Prisoners of Politics : Myanmar: Harvard scholar Michael Aris keeps a lonely vigil for his wife, Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, held captive half a world away.

In his tweed sport coat and baggy pants, Michael Aris is an academic straight out of central casting--a man of suede patches and arcane ruminations who prefers being alone. For most of his life he’s been an apolitical sort, a scholar who scorns the hurly-burly of daily news.

But reality crashed in three years ago, drawing Aris into the turmoil of a distant Asian country and separating him from his wife. The rumpled professor of Tibetan and Himalayan studies hasn’t been the same since.

In a bizarre turn of events, Aris’ wife, Aung San Suu Kyi, became one of the world’s most famous political prisoners. She was placed under strict house arrest in Rangoon on July 20, 1989, after rallying national opposition to Myanmar’s corrupt military regime and its flagrant abuse of human rights.

The outspoken activist is approaching her 29th month in captivity and won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her courage. Yet she will not join Aris and their two sons in Oslo next week to accept the award. Cut off from the outside world, she refuses to leave Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, unless democratic reforms are implemented.

“Our world has turned upside down,” says Aris, who is British. “No family should have to live this way. But she’s a political animal and I’m not.”

Suu, whose full name is pronounced Ahn-Sahn-Sue-Chee , had been living in Oxford, where her husband taught for many years. She left their home in 1988 to nurse her ailing mother in Rangoon, but could not remain aloof when political and military unrest suddenly swept the nation of 28 million.

As the daughter of Gen. Aung San, the martyred national hero who liberated the country in 1945, Suu felt a moral obligation to carry on his work for democratic reforms. Aris supports her decision, yet the upheaval has taken a toll.

“I’m not a diplomat,” he says, puffing on a cigarette in his cluttered office at Harvard, where he is a visiting instructor. “I’m simply a human being who misses his wife, trying to make sense of cataclysmic events.”

He’s also struggling with role reversal. Most people envision women as the spouses of political prisoners, waiting for men to come home. As the husband of a hostage, Aris, 45, appreciates the dark humor of his predicament.

“People do point this out,” he says dryly. “And they say, ‘What is the wimp of the husband doing to get her out, hmmm? What about it?’ ”

Despite numerous appeals, Aris is not allowed to speak on the phone with his wife, whom he last saw on Jan. 1, 1990. The two boys--Alexander, 18, and Kim, 13--are in English schools and can’t visit her because their passports from Myanmar have been revoked. Recurring rumors say Suu, 46, has been killed, starved or tortured, and the professor chases down each new story with a sense of dread.

Aris offers details of his family life only haltingly, and tries to steer questions away from his own feelings. But the strain is obvious, even though friends marvel at his steely composure. They also applaud his emergence as a spokesman for his wife. The tall, wavy-haired Englishman recently persuaded Penguin Books to publish “Freedom From Fear,” a collection of Suu’s writings, and the publicity has shattered what remains of his isolation.

“Today, the finger of fear touches everyone in Burma,” he says. “But it’s not for me to say what should be done, or interfere. I’m not Burmese. I’m just a husband, trying to support my wife in the best way I can.”

The conversation is interrupted when a student calls about an upcoming test. Looking momentarily befuddled, Aris gropes for a point he was making.

“I’d be so happy to change places with Suu,” he says, finally remembering. “I’d be delighted. Solitary confinement isn’t a problem for me, as long as I have books. I’d love to be locked up for three to four years.”

Then he turns somber. “Of course, it’s no joke. It’s no picnic. When you’re talking about a place as dark and distant as Burma, you remember that so many people are suffering. Suu has made her commitment to her people, and she’s locked up with them. I support her decision.”

So do human rights activists around the world. Suu has won praise for her refusal to leave Myanmar, as military officials have suggested. Last year, when she was under house arrest, her political party won a smashing victory in national elections. Stung by the results, the army refused to give up power and arrested scores of opposition leaders. Hundreds more are feared dead.

“Suu is one of those rare individuals who symbolize not just the courage of human beings, but the courage of an entire country,” says David Arnott, an official with the Burma Peace Foundation, which is lobbying for her release.

“There’s an almost mystical identity between her and the Burmese people. It’s a powerful relationship that’s hard for the world to ignore.”

