Aung San Suu Kyi's first Reith Lecture: Securing Freedom

Aung San Suu Kyi's first Reith Lecture, entitled Securing Freedom

June 28, 2011

Presenter: Aung San Suu Kyi

Lecture 1: Liberty…

To be speaking to you now, through the BBC, has a very special meaning for me. It means that, once again, I am officially a free person. When I was officially un-free - that is to say when I was under house arrest - it was the BBC that spoke to me. I listened. But that listening also gave me a kind of freedom: the freedom of reaching out to other minds. Of course it was not the same as a personal exchange, but it was a form of human contact. The freedom to make contact with other human beings with whom you may wish to share your thoughts, your hopes, your laughter, and at times even your anger and indignation is a right that should never be violated. Even though I cannot be with you in person today, I am so grateful for this opportunity to exercise my right to human contact by sharing with you my thoughts on what freedom means to me and to others across the world who are still in the sad state of what I would call un-freedom.

The first autobiography I ever read was providentially, or prophetically, or perhaps both, Seven Years Solitary, by a Hungarian woman who had been in the wrong faction during the Communist Party purges of the early 1950s. At 13 years old, I was fascinated by the determination and ingenuity with which one woman alone was able to keep her mind sharp and her spirit unbroken through the years when her only human contact was with men whose everyday preoccupation was to try to break her.

It is one of the most basic needs that those who decide to go into, and to persevere in, the business of dissent have to be prepared to live without. In fact living without is a huge part of the existence of dissidents. What kind of people deliberately choose to walk the path of deprivation? Max Weber identifies three qualities of decisive importance for politicians as passion, a sense of responsibility, and a sense of proportion. The first - passion - he interprets as the passionate dedication to a cause. Such a passion is of crucial importance for those who engage in the most dangerous kind of politics: the politics of dissent. Such a passion has to be at the core of each and every person who makes the decision, declared or undeclared, to live in a world apart from the rest of their fellow citizens; a precarious world with its own unwritten rules and regulations, the world of dissidence.

There are no external signs by which the strange denizens of this world can be recognised. Come any week day to the headquarters of the NLD, a modest place with a ramshackle rough-hewn air of a shelter intended for hardy folk. More than once it has been described as the NLD “cowshed”. Since this remark is usually made with a sympathetic and often admiring smile, we do not take offence. After all, didn’t one of the most influential movements in the world begin in a cowshed?

In our shabby, overcrowded office, you will find very ordinary looking people. That elderly man with poetically unstylish hair is a veteran journalist. He is also a dissident supreme, and when he was released after 20 years in prison immediately set about writing a book about his harrowing experiences entitled Is This A Human Hell? He always wears a prison blue shirt to keep alive the awareness that there are still thousands of prisoners of conscience in Burma. This neat, bespectacled woman with a face free from lines of worry or despair is a doctor who spent 9 years in prison. Since her release 3 years ago, she has been busily involved in the social and humanitarian projects of our party. There are some sweet old ladies in their eighties. They have been coming regularly to our office since 1997. That was one of our Tsunami years when a big wave of repression swept away large members of our democracy activists into jail.

At one of our party meetings, I called on the wives and small children and old parents of those who had been taken away to rally to our cause to show the Junta that we will not be defeated; that those of us who remained free would take up the standard of those whose freedom had been curtailed. The sweet old ladies were among the brave who picked up the standard. They are still holding onto it with great tenacity.

You will also see in our NLD office women and men whom the Burmese would say were of “a good age”. That means they’re in their forties. When they joined the Movement for Democracy, they were in their twenties or even still in their late teens, fresh faced and flashing eyed, passionate for the cause. Now they are quieter, more mature, and more determined, their passion refined by the trials they have undergone. You do not ask them if they have ever been to prison. You ask them how many times they have been to jail.

Then there are young people, but not too young to be strangers to interrogation and incarceration. Their faces are bright with hope, but sober, free from the flush of illusion. They know what they have let themselves in for. They threw down the gauntlet to the future with clear eyes. Their weapons are their faith; their armour is their passion, our passion. What is this passion? What is the cause to which we are so passionately dedicated as to forego the comforts of a conventional existence? Going back to Vaclav Havel’s definition of the basic job of dissidents, we are dedicated to the defence of the right of individuals to free and truthful life. In other words, our passion is liberty.

Passion translates as suffering and I would contend that in the political context, as in the religious one, it implies suffering by choice: a deliberate decision to grasp the cup that we would rather let pass. It is not a decision made lightly - we do not enjoy suffering; we are not masochists. It is because of the high value we put on the object of our passion that we are able, sometimes in spite of ourselves, to choose suffering.

