The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi
by Peter Popham
Rider Books
In 1988 - auspicious for the numerology-obsessed people of Myanmar, as much as for the Chinese - the closed nation appeared to be on the cusp of democracy, and opening up to the world. It was a heady time, akin to Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring in 1968. But as with the Prague Spring, the promised liberalisation that was set to follow Aung San Suu Kyi's election victory was a threat the totalitarian order could not tolerate.
A bloody military crackdown followed, as well as Suu Kyi's house arrest; she would be imprisoned for for most of the intervening years until her most recent release last year. 'The Generals' - the most commonly used term for the ruling junta - have been in control and their flagrant human rights abuses have earned them international opprobrium. Periodic official assurances of 'reform' led to nothing.
Nevertheless, Suu Kyi has remained steadfast in her defiance, and her commitment to a free Myanmar, and is today deservedly revered as an unimpeachable moral voice in Asia. Nobody was greatly surprised when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
To do justice to such an iconic individual in a biography calls for a remarkable writer and Milan-based Peter Popham is the scribe for the job: the foreign correspondent has toured Myanmar 'undercover' several times since 1991.
It is all the more an extraordinary book for the manner in which it was researched. Popham recently said that 'my book on Suu Kyi was different from all these in that for the entire period of research she was incommunicado, under house arrest. I had interviewed her years before [for the British daily, The Independent], but now I had no way of letting her know what I was up to, let alone interviewing her again. When she was finally released one year ago, I went back to Burma intending to tell her about the project, but was expelled before I could do so.'