RIGHT before Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and the terrorist attack on Paris that erased it from the headlines of world news, the most significant event of the 21st century happened, bar none. Aung San Suu Kyi won the elections in Burma. Her National League for Democracy won 59 percent of the popular vote and captured 81 percent of the seats in parliament. Her proxy presidential candidate won (she was still disqualified to run for president). The only other party today is the Army with guaranteed seats in parliament. Therefore, Suu Kyi won 100 percent of the popular vote with a gun to her head.
She ran before just out of solitary confinement and while under house arrest—and won.
She also ran for president, but was disqualified because her two British children carry British passports.
She is the daughter of Burma’s Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Heneral Luna and presidents Aguinaldo, Quezon, Osmeña and Roxas, all rolled up into one at the time he was assassinated.
She then lived abroad, studied philosophy at Oxford (where it is a hard and highly technical discipline), and married a handsome Oxford don. He died of cancer during her captivity. She had returned to Burma to contest its first democratic election following the death of its longtime strongman who had turned Burma into a hermit kingdom—but the Army stole the result. (This could have happened here, if the Reform the Armed Forces movement had succeeded.)
She defied the Army in the daytime and, when she had access to a piano, she played Bach at night—kinda like Condoleeza Rice in that her mind and talents are genuinely powerful.
She wrote for my newspaper, but I “fired” her when her columns started coming in late. This publisher did not brook late submissions. Later I learned that her courier was caught trying to sneak them out to the world. To make up for losing her column in my newspaper, she got—small consolation—the Nobel Peace Prize and the title by which she is known throughout Burma—“The Lady.” That title is now denied all other women in the world.
She was alternately encouraged and discouraged by friends of democracy abroad (the phrase comes from Plutarch and is a convenient shorthand). From one side of its mouth, America egged her to defy the generals who were leaning toward China, offering rising China a warm water port in the Bay of Bengal. From the other side of its mouth, America advised her to play along with the generals because defiance wasn’t working and her submission might get US sanctions lifted against American investment in Burma. Singapore, Thailand and France (with Total) were raping Burma’s natural resources. Out of the middle of its mouth, America spoke through its human-rights activists and castigated her for not siding with the oppressed ethnic minorities that are out to split apart Burma into as many countries as they number and all of which will be in the opium trade.
She continued to defy the military and yet kept talking to it. And the Army listened. She was the daughter of the Father of the Army. The Catholic theologian Guardini was right in explaining the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospels as the tedious but indispensable genetic background of greatness because pedigree is destiny.
The result of the election that was erased from the news by the attack on Paris was that Suu Kyi swept the Burmese elections where she projected herself as running for the presidency she could not legally hold under the Army-imposed constitution. She explained that, anyway, she would be the real president over the elected one, calling the shots from the exalted height where the people’s esteem—and the Army’s respect—had placed her.
Suu Kyi won like none before her, against odds only Mandela had faced. She had neither useful friends nor much steady sympathy from abroad. The foreign media could not help. Foreign journalists were not banned from covering events in Burma, and local ones weren’t allowed to publish. Foreign journalists were hunted down from house to house and chased across rooftops, my American media friends from the 1986 People Power Revolution said. “Hey, man, Burmese people power is not a party,” they told me. Meaning ours was, which is true.
From the land of people power, Suu Kyi got no support at all except from former Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo over the Department of Foreign Affairs objection and my editor Chuchay Fernandez from the strength of her convictions. If anybody else comes forward to claim credit, I will slap her. The generals accepted Suu Kyi’s victory and prepared to turn over the state to a democratically elected government.
There as here, it had to be a woman to do it—and why? Because when a woman sets her mind to do the right thing, it is the only thing on her mind. When a man does it, he also thinks of how he can turn the greater good he purportedly seeks to his even better personal advantage.