At the Ho Rih Hwa Leadership in Asia Public Lecture held at SMU on Sunday, a member of the audience asked Myanmar’s democracy icon and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi if given the military’s tendency to claim power by force, a leopard can change its spots. Ms Suu Kyi said that soldiers should not be in the government, and that Myanmar should change its Constitution to have a professional army instead, as in Britain, which is “well looked after by a civilian government and loved by its people”. She recalled how her father, General Aung San – who led then Burma to independence from British colonial rule – set an example when he resigned from the military to join politics in 1945. Government officials, business leaders, academics and students attended the lecture.