Burma Heroine in Chains

By Bruce W. Nelan

As the overnight curfew ended, a squad of soldiers lifted barbed-wire barricades from the middle of Rangoon's tree-lined University Avenue. Then they took up positions, as they do every day, at four sentry boxes in front of the residential compound where Aung San Suu Kyi, 46, the leader of Burma's democratic opposition, has been under house arrest since July 1989.

Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said last week that they could not be sure that Aung San Suu Kyi even knew she had been awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. But if she has access to a shortwave radio, she would have learned the news from overseas without delay. As the head of an opposition using "nonviolent means to resist a regime characterized by brutality," read the Nobel citation, Aung San Suu Kyi has become "one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades." Within hours much of Burma -- which the ruling junta has renamed Myanmar -- was whispering the news.

For Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, the Peace Prize was the first major morale booster in more than a year. Although she was already under house arrest at the time, her party won a landslide victory in the May 1990 parliamentary elections, taking 392 of the 485 seats. But the generals refused to surrender power. Instead they arrested scores of elected parliamentarians and hundreds of Buddhist monks.

Burma's military rulers were predictably unimpressed by last week's news. The cool reception the award was given in other Asian states was hardly more encouraging. "It might prick the conscience of a few people," said Zakaria Ahmad, head of strategic and security studies at the National University of Malaysia, "but it won't change anything." A Singaporean diplomat categorized the prize as "almost a nonevent."

Such attitudes illustrate the contrast between the West's vocal outrage at human-rights abuses, even as Western oil companies are exploring there, and the Asian view that such issues should be handled without direct confrontation. Some Asians even see the latest Peace Prize as a form of interference in Burma's domestic affairs, even of neocolonial badgering. Almost all Asian governments are more eager to do business with Burma than to put pressure on it. South Korea recently opened a household-appliance factory there. China has agreed to sell the junta almost $1 billion in armaments, partly in return for Burmese teak and minerals.

The six-member Association of South East Asian Nations, a political and economic grouping, has repeatedly rejected calls from the West to impose economic sanctions on Burma. Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, explains that ASEAN thinks sanctions will not work. "The ASEAN view," he says, "is that if we boycott or condemn the government, we'll lose influence with it."

The prize, which includes a gold medal and about $1 million, will be presented in Oslo in December, but Aung San Suu Kyi is not likely to be there. The junta has told her she can leave the country only if she agrees never to return, a condition she flatly refuses. Like other foes of injustice, whose efforts take place far off the world's stage, she cannot know what the outcome of her struggle will be.

With reporting by Sandra Burton and David S. Jackson/Hong Kong