Until recently, however, the world put Myanmar’s problems on the back burner. Although the United States and other nations have harshly criticized the country’s leaders for brutally stifling dissent, China and other Asian regimes have been slow to condemn them.

Money is the culprit, says Josef Silverstein, a Rutgers professor who specializes in Burmese history: “You’ve got Thailand making a fortune off the teak forests in Burma. Singpore has been selling military hardware to the Burmese, as have the Chinese. The Malaysians are also doing good business.”

Last week, the United Nations passed a resolution that criticized human rights violations in Myanmar, which was renamed by the country’s military leaders in 1989. It was unusual for the United Nations to act so decisively, and skeptics question the vote’s impact.

This clearly concerns Aris, yet he is careful not to speak harshly about the Myanmar government, avoiding any incendiary comments.

“I admire his (Aris’) restraint more than I can say,” says Professor David Steinberg, a family friend and professor of Korean Studies at Georgetown. “He can’t say anything that could be used to hurt her, and I know he worries very much that the authorities may harm her. So he’s careful.”

More important, Aris is mindful of his status as an outsider. From the day he met her, the professor has respected his wife’s links to her homeland. In a 1971 letter to him, Suu seemed to anticipate that destiny might one day take her home:

“I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them. . . . Sometimes I am beset by fears that circumstances and national considerations might tear us apart just when we are so happy in each other, that separation would be a torment.”

Born in Rangoon in 1945, Suu was 2 years old when her father died. She spent years learning about his battles to free the country from Japanese and British domination. Gen. Aung San was the national equivalent to George Washington, but never lived to see his dreams of independence fulfilled.

Raised by her mother, who served as Burmese ambassador to India and Nepal, Suu studied in Oxford, Japan and India, and worked at the United Nations for three years. She met Aris at an Oxford party in 1966 (“I was swept away by her beauty,” he recalls) and married him six years later.

An accomplished scholar, Suu worked at the ministry of foreign affairs in Bhutan and did research in Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in Japan. However, she devoted much of her energies to raising the family’s two boys, Alexander and Kim, while Aris pursued his own studies.

Fate intervened with Suu’s 1988 trip to Rangoon, when the streets were filled with students protesting 26 years of rule by the junta. The tension increased when dictator Ne Win resigned, paving the way for a new government.

A quiet, unobtrusive woman who meditates daily and plays Bach on the piano, Suu was drawn to the struggle. She spoke out for reforms, even though some opponents criticized her for being out of touch with her homeland.

“People have been saying I know nothing of Burmese politics,” Suu said in a 1988 interview, recalling her father’s assassination by political rivals after World War II. “The trouble is, I know too much.”

Aris visited his wife periodically, and was standing behind Suu when she made her maiden speech to a huge gathering in Rangoon. Soon, she led a national movement and seemed on her way to a bright political future.

But the army cracked down, killing or arresting thousands of protesters. Undaunted, Suu continued to speak out. In one incident, she walked toward soldiers who aimed rifles at her, shaming them into lowering their guns.

Angered by her independence, army leaders retaliated with an ugly public relations campaign. They circulated posters that attacked Suu for marrying an Englishman. Other posters accused her and Aris of engaging in unnatural sex.

Today, Myanmar officials brand Suu as a subversive and have made it a crime to speak publicly about her achievements. Steinberg quotes U.S. State Department sources who say that 40 to 50 people were arrested last month in Rangoon, simply for expressing pride in Suu’s Nobel Prize.

Will the Burmese problem be resolved soon? Aris believes it must, because people can’t live in a state of constant crisis. But it is only a hope.

“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of her constantly,” he says. “I wonder, is she eating enough? Is she well? How is she holding up?”

The professor looks pensive, then his mood shifts. Suu would not want people feeling sorry for her when others in her country are suffering so much more, he insists. Nor would she want a cult of personality to develop around her.

“It’s hard separating the personal from the political,” Aris concludes. “Very hard indeed.”

In “Freedom From Fear,” Ann Slater, an English family friend, writes movingly about Suu’s years at Oxford. She ends with this thought:

“Michael is at Harvard, Alexander in London, Kim at boarding school. Suu is under house arrest. Every evening, as I put my car in the garage behind her house, I think of her, and one line of Yeats comes to mind:

How many loved your moments of glad grace

And loved your beauty with love false and true

But one man loved the Pilgrim soul in you.