That Aung San Suu Kyi has expressed a desire to “cooperate” with the Burmese generals should not be viewed as surprising. Amitav Ghosh’s 1996 New Yorker piece “At Large in Burma” (collected in a book I reviewed here) remains one of the best, and rarest, in-depth glimpses of Suu Kyi’s mind at work. Ghosh interviewed her shortly after Burma had been warmly welcomed into the fold of ASEAN. He was eager to ask about it, and initially taken aback by her reply:
She dismissed my question. It was only normal that the association should welcome a new member.
[…]
No, she said, really. There was nothing unusual about it.
I persisted. At a time when many nations were talking about taking actions against Burma, the Southeast Asian leaders spoke about a policy of constructive engagement, which seemed like an endorsement of the regime.
Again I was dismissed. Picking her words carefully, Suu Kyi said, “I don’t quite understand why one talks about constructive engagement as being such a problem. Each government has its own policy, and we accept that this is the policy of the ASEAN nations…. Just because [these governments] have decided on a policy of constructive engagement, there is no need for us to think of them as our enemies. I do not think it’s a case of us and them.”
I was witnessing, I realized, Suu Kyi the tactician. She was choosing her words with such care because she wanted to ensure that she did not alienate the leaders of nations who might otherwise think of her as a threat.
Suu Kyi is a whip-smart pragmatist, not an all-or-nothing revolutionary, and far from being bent on a course of “confrontation and utter devastation,” as the mass-murdering regime argues, she has labored to give the generals a graceful way out at every stage. Of course, 1996 was during a break from her long house arrest. The regime had given her an inch, and she was giving back. Her arguments today may not be exactly the same. But apparently her temperament is.
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