What kind of regime refuses to let a dying man visit his wife?

One of the most difficult things for the leader of a pro-democracy struggle is the pain of loved ones

SO THINK about this for an impossible choice. You are the leader of a movement for freedom that is harassed and attacked at every turn by a despotic military regime. Millions of people look up to you as the symbol of their struggle. You have endured years of house arrest, and seen your best friends imprisoned and tortured, your people murdered and driven from their homes. And as I say, you are the one figure who remains capable of giving your people hope.

The military regime knows that if there were a democratic election in the morning, you would be president of the country. The reason they know it is that elections have already been held in which you won an overwhelming victory. The problem is that they refused to accept the result. Their attempts to destroy your spirit take many forms. There has been the aforementioned house arrest and persecution of your allies. But there is also something more insidious: a campaign against your family that is designed to make your personal life a torment. They refuse to allow your husband or your two sons to enter the country and visit you. In fact they have gone so far as to strip your sons of the citizenship that is their birthright.

And then you learn that your husband, the man who has raised the boys while you have been under house arrest, is dying from cancer. He is in England and you are in Burma. You know that the Burmese authorities want to deport you, would do anything to get you out of the country. And so they refuse your dying husband permission to come and visit you, insisting that you leave and visit him instead. They say they are concerned for his health and fear he would not survive the journey. Words such as "irresponsible" are used. Quite correctly you surmise that the generals want you gone and are willing to use the tragedy of your husband's poor health to achieve their aim. And if you do leave, you leave behind the millions who are suffering, those for whom you are the only hope.

But your husband, as quiet and gentle and decent a man as was ever born, is dying. He longs to see you and you long to see him, and that is the loneliest, most impossible dilemma to confront anybody.

I know Aung San Suu Kyi well enough to know what pain she must be feeling. Of all the world leaders I have met I can think of no other who is more visibly humane or more deeply touched by compassion for the suffering of others. Her own privations she endures with stoicism and the strength of her Buddhist faith. But it is the fate of those who suffer because they have followed her dream of freedom, or who have aligned themselves with her, that most concerns Aung San Suu Kyi.

And Michael Aris, her husband and the father of her sons Kim and Alexander, has been badly persecuted. As he would doubtless affirm himself, the choice was one he made willingly and with eyes wide open. From the very outset Suu made it clear that the freedom of her country and people was the foremost goal of her life.

Those who know Michael will be aware of just how deeply he himself is committed to the Burmese struggle. I know it myself from numerous conversations; when I last saw him, at a dinner party more than a year ago, he was full of plans and ideas. But he is a shy and private man who has always refused to parade himself in public, concentrating instead on quiet campaigning and the essential work of raising the couple's sons.

That has been the true measure of his love for Suu and his commitment to the Burmese struggle.

They met and married while she was a student at Oxford, moving first to the Kingdom of Bhutan and then travelling back to Oxford where Suu gave birth to Alexander and Kim. And then in the late Eighties came the moment when the family's life was changed for ever. Suu's mother became seriously ill and Suu returned to Burma to act as her nurse.

Her return coincided with the rise of a mass democracy movement, and she emerged from her mother's home in Rangoon to lead it. As a lifelong evangelist for democracy, and the daughter of the country's founding father, Aung San Suu Kyi was the natural choice to lead the movement. There followed a brutal crack-down in which thousands were killed, then an election which her League for Democracy won - and then the military rejection of the result. The rest is a history of repression that has lasted until this day.

I have not seen Aung San Suu Kyi in more than three years. (The last time I applied for a visa the Burmese authorities made it clear that I was not welcome.) When we did meet she spoke about Michael and the boys, and the pain of separation. But it is not a topic she likes to dwell on; she simply described the separation as "difficult" and reminded me that thousands of Burmese families were going through similar pain.

We spoke a lot about Nelson Mandela and she agreed with his comment that one of the most difficult things for the leader of a pro-democracy struggle was the pain suffered by their loved ones.

"I felt exactly the same way about my sons," she told me. "To tell the truth I tried not to think about them too much because that didn't help. I just thought, they've got a good father and they will be all right." Now that the good father is stricken with illness I cannot speculate on what Suu or her children will be feeling. But you and I can imagine what we would feel ourselves in the same situation. We can only pray to high heaven that we never find ourselves in that sad place.

But we are also free to ask ourselves what kind of regime would refuse a dying man permission to visit his wife. Think of the meanness of spirit that that implies. In fact, I understate this: think of the cruelty and malice it takes. Now, if we were talking about someone who had sworn to bring down the military by a violent revolution in which the generals would perish, you could perhaps see a point to their behaviour. But we are talking about a woman who preaches peace and really means it. No half- truths, no evasions, no hidden agendas. Agree to democracy, she says, and there will be no recriminations and no witch hunts. That is the promise, and I believe her. The generals have no idea how lucky they are to have a leader-in-waiting of the calibre of Aung San Suu Kyi.

But they do not see it that way. They see democracy as signing the death warrant to their regime of exclusive power and they cannot believe in a human being who is not governed by greed and the megalomania.

If they continue to refuse a visa, then the world is entitled to make its own judgement. The world, and particularly Burma's Asian neighbours, will be entitled to say that there is no way back for these people, that they must be shunned and excluded and sanctioned.

It need not be so. As the former British ambassador to Burma, Martin Moreland, put it this week: "By making a gesture of compassion they could in fact help to bridge the gap between themselves and the pro-democracy movement."

And so the choice is not one for Aung San Suu Kyi herself to make. She must not be asked to choose between her right to remain in Burma at the head of her people's struggle and her right as a wife to be with her husband in his hour of need. It is the generals who must now make the only decent choice there is: give Michael Aris a visa and do it now.

The writer is a special correspondent for the BBC