The life of the elected (but imprisoned) leader of the unhappy nation of Burma, Ang Sang Suu Kyi, suffered a tremendous blow this month when a middle-aged American, John Yettaw, described as "a well-intentioned but misguided man" swam to her compound from across a lake in Burma. This gave the infamously secretive regime in Burma a perfect excuse to yet again imprison the greatest threat to their grip on power, the woman George Packer of The New Yorker calls "the lady of the lake."
What did she do to deseve this fate? She took pity on the deluded idealist. Writes Packer:
of her house arrest, but apparently she took pity on him after he
begged to be allowed to stay until he was strong enough to swim away
again. Her visitor left the next day, or the day after, depending on
whether the government’s or the opposition’s version
of this strange encounter is correct. He was picked up by the police in
the middle of Inya Lake. And now Suu Kyi has been locked away in
Rangoon’s notorious Insein Prison. The authorities have announced that
they will try her for all kinds of security violations. Her current
six-year house arrest, which was due to end later this month, will
probably be renewed. And John William Yettaw will have given the nasty
Burmese authorities exactly the pretext they needed to keep Suu Kyi cut
off from the world as they prepare for next year’s sham elections.
Was she set up? Or did her tremendous charisma compel the swimmer across the lake?
Based on my family history, it's not exactly either, though closer to the latter. I had an aunt, who sometime after renouncing her family, remaining herself Deborah Fahrend, and taking up with a Lebanese man in Berlin, was kidnapped with him and a child in Beirut, apparently, and briefly made the news pages of The New York Times, back in l980. She, the Lebanese man, and the child were released the next day. Or perhaps they were never abducted at all. No one ever could quite figure it out.
Similarly, I predict with total confidence that no one will ever figure out what was up with the American nutball American Yettaw, because it will never make sense to anyone but him.
Here's my thinking: A lot of people in this world are unhappy, many of them for most of their lives. Some of these unhappy people are driven to inflict their unhappiness on others…as was my aunt.
It's a sign of terminal childishness, sez me, and causes endless endless trouble.
And it's a fate the sad-eyed Aung San Suu Kyi surely deserves less than nearly anyone else in the world.
[pic of the woman known as "The Lady" in Burma from Chris Robinson of Amnesty UK]
Kit Stolz 
Poor John Yettaw! He need not be given all the credit for Ms Suu Kyi’s new misfortunes. Knowing the burmese junta, the whole world can see that, if not Yettaw, it would have certainly been somebody or something else. Only the media can be so naive as to think that they needed a Yettaw to throw her back into prison!
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