Impossible ask: fighting for the Myanmar presidency

Photo:  Burma pro-democracy leader
 Aung San Suu Kyi sits in the Lower
 House of Parliament in Naypyidaw.
(Reuters: Soe Zeya Tun)
By ABC's Jim Middleton

Aung San Suu Kyi stole the show at the World Economic Forum as she demanded the opportunity to run for president. Trouble is Myanmar's constitution won't let her. Such grace under pressure deserves a more equitable constitution, writes Jim Middleton.

Canberra is the butt of many jokes - a cultural desert and a bunch of suburbs in search of a soul.

Not from me, I will miss its lotus land pleasures to the end of my days.

It is equally simple to laugh at Myanmar's reclusive capital, Naypyidaw, at the end of a tyre-shredding rough concrete highway five hours drive from the commercial centre of Yangon with its dozens of striking, if crumbling, heritage buildings from the days when the British ruled the roost.

So easy to suggest, then, that Naypyidaw makes Canberra look like the centre of the universe, but that would be as cheap as the jibes about Australia's national capital.

Just as the relative dignity of leadership on display in recent days in the Myanmar capital contrasts more than favourably with the antics which pass for politics in Australia at the moment.

And it is not just the behaviour of Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has used a combination of charm and chutzpah, to extricate herself from two decades of house arrest - and worse - to bring herself to the edge of the presidency in just three years.

Because there is grace, too, in the behaviour of president Thein Sein, the former general, who has used the presidency to remove his country from debilitating and impoverishing isolation.

I scored an interview with him at the Presidential Palace, a supersized marble-ised McMansion, chintzed-up with gilt - a Versailles from Sylvania Waters - approached by a totally empty 16-lane (count them) highway, a relic of the days when Myanmar took its lead from Pyongyang.

Six decades of introverted military dictatorship took Myanmar from being the richest nation in Southeast Asia to the poorest with one in four people below the poverty line, the average child getting just four years of schooling and one in 14 children dying by the age of five.

Think of the contrast, then, as one multinational put on an extravagant bash last week with an Illuminati theme, replete with jugglers, stilt walkers, drinks beyond imagination, waiters and chefs all flown in from Singapore.

The setting was a World Economic Forum (WEF) summit which had attracted highflying business types, including chief executive of Coca Cola Muhtar Kent and Martin Sorrell, the global chief of WPP, the world's biggest advertising conglomerate.

Thein Sein used the gathering to defend the lagging pace of the transformation of Myanmar from failed command economy to the free market amid long running ethnic conflict and an upsurge in religious violence.

Once again, though, it was Ms Suu Kyi who stole the show, as she did at the same event in Bangkok last year.

Demonstrating both guile and grace, the opposition leader took the stage in the presence of the other prominent politician who wants to be the next president, speaker Thura Shwe Mann, to make a demand which she knew would have global media impact, thanks to the profile of the WEF.

"I want to run for president and I've been quite frank about it... if I pretended I didn't want to be president I wouldn't be honest."

Take that, Kevin Rudd.

But there was more.

In front of an SRO audience, including many grown men behaving more like Taylor Swift's sub-teen fans, the sexagenarian ice queen put the acid on Thein Sein.

Allow her to run for the top job, she insisted, because only a government led by her could provide the "inclusive development" necessary to boost the country's economy without leaving the poor behind and disgruntled.

Trouble is Myanmar's constitution won't let her.

One of its provisions bans anyone with children who are foreign citizens from the office.

Aung San Suu Kyi has two sons who are British.

Looks like a clause written by Myanmar's old military regime with just one person in mind.

To amend the constitution requires a 75 per cent majority in a parliament where 25 per cent of the seats are still reserved for the military.

It is an impossible ask as things stand, so what is Thein Sein's response to the gauntlet thrown?

"There are three main pillars in our country... that is, the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judicial branch.... So I do not have authority over the parliament," he told me dwarfed by the outsize gold framed couch in which he sat.

He would not publicly pledge to lobby parliament to make the change, even though he acknowledged Ms Suu Kyi's claim on his job.

"If the parliament authorises it and the people agree that she become the president, I do not have a say."

This is an awkward conundrum for both the president and the woman who would be.
Thein Sein is himself a one-time general and has a delicate relationship with his former military colleagues.

On the other hand, Ms Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy had an overwhelming victory in the elections last year which transported her into parliament.

To deny her a shot at the presidency would invite trouble from the people; to allow her to stand would irritate, to say the least, the military hardliners still dogging the president's reform program.

Ms Suu Kyi's WEF performance may well have been designed to reinforce whatever deal she and Thein Sein struck when she was released from house arrest in 2010.

Such grace under pressure deserves a more equitable constitution.

The question is whether Australia's resilient document crafted by the founders of federation deserves the nation's current crop of politicians.

Jim Middleton is the presenter of Newsline on the Australia Network and ABCNews24 and Asia-Pacific Focus on ABC1, Australia Network and ABCNews24. View his full profile here.
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