In May 2003 a motorcade of NLD members and supporters accompanying me on a campaign trip to Dabayin, a small town in North Burma, was surrounded and attacked by unknown assailants thought to be operating under the orders of the Junta. Nothing has been heard to this day of the fate of the attackers, but we, their victims, were placed under arrest. I was taken to the notorious insane jail and kept alone, but, I have to admit, kept rather well in a small bungalow built apart from the quarters of other prisoners.

One morning, while going through my daily set of physical exercises - keeping fit, as fit as possible was, in my opinion, one of the first duties of a political prisoner - I found myself thinking this is not me. I would not have been capable of carrying on calmly like this. I would have been curled up weakly in my bed, worrying my head out over the fate of those who had been at Dabayin with me. How many of them had been severely beaten up? How many of them had been dragged away to I did not know where? How many of them had died? And what was happening to the rest of the NLD? I would have been laid low by anxiety and uncertainty. This was not me here, working out as conscientiously as any keep fit fanatic.

At that time, I had no recollection of Akhmatova’s lines: “No, this is not me. This is somebody else that suffers. I could never face that and all that happened.” It was only much later, back in my own house but still under arrest, that these words of requiem came back to me. At the moment of remembrance, I felt almost as a physical force the strong bond that linked those of us who had only our inner resources to fall back on when we were most in need of strength and endurance.

Poetry is a great unifier that knows no frontiers of space or time. Uintin (ph), he of the prison blue shirt, turned to Henley’s Invictus to sustain him through the interrogation sessions he had to undergo. This poem had inspired my father and his contemporaries during the independent struggle, as it also seemed to have inspired freedom fighters in other places at other times. Struggle and suffering, the bloody unbowed head, and even death, all for the sake of freedom.

What is this freedom that is our passion? Our most passionate dissidents are not overly concerned with academic theories of freedom. If pressed to explain what the word means to them, they would most likely reel off a list of the concerns nearest to their hearts such as there won’t be any more political prisoners, or there will be freedom of speech and information and association, or we can choose the kind of government we want, or simply, and sweepingly, we will be able to do what we want to do.

This may all sound naïve, perhaps dangerously naïve, but such statements reflect the sense of freedom as something concrete that has to be gained through practical work, not just as a concept to be captured through philosophical argument.

Whenever I was asked at the end of each stretch of house arrest how it felt to be free, I would answer that I felt no different because my mind had always been free. I have spoken out often of the inner freedom that comes out from following a course in harmony with one’s conscience. Isaiah Berlin warned against the dangers of the internalisation of freedom. He said, “spiritual freedom, like moral victory, must be distinguished from a more fundamental sense of freedom and a more ordinary sense of victory. Otherwise there will be a danger of confusion in theory and justification of oppression in practice in the name of liberty itself”.

There is certainly a danger that the acceptance of spiritual freedom as a satisfactory substitute for all other freedoms could lead to passivity and resignation. But an inner sense of freedom can reinforce a practical drive for the more fundamental freedoms in the form of human rights and rule of law. Buddhism teaches that the ultimate liberation is liberation from all desire. It could be argued, therefore, that the teachings of the Buddha are inimical to movements that are based on the desire for freedom in the form of human rights and political reform. However, when the Buddhist monks of Burma went on Amyitta (ph), that is loving kindness march in 2007, they were protesting against the sudden steep rise in the price of fuel that had led to a devastating rise in food prices. They were using the spiritual authority to move for the basic right of the people to affordable food. The belief in spiritual freedom does not have to mean an indifference to the practical need for the basic rights and freedoms that are generally seen as necessary that human beings may live like human beings.

A basic human right, which I value highly, is freedom of fear. Since the very beginning of the democracy movement in Burma, we have had to contend with the debilitating sense of fear that permeates our whole society. Visitors to Burma are quick to remark that the Burmese are warm and hospitable. They also add, sadly, that the Burmese are in general afraid to discuss political issues. Fear is the first adversary we have to get past when we set out to battle for freedom, and often it is the one that remains until the very end. But freedom from fear does not have to be complete. It only has to be sufficient to enable us to carry on; and to carry on in spite of fear requires tremendous courage.

“No, I am not afraid. After a year of breathing these prison nights, I will escape into the sadness to name which is escape. It isn’t true. I am afraid, my darling, but make it look as though you haven’t noticed.” The gallantry embodied in Ratushinskaya lines is everyday fare for dissidents. They pretend to be unafraid as they go about their duties and pretend not to see that their comrades are also pretending. This is not hypocrisy. This is courage that has to be renewed consciously from day to day and moment to moment. This is how the battle for freedom has to be fought until such time as we have the right to be free from the fear imposed by brutality and injustice.

