A Voice From Myanmar, Worthy of a Hero\'s Welcome

The Day September 24, 2012, 9:15 am

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Long ago, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi lived for a few years in New York. On her arrival in the late 1960s, she was surprised to find a city that was exactly as she had pictured it, skyscrapers and all. “I thought, ‘Oh, it looks just like a postcard,'” Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said on Saturday. “Somehow, I never really believed it would be quite like that.”

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Years later, she said, she thought of New York when she was packed off to prison by the thugs in uniform who had taken control of her country, then called Burm a and now officially Myanmar. It was the start of what would turn into many years of house arrest stretched across two decades.

Not that this city resembled a prison, she said, a disclaimer that brought laughter from hundreds of people listening to her at Queens College. What came to mind was the same sense of surprise at discovering that some things are indeed what one had been told they were.

“It was a five-star residence by Burmese prison standards,” Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said. Still, “they shut the door. It was an iron door, and there was this clank, and there were all these bars on the windows. And I suddenly thought: ‘This is prison. It's just like in the books.'”

There was a lesson in this for her audience as well. “I hope you'll all understand what it is like to struggle for human rights and democracy in Burma,” she said. “It is just the way you heard about it.”

The way we have heard about it, and feel it, is that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 67, embodies the never-ending struggle for human dignity and decency, everywhere. In Myanmar, where the generals have at long last eased the worst of their repression, she has emerged from house arrest to become the opposition leader in Parliament. She is now visiting the United States, and is supposed to appear later this week at the United Nations, where she worked during her years in New York.

If ever a word has suffered from serial abuse, it is “hero.” Genuine heroes emerge only now and again. New Yorkers knew one such moment in 1990 when Nelson Mandela arrived here soon after his jailers in apartheid South Africa freed him from a 27-year imprisonment. This visit by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is an echo of that experience.

The city threw a “ticker-tape” parade for Mr. Mandela. Maybe if many Burmese lived here, officialdom might have thought about organizing a similar event for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. But their numbers are small, only 6,200, according to the best estimates of the Department of City Planning.

During Mr. Mandela's visit, this newspaper said in an editorial that he reflected “the power of positive heroism.” The same words easily apply to the visitor from Burma.

She is elegant and brave, thoughtful and witty - attributes amply displayed at Queens College, where she was introduced by Representative Joseph Crowley, a major supporter of hers in Congress. She appeared before two groups, speaking in English to one audience, then in Burmese to about 2,000 of her countrymen and women, who sat spellbound.

One of them was Minn Dylan Tun, now an American citizen living in Astoria, Queens. He had intended to be in Luxembourg on Saturday, to start graduate school studies there in banking and finance. But when he heard about the scheduled appearance of Daw Suu, as he called her, he changed his travel plans. How could he not? he said; this was “so excitin g.”

Daw Suu means Aunt Suu. Some in her country refer to her as Amay Suu, or Mother Suu.

In the hall where the Burmese gathered, many after having waited hours in line, a young man in the back led a rhythmic chant in his native language.

“Mother Suu,” he cried.

“Long live,” the crowd shouted back.

The audiences heard appeals from Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi to uphold democratic virtues. But hers was an idealism wrapped in obligation and braced with pragmatism.

“‘Duty,' I think, is considered a very boring word by some young people,” she said, “but actually it is not.” You cannot take for granted the tools of liberty, like voting in free elections, she admonished students: “You must use your democratic rights. Otherwise, they'll fade away.”

She found scant value in dissent for its own sake - “I don't believe in professional dissidents. I think it's just a phase, like adolescence” - and she spoke of an absol ute need to “balance rights with responsibilities.”

Those words rang of themes in an essay, “Freedom From Fear,” that she wrote in 1991. An excerpt was read by the actress Anjelica Huston. It spoke of free people, how they are the ones, even under oppression, who keep striving to “make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and to uphold the disciplines which maintain a free society.” The essay put it this way:

“Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying.”