not only by her, but also by the adoration she inspired in many Burmese people, and the admiration with which the overwhelming majority of foreign journalists wrote about her. The uncertainty about where the transition was leading and the role that the NLD could play in it had not changed since my previous visit. Suu Kyi was vague about the plans for the party and its political philosophy, and I interpreted such vagueness as caution. ‘I always say that I am cautiously optimistic. If one is engaged in the kind of work we do, surely we should do it with certain degree of optimism; one has to believe that the goals are not only necessary but also attainable. We believe we can change things, and that’s only possible through negotiation and national reconciliation’, she said. When I asked her to describe what kind of democracy she aspired to build, she replied vaguely that there is democracy ‘when people’s voices are heard’, so I pushed her on the concept’s ideological underpinnings. ‘The universal declaration of human rights’, she replied.
It was difficult to predict at that time, but that situation of uncertainty and legal precariousness did not last for long. A couple of weeks later, in August 2011, Aung San Suu Kyi met Thein Sein; this was the first of several meetings in successive months. The contents of those conversations remain a mystery, as well as the concessions that both sides would be willing to make. But the NLD was allowed to enter the political arena.
In a by-election held in April 2012, the NLD gained almost all of the disputed forty-five seats in parliament, including one for Suu Kyi herself. Western countries had based their policies towards Burma on indications made by Aung San Suu Kyi, or on how she was treated. Such policies had been mostly punitive, including sanctions and embargoes, at least since the late nineties. But the fact that she was now a member of parliament, and her party a legal political force, provided, in the eyes of the so-called ‘international community’, a veneer of legitimacy to the transition designed by the generals. She was even allowed to travel abroad, and foreign dignitaries also visited her and others in Burma during the period.
The main strategy of Suu Kyi over this period was to seek the reconciliation she had mentioned in our interview, and that meant primarily reconciliation between her party and the military. Two years after the beginning of the transition, something happened that would previously have been unthinkable: she attended a military parade on Armed Forces Day in the capital, Naypyidaw, surrounded by the generals of the same army that had kept her captive for almost fifteen years.14 Her rapprochement with the military should not have come as a surprise. In her first major speech, during the heady days of the 1988 uprising, when she entered politics, she had said that she felt a ‘strong attachment for the armed forces’, as ‘not only were they built up by my father, as a child I was cared for by his soldiers’.15 The personal is often political when it comes to ‘the Lady’.
A defining moment for the new Burma, and for Suu Kyi herself, came when she visited Salingyi Township, in Sagaing Division, in 2013. A typical township of the rural areas of central Burma, Salingyi was afflicted by a problem all too common throughout Burma: the eviction of farmers from their lands to make way for mega-projects or big business in the name of economic development. Suu Kyi played a role that would lead to a situation without precedent in the country: people in Salingyi would protest against her – and they would do so spontaneously, without being organized or coerced to do so by the military, as had happened on occasion in the past.
The inhabitants of the dusty villages of Salingyi have been mostly farmers for generations, but life in the township has been dominated in recent years by the gigantic Letpadaung copper mine, the biggest in the country. The mine was opened in 1978, but it was greatly expanded when it began to be operated by the Canadian company Ivanhoe in 1996. In 2010, Ivanhoe yielded to pressures from foreign activists denouncing the human rights violation of the military regime, and withdrew from the project. After that, Wanbao Mining Ltd, a subsidiary of Norinco, a Chinese arms manufacturer, stepped in.16 Since then, the exploitation of the mine is a joint venture of Wanbao and the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd (UMEHL), a vast conglomerate owned and run by the Tatmadaw. None of these deals were made in a transparent manner. Nobody had bothered to consult the local population, and the government had evicted hundreds of farmers from their lands in the mid 1990s using laws from the British colonial era. The situation had become even worse after Wanbao bought the project and continued to develop and expand the mine, evicting more farmers for little or no compensation.
In November 2012, many villagers, led by local Buddhist monks and activists, staged a series of protests against the project. The police repressed the protests with brutality, shooting protestors and even using white phosphorus, burning the skin of many of them. In the new Burma, where the media had freedom to report on such incidents, the brutality provoked a scandal.
Aung San Suu Kyi was now a member of parliament, after her party had won some seats in a by-election in April that year, and was invited by President Thein Sein to head a Commission to investigate the incident and the mine project. She accepted the role. The report issued by the Commission in March 2013 failed to demand accountability for the police brutality or the use of white phosphorus, simply recommended improvements in police training.17 The Commission recognized that the mine was bringing little benefit to local villagers, but it argued for the continued expansion of the project, albeit recommending an increase in the compensation handed to the farmers and more thorough environmental assessments. The argument in defence of the project was that it was in Burma’s national interest to continue operations in the mine, as halting them would discourage foreign investors from doing business in the country.18 An abstract ‘national interest’ seemed to override the concrete interests of the very same individuals who were members of the nation.
After the Commission issued the report, Suu Kyi visited the area to talk with the villagers. She was received by the farmers with a hostility she appeared utterly unprepared to confront. She was heckled and shouted at by villagers who were unwilling to listen to her explanations of why a project that was damaging them so much should continue. At some point she took refuge in her car while angry villagers shouted at her. Looking from the window, she seemed completely puzzled. ‘We had so much hope on her, but her report is like a death sentence’, said a woman, crying. The villagers might have refused to understand an argument based on a ‘national interest’ that seemed to exclude them; or perhaps they understood it only too well – but it was clear that she had not understood their position. She had called for compensation for the farmers, but she appeared unable to grasp that they were fighting for their land, too – for an environment to which they felt deeply attached, and where their lives had a meaning for them. Reportedly, she asked in exasperation: ‘Why do they want the mountain?’19
I visited the area a few months later to witness the impact of the mine for myself. The situation was tense, and during the day the police were ubiquitous in the area. But the farmers were protecting the activists organizing the protests, forming patrols and preventing the security forces from searching for them in their villages at night. The deleterious impact of the mine was visible even on the very skin of some of the people I met. Ma Myint Myint, a fragile forty-two-year-old woman, suffered painful open sores all over her body after taking showers with water polluted with acid. In a country with an abysmal public health system, she was too poor to afford treatment in a private hospital, so she had to endure the pain using only an ointment that barely alleviated it.
The area around the mine included a barren yellow landscape, on which farmers who had previously cultivated the land were now forced to eke out a living extracting and processing low-quality copper in small improvised mines. They were receiving the crumbs of a project that was worth millions of dollars. One of them was Ko Nyo, a forty-eight-year-old man living with his wife and two children. He used to make the equivalent of US$150 a month when he was a farmer, and had also been able to produce some food for his family. He had been evicted from his land a couple of years before, and making copper was providing him with the equivalent of only US$90 per month.
The compensation given to those who received it was completely insufficient, according to the young lawyer acting on behalf of the farmers,