Achmatova and Ratushinskaya were Russians. Henley was English. But the struggle to survive under oppression and the passion to be the master of one’s own fate and the captain of one’s own soul is common to all races.

The universal human aspiration to be free has been brought home to us by the stirring developments in the Middle East. The Burmese are as excited by these events as peoples elsewhere. Our interest is particularly keen because there are notable similarities between the December 2010 revolution in Tunisia and our own 1988 uprising. Both started with what at that time seemed small, unimportant events. A fruit-seller in a Tunisian town, unknown to the world at large, gave an unforgettable demonstration of the importance of basic human rights. One humble man showed the world that his right to human dignity was more precious to him than life itself. This sparked off a whole revolution. In Burma, a quarrel in a Rangoon teashop between university students and local men was handled by the police in a way the students considered unjust. This led to demonstrations that resulted in the death of a student, Po-Maw (ph). This was the spark that fired the nationwide demonstrations against the dictatorship of the Burmese Socialist Programme Party.

A friend once said she thought the straw that broke the camel’s back became intolerable because the animal had caught a glimpse of itself in a mirror. The ris… realization dawned that the burden it was bearing was of unacceptable magnitude and its collapse was in fact a refusal to continue bearing so oppressive a load.

In Tunis and in Burma, the deaths of two young men were the mirrors that made the people see how unbearable were the burdens of injustice and oppression they had to endure. It is natural that the young should yearn for freedom. The desire to stretch newly matured wings is as strong as it is instinctive. It comes as no surprise to us in Burma that young people are at the vanguard of the Tunisian Revolution. It also comes as no surprise that a popular rapper was prominent among those who demanded that they be allowed to decide the shape of their own existence.

In Burma today, young rappers are at the core of Generation Wave, an informal organisation strongly committed to democracy and human rights. A number of them were imprisoned after the Saffron Revolution of the monks. About 15 of them still remain in jail today. The Burmese authorities, like the now ousted Tunisian government, are not fond of intense, unconventional young people. They see them as a threat to the kind of order they wish to impose on our country. For those who believe in freedom, young rappers represent a future unbound by prejudice, by arbitrary rules and regulations, by oppression and injustice.

The similarities between Tunisia and Burma are the similarities that bind people all over the world who long for freedom. There are dissimilarities too and it is because of these dissimilarities that the outcome of the two revolutions have been so different. The first dissimilarity is that while the Tunisian Army did not fire on their people, the Burmese Army did. The second, and in the long-run probably the more important one, is that the Tunisian Revolution enjoyed the benefits of the communications revolution. This not only enabled them to better organise and coordinate their movements. It kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.

Not just every single death, but even every single wounded can be made known to the world within minutes. In Libya, in Syria, and in Yemen now, the revolutionaries keep the world informed of the atrocities of those in power. The picture of a 13 year old boy tortured to death in Syria aroused such anger and indignation that world leaders had to raise their voices in condemnation. Communications means contact and, in the context of the Middle Eastern revolutions, it was a freedom contact.

Do we envy the people of Tunisia and Egypt? Yes, we do envy them their quick and peaceful transitions. But more than envy is a sense of solidarity and of renewed commitment to our cause, which is the cause of all women and men who value human dignity and freedom. In our quest for freedom, we learn to be free. We have to act out our freedom, our belief in freedom. This is Vaclav Havel’s Living In Truth. We go about our duties out of our own free will, in spite of the dangers that are inherent in trying to live like free people in an un-free nation. We exercise our freedom of choice by choosing to do what we consider to be right, even if that choice leads to the curtailment of other freedoms because we believe that freedom engenders more freedoms.

Dissent is a vocation in accordance with Max Weber’s views on politics as a vocation. We engage in dissent for the sake of liberty and we are prepared to try again and again with passion, with a sense of responsibility and a sense of proportion to achieve what may seem impossible to some. We are struggling with open eyes to turn our dream of freedom into a reality.

Those old women and those young people who come to their unpaid jobs at NLD headquarters are exercising their right to choose the hard road to freedom. As I speak to you, I am exercising my right to the freedom of communications; and the very fact that I am exercising this right makes me feel a much freer person.

I would like to end this lecture with my favourite lines from Kipling with many thanks to Tim Garton-Ash who tracked them down for me. “I’d not give room for an Emperor - I’d hold my road for a King. To the Triple Crown I’d not bow down - But this is a different thing! I’ll not fight with the Powers of Air - Sentry, pass him through! Drawbridge let fall - He’s the lord of us all - the Dreamer whose dream came true!”

ENDS

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