Advocate in Myanmar Hopes to Seek Presidency
By THOMAS FULLER
Speaking to an audience of foreign business
executives, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was explicit and unequivocal about her
political ambitions.
Since her election to Parliament last year, the winner of the 1991 Nobel
Peace Prize and the leader of Myanmar’s opposition has alternately
dodged the issue, parried it with rhetorical questions of her own and
more recently answered with what sounded like a qualified yes.
But on Thursday, speaking to an audience of foreign business executives,
she was explicit and unequivocal about her political ambitions.
“I want to run for president,” she told a room packed with executives at
a meeting hosted by the World Economic Forum here. “If I pretended that
I didn’t want to be president I wouldn’t be honest. And I would rather
be honest with my people than otherwise.”
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was jailed by the military for the better part of
two decades, and her ascension to the presidency would be a kind of
Mandela moment for this impoverished and formerly hermetic country that
is now opening to the world.
Unlike previous occasions when she was asked about the presidency —
including during recent trips to the United States and Japan — Ms. Aung
San Suu Kyi also laid out her intentions in the Burmese language on
Thursday. Burmese journalists said this was a first.
“It’s natural that a leader of a political party says he or she is ready
to lead the country and the government,” she said in Burmese.
She also did not hesitate to answer the question in the presence of the
man analysts presume would be her rival for the office, Thura Shwe Mann,
the speaker of the lower house of Parliament.
By the end of the day, after journalists had lobbed a number of
follow-up questions at her, she said she was wary of discussing the
subject further.
“I’m getting a little bit tired of this presidency business,” she said.
Even before her comments on Thursday there was little doubt among
political analysts in Myanmar that she aspired to the presidency in
elections that are scheduled for 2015. In recent months she has
surprised some of her followers by wooing
the country’s powerful military, her former jailers, whose support she
needs to change the Constitution. (Under current rules, her marriage to a
foreigner — her husband was English — disqualifies her from the
presidency.)
The 2015 elections threaten the dominance of the party formed by former
military officers that currently holds the majority of seats in
Parliament.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi commands allegiance verging on idolization among
her ethnic group, the Burman, who make up about two-thirds of Myanmar’s
population of 55 million.
But over the past year she has been accused by ethnic minorities in the
country and by foreign human rights organizations of playing politics
and pandering to the Buddhist majority. She has been criticized for her
oblique and restrained reaction to the repeated eruptions of violence
against Muslims that have killed more than 200 people and displaced well
over 100,000. The violence has been led by Buddhist mobs.
On Thursday, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi did not dispute that she had been
muted in reacting to the violence. Asked about the killings in western
Myanmar, she said she was afraid of stoking the violence and giving
fodder to the “more extremist elements in these communities.”
“I do not want to aggravate the situation by saying that one community
is wrong or the other community is wrong,” she said. “If they have not
enjoyed the sympathy of politicians or influential groups then it makes
them more extremist.”
She said she was seeking to avoid “a vicious cycle of people getting
more and more aggressive and more and more extremist.”
As a measure of the distance that the country has traveled since Ms.
Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in 2010, one of the
country’s most powerful ministers, U Soe Thane, shared the stage with
her in a debate, and referred to her as “my respectable elder sister.”
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