“Does Suu Kyi look like her father?” asked Dagon Tayar, one of Burma's most famous poets and writers, who has lost his eyesight.
“The father and the daughter share the same mentality and intelligence, but Suu Kyi has better looks than her father's,” replied the late Ludu Daw Amar, one of Burma's most famous writers and activists.
The conversation took place some years ago in a gathering where Suu Kyi paid her respects to aging friends of her father.
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| Father and the daughter |
“Gen. Aung San is a statesman, and he knew that it was important to achieve power to bring changes to the country, while his daughter Suu Kyi has shown more compassion towards her adversaries,” said 92-year-old Dagon Tayar, a colleague of independence hero Aung San, speaking to The Irrawaddy on Saturday.
Aung San led the successful battle against British colonial rule in 1947. He was assassinated that same year at age 32, when Suu Kyi was two. Sixty-three years later, Burma is under the brutal rule of its own people, and, in the fight for what she calls Burma's second struggle for national independence, Suu Kyi, now 65, is locked up by the leaders of the Burmese army which was founded by Aung San.
Thakhin Chan Tun, 90, an independence fighter who met Aung San at least twice in 1946, said, “In terms of leadership, Aung San was regarded as a national savior successfully working towards Burma's independence. Whereas we view Suu Kyi as a democracy leader who made all sorts of sacrifices for so many years.
“Both of them are equally intelligent and courageous,” he said.
Though Aung San remains widely known in Burma as its independence hero, a speech he made in 1945 showed that he shared similar democratic aspirations which his daughter is fighting for.
“If this kind of ideology [facism], totalitarianism, racism and militarism grows like in Japan, our people will not be able to achieve freedom,” Aung San said in a meeting of the country's national leaders. “Therefore, we must try to make sure that democracy alone thrives in our country. And based on democracy, we must try to build a free Burma.”
Frustrated with the country's political and economic woes, the Burmese people often lament that if Aung San did not face an untimely death, Burma would have been different.
Considering Aung San's successful leadership of an armed struggle against the country's colonizers and Suu Kyi's as-yet-unsuccessful nonviolent struggle for democracy, some Burmese paint Aung San as a more realististic leader than his daugther.
“Aung San cooperated with facist Japan while Daw Suu gets stuck in pushing out the regime leaders,” said a Burmese writer who asked to speak anonymously.
However, Thakhin Chan Tun said that there were no alternatives for Aung San except the use of arms against the British. Later, Aung San persistently chose dialogue with the British government to work out the country's independence.
Although Aung San's dialogues with the British government eventually resulted in the fruition of Burma's independence, Suu Kyi calls for dialogue with the regime has been ignored.
Win Tin, one of the outspoken leaders of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party (NLD), who met her father at age 13, when he unsuccessfully requested to let him join the independence struggle, said, “Gen. Aung San and Daw Suu share the same leadership qualities, I think.”
“Both have their own convictions and determinations. Both made astounding sacrifices,” Win Tin said. “Even though I may have disagreements with Daw Suu on some points, I feel compelled to follow her advice. That's her leadership skill which she shares with her father.”
A young political dissident and a supporter of Suu Kyi in Rangoon said that her persistent focus on nonviolence is designed not to repeat the vicious cycle in which Burma has been caught up and to prove that to resort to violence is not the way to justice.
“The dominant fact of Aung San's history is Burma's national independence which was the reality under the circumstances of those days.
