Aung San Suu Kyi Read Online Free

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    It took him a good while to reach his goal. Sometimes the water got deeper and he had to swim. When he saw the house with its white stone façade stained by damp, he knew that he had made it. He waded the last few yards with the plastic bags hanging loosely by his sides. He was tired and thought to himself that he was making terrible noise. But the darkness was impenetrable and none of the guards in front of the building could see him. Some steps led up to a veranda. On the last occasion when he had been there the house staff had turned him away. He had not been allowed to enter and therefore not been able to deliver his important message. All he had done was to hand over some books about the Mormon Church. He wondered sometimes whether the woman in the house had read them and whether she had understood anything of the message.
    It was as he had assumed: the veranda door was unlocked. He opened it slowly, carefully, and then suddenly he was standing inside the house. In the dark room he could see two women staring at him. They looked astonished, almost shocked.
    The time was five o’clock in the evening on May 4, 2009, and John Yettaw had just realized his dream. He had made his way into Aung San Suu Kyi’s house by Lake Inya in Rangoon.
    It is still unclear what John Yettaw, a fifty-three-year-old Mormon from the state of Missouri, hoped to achieve by his visit to one of the world’s most famous and respected political prisoners. When he clambered out of the waters of Lake Inya that night in May, Aung San Suu Kyi had been under house arrest for fourteen of the last twenty years, and during the past six years she had been almost totally isolated from the outside world. Only a few people had met her: two domestic servants (they were the women who had met John Yettaw at the door of the veranda), her doctor, a contact person in the democratic movement, and, on rare occasions, representatives from the international community.
    It is possible that Yettaw saw himself as the hero in a drama in which Aung San Suu Kyi would regain her freedom. In the two black plastic bags he was carrying among other items two black chadors—Muslim headdresses that cover the body from head to knee. Yettaw seems to have been planning on disguising himself and Aung San Suu Kyi in this garb, and then leaving the house via the main entrance. He does not seem to have reflected on exactly why the guards would accept two Muslim women from nowhere suddenly coming out of the house where Burma’s most well-guarded political prisoner was to be found.
    He was allowed a few hours’ sleep on the floor in the hall, and as soon as darkness had fallen, he was transported away and let go, only to be seized the day after outside a shopping center in central Rangoon. The security services had clearly been keeping a watch on him and had only been waiting for the right moment. Shortly afterward Aung San Suu Kyi and her two domestic servants were also arrested.
    To the military junta, Yettaw’s little swim was like a gift from the gods. Aung San Suu Kyi’s latest house arrest had begun in May 2003 and was due to expire only a few days later. According to Burmese law, the junta would be unable to detain her without first having her sentenced in a court of law. Releasing her was unthinkable. Burma found itself in far too sensitive asituation and the military junta’s entire possession of power was at stake.
    Barely two years earlier, in the autumn of 2007, the demonstrations of the Buddhist monks known collectively as the saffron revolution had focused the eyes of the world on the junta’s violations of power. These huge public protests broke out after the junta had scrapped petrol, gas, and other fuel subsidies, which doubled fuel prices overnight. People suddenly had to invest their entire monthly income in fuel. However, at that point the unrest had been seething just below the surface for several years. Despite the efforts of