I don’t even know where to begin.   Does this story start in 1988 when the beautiful daughter of Burma’s first leader of independence, Aung San, was catapulted into the frontline?  Is it about her Nobel prize for peace?  Is it about the suffering she must be enduring now in prison?  Or how she must have suffered when she knew she wouldn’t see her husband Michael Aris again, even though he was dying?  

I’ve been fascinated by Burma ever since I was small and my mother would tell us stories about her childhood there.  About how she rode to market in a bullock cart with her grandfather.  Or adored her own mother, whose hair was decorated with jasmine flowers, her neck adorned with jade and rubies,  until she was sent away to school in the hills under the tutelage of fierce Italian nuns,  her Irish father believing she was better off with a European education.  She converted from her mother’s Buddhism (and probably Animism)  to Catholicism when she found it made the beatings stop. 

Like many post-war immigrants, she went through her teenage years aware that she was different in every way, having taken a ship from Rangoon to Dublin to live with her sister Patricia, and her grandmother. Both her parents had died in the war, previously having separated.  My mother lost touch with her remaining Burmese family, and became deeply unhappy and homesick.  She felt guilty for not being able to make a success of her new home in Ireland. 

My mother’s story became a published autobiography years later, when after all our questions and confusion she thought she should finally write her story down.  She had started working as a secretary, a job that didn’t give her much satisfaction, and would come back in the evenings to the tiny flat she shared with my father in Battersea and sit at a small desk typing away.  

She kept notebooks, and when her memory failed her, (she left Burma when she was about 13)  she’d research further by reading books about Burma and taking Burmese lessons at SOAS to try to remember some of the language she’d forgotten.  Her book, A World Overturned, is still available via Amazon, although it’s out of print.  It’s a brilliant story, and I really recommend it  - I know I’m biased, but it had great reviews. 

I was the first one in my family to go back to Burma, about 14 years ago, and it made a deep impression on me, so much so that I have found it hard to go back since.  I stayed with an old school friend of my mother’s, who had married an army Colonel, now retired.  He took us to meet a revered monk, who blessed us all and I’m sure in some way enabled me to find my mother’s family, who we lost touch with.  Meeting them all, I felt incredibly loved, and very fortunate.  My mother later went back, my sister Fiona too, several times,  and Fiona especially has kept in touch with our second cousins who live there. 

Last night I had the chance to attend… wait for it… the very first showing of a film about the recent troubles in Burma at No 10 DOWNING STREET.  It was also the very first use of No 10’s dining room as a cinema! 

Burma VJ is a brilliant but disturbing documentary,  made from footage taken during the monks’ and the people’s protests.  The Danish director, Anders Ostergaard admits he had no idea of what he was undertaking when he set out to make it, and knew very little about Burmese politics.  You see the drama unfolding,  shot after bloody shot, but you also see the risks the cameramen took,  clutching their hidden videocameras in secret, while running about in streets crowded with soldiers and protestors.  These brave people got pictures out to the rest of the world including the footage of the Japanese journalist shot dead by the soldiers, and the shot of the dead monk floating in the river. 

After we saw the film, there was time for questions.  Sarah Brown had introduced us to the film, and then gone on somewhere.  Gordon was meeting in Brussels with the EU trying to engage them in further economic sanctions against the Burmese government.  An official was left to tell us how much Gordon cares about Burma.  Apparently it’s the first thing Gordon asks every morning:  ”What about Burma?”

Gatherings like this one are very important.  In the audience was a very brave Karen woman, Zoya Phan, whose father, the leader of the Karen insurgents was assassinated by the Burmese military last year. Zoya is a gifted speaker and has just published her biography, Little Daughter .  I’d met her before - at a fundraising event and was sad to talk to her about her father’s death.  She told me she’d found the film incredibly moving - it had made her think of the people she had left behind.  About how lucky she was to be able to speak freely.

I asked the official whether he thought the film would have an impact on the Burmese ruling military junta - if they saw it.  My guess is they will see it.  They will be watching to see if they can identify protestors they haven’t yet incarcerated in jail.  Because my view is that here in the west we imagine our dissent has more influence there than it actually does.  Yes, it’s important.  But the junta won’t care about this film.  Britain doesn’t trade much with Burma, so why should it care about what the British government thinks? 

What was interesting about the recent protests, started by the monks, was that they began after the government doubled the price of petrol.  Already very poor, struggling to buy food to eat, this was the final straw.  The junta does listen to the monks - the colonel I had travelled with years ago made a special diversion to pay his respects and make an offering to the revered monk.  But the junta also listens to China because it trades so heavily with it.  The poverty of the people has less to do with the economic sanctions imposed by the West, and more to do with the way the junta has spent the profits from becoming a mini-colony of China’s.

As a result, I’m not sure about sanctions.  I asked someone who trades regularly with Burma recently whether sanctions had affected her business.  ”Not really,” she said. “I just have to make payments via Singapore or Thailand.”

I asked the same question to the official at No.10:  ”In 1988 there were two revolutions - Burma and Tiananmen Square.  Yet we do business with China, and impose sanctions on Burma.”   His reply - in a nutshell - was that you can’t expect to apply one solution to all countries.  He’s right - besides which sanctions clearly worked for South Africa.  Then he added that, it’s easy to be cynical, but if we’re gong to be cynical, we should take into account that Burma is not a votewinner.  His constituents don’t really care about it.  Burma is not in the national interest.  Which I translated as meaning, “Look, we don’t trade with Burma. We trade with China.  That’s why we’re being nice to China.”

Don’t get me wrong - I was thrilled and very honoured to be at No.10.  I think it’s great that Gordon Brown is interested in doing something to help the people there. But in Burma not everyone can be a hero.  It’s a very poor country and if you have children to feed, you can’t just get out onto the streets and fight for the right to vote.  Life for most people in Burma means living WITH the junta, not against the junta.  

In our idealised world, where we do have freedom of speech, and I can express an opinion that goes against the foreign policy of this government, that’s something that’s hard to swallow. 

Aung San Suu Kyi is more than a beautiful woman, a Nobel prize winner, a mother, a widow.  She symbolises the chance for democratic freedom that the Burmese people so nearly had. For me, personally, her image is synomynous with Burma itself.  Seeing her face on a poster has the same effect on me as seeing Nelson Mandela’s. She is both sadness and hope, personified. 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AUNG SAN SUU KYI

Show your support by sparking more debate. Find out more: 

Amnesty International - short film for Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday.  A tribute to her achievements so far, please forward this link to anyone you know who would like to see her freed. http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=343

Prospect Burma - the charity my mum was involved in!  Prospect Burma helps provide an education for young Burmese forced to flee the regime.  I’ve met some of the students, and seen how they’ve managed to forge careers though miles away from their homeland, all thanks to this small but incredibly vital charity.  Please support them! 

Burma Campaign - Informative site. 

Further reading:

 Zoya Phan’s Little Daughter

Thant Myint-U’s The River of Lost Footsteps is a brilliant history of Burma written by academic and grandson of the former Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant. 

Maureen Baird-Murray’s A World Overturned - see above.  My mum’s book!