her own right the symbol of the revolt against violence and the struggle for a free society, not only in Burma, but also in the rest of Asia and in many other parts of the world.

We ordinary people, I believe, feel that with her courage and her high ideals, Aung San Suu Kyi brings out something of the best in us. We feel we need precisely her sort of person in order to retain our faith in the future. That is what gives her such power as a symbol, and that is why any illtreatment of her feels like a violation of what we have most at heart. The little woman under house arrest stands for a positive hope. Knowing she is there gives us confidence and faith in the power of good.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader rather than the woman, was born of promise. Her vision had yet to stand intact with time. Her flame endures, even as her supporters develop new strategies and thinking, exploring other paths to freedom, turning away, with pragmatism, from the headiness of toppling their goverment from the streets and working instead for the slower, patient incremental evolution of society.

The prize to Suu Kyi mattered not only for turning attention to Burma but also to vindicate the legitimacy of her struggle. It mattered because onto her it passed a torch that fuels itself on the power of human agency to alter history. On the wings of that belief, societies the world round were choking their streets with calls of change --1986 in Philippines saw People's Power, in 1987 mass demonstrations in South Korea led to political liberalization, Burma in 1988, and Tiananmen and Berlin in 1989.

And the likes of Ghandi, Mandela, Lech Walesa, Suu Kyi set ablaze with a spark the simmering of popular discontent.

Which brings us back to President Obama. If I might add my two cents, I had the initial surge of disbelief for a barely tested president who won the prize over nominees who daily risk their lives for peace and the advancement of human rights. But upon reflection...
That nominations must be in by Feb. 1 -- barely a month after the interregnum between Pres. Bush and the taking of the oath of his successor -- suggests the initial trigger was both rejection of Bush and vindication of Obama for winning on a campaign that rose above racial divides. But in the intervening eight months the nominations sit, the committee reflects, and the nominees evolve. There's more to test him on.

Barack Obama accepted his award as "a call to action," acknowledging that it probably didn't reflect too many of his own none too sweeping accomplishments. He grapples with the same issues that would have met with others in his place. He has yet to prove, eight months into his presidency, that he can vanquish any.
His approach, however, is all. It offers a clear break with his predecessor, but more than that it stands on a different conception of America, in which might is the mantle of benign global leadership. It as as valid as the Jacksonian populism of a previous president, if, from the world's point of view, somewhat more appealing for its lack of unilateralism and visible self-interest. There might after all be truth in the idea that this 2009 award to Obama is less a rejection of Bush then a tribute to the possibility and dream of American leadership in a world.
And so I wouldn't reject Norway's decision as a brand of European arrogance dictating a path to pacificism. In my travels to distant villages in the vast tumbledown slums of Africa or villages in our well loved Burmese rice paddies, I've learned that people live with similiar dreams. America isn't their nirvana but in its broader, benign manifestations, it offers them hope. It is, like Wiesel, like Suu Kyi, a guide and a beacon. We all need that.