Burma: strange case of Suu Kyi and the night swimmer
The story of the unwanted visitor to the world’s only Nobel laureate-political prisoner makes truly bizarre reading.
It’s so weird, in fact, that it could really only happen in a country whose political manoeuvrings are stage-managed by a military junta.
Burma’s “ministry of truth” appears to have fooled only the generals into thinking that everything’s normal.
John William Yettaw, a 53-year-old US citizen, who’s a Vietnam War veteran, a Mormon and a father of seven (and told Burmese exiles he was writing a book on “faith-based heroism”) is a self-appointed crusader who’s just made life a lot more difficult for Aung San Suu Kyi, who was 13 days short of her house arrest orders expiring.
(See page 10 of this state-backed newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar its biog of John William Yettaw).
In dead of night on 3 May, Mr Yettaw apparently swam a mile across Rangoon’s Inya Lake, towards the back garden of No 54 University Avenue, where the woman who won democratic elections by a landslide back in 1990, has now spent 13 years and 202 days in what the United Nations has declared “detention illegal under international law”.
Mr Yettaw was found to be carrying a black torch, folding pliers, a camera and Burmese and US currency. He swam to the house with plastic containers lashed to his arms as flotation aids and a pair of home-made flippers which he photographed after attaching to his open-toed sandals.
Weirdest of all, it wasn’t the first time he’d done this, it turns out. He’d apparently made a similar visit to the compound in November last year. On that occasion Ms Suu Kyi had informed her doctor (permitted one visit a month, as negotiated by a UN envoy), who told the police… who did nothing.
This time, the night swimmer is way out of his depth.
Tonight, the revered daughter of Burma’s revered independence leader is in Insein Jail, on the outskirts of Rangoon, where many of the country’s 2,120 political prisoners are incarcerated. She, her two female caretakers and her doctor, are expected to be charged with violating state security laws.
Her lawyer says she’s charged under Section 22 of the State Protection Act, which, when she’s tried in a special court inside the jail on Monday next week, could lead to a three-five year sentence and will shut down any prospect of meaningful political dialogue with the generals.
How convenient for the paranoiac, unloved tyrants who, it’s speculated, may even have stage-managed this entire incident to provide a pretext for keeping a woman committed to non-violent Ghandian philosophy in what they euphemistically call “protective custody“. Could Yettaw the crusader actually have been crusading for the General Than Shwe and his cronies?
If that’s the case, as Burmese exiles suspect, this illegitimate and repressive regime is only protecting itself, once again, from reality. The mantra of the military junta is: “Crush all destructive elements obstructing the stability of the state.” As we’ve seen with the monks and pro-democracy protesters, and now, Aung San Suu Kyi (again), the generals will continue to confront any challenge to their rule.
