She will lead a small minority in a parliament in which 25 per cent of seats
are reserved for the armed forces.
And though her voice will carry far beyond the parliament, her new role will
force her to address her domestic audiences as well as the international
community. To achieve her democratic aims, she must persuade the
military-led establishment she no longer poses a threat to them.
As the daughter of the nation’s independence hero and first army chief, she
believes she will be able to persuade the army to withdraw from politics and
to embolden Burma’s people to lose their fear and assert their rights.
She has already said she supports a peace and reconciliation process to
address past human rights abuses. “I want to win the military over for
peace and progress,” she said last week.
President Thein Sein’s advisers believe her job has just become much tougher
and that she will now have to prove her worth as a parliamentarian and show
that she can reach out to old enemies and make new alliances.
Sonny Nyunt Thein, the head of the influential Myanmar Egress policy and
training centre, said she will have to overcome the fear her landslide will
generate within the military establishment.
She will also have to develop her NLD from campaigning for democracy into a
broader political party with policies beyond constitutional reform to the
rice bowl concerns of an overwhelmingly poor country, he said.
To achieve her ambitions for Burma she has to be a real leader rather than an
icon, he said.
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