A Day to Remember

Growing impatience and dissatisfaction with an aging leadership has led to splits within the party; and the isolation of its natural leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is a further serious challenge to its unity and effectiveness.

Differences within the NLD were present, of course, at the time of the 1990 election, particularly when it came to selecting the candidates. But the countrywide support for the party as a unified force was so massive that the choice of individual candidates was, in the end, immaterial. The voters rallied to the NLD en bloc.

The name on every NLD voter’s lips wasn’t even a candidate: Aung San Suu Kyi had been barred from standing. In handing in her ballot in May, 1990, my grandmother was voting for the party of “Bogyoke’s daughter.” Millions of others felt the same way.

Although now 78, my grandmother retains a crystal-clear memory of that day 15 years ago. “We voted naively, wondering whether power would be handed over,” she muses.

Naive, indeed. Far from handing over power, the regime used the election as an excuse to smash the opposition. Among those democratically elected members of what should have become a free Burmese parliament was the candidate who received my grandmother’s vote: Sein Hla Oo.

We were fellow prisoners in Rangoon’s Insein prison. I’m now free, but he is still a prisoner, aged 68, in Myitkyina, northern Burma, serving the latest sentence in a string of prison terms that already exceeds 10 years.

Me? I still hope my vote went some way to help build a democratic Burma. I certainly don’t want to torture myself with the question: “Was I really lucky to have that vote?”