MYANMAR AGAINST THE WORLD
If there is one person in the world today who badly needs the help of the international community, it is no other than Aung San Suu Kyi.
Who is Aung San Suu Kyi?
Aung San Suu Kyi is a pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma (Myanmar) and a noted prisoner of conscience and advocate of non-violent resistance.
She is a multi- human rights and peace winner having been awarded the Rafto Prize (a human rights award in memory of Norwegian human right activist, Thorolf Rafto) and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought (an award for exceptional individuals who, like Andrei Sakharov, took courage in defending human rights and freedom of expression) in 1990. She also won the much coveted Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In 1992 she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru peace prize by the government of India for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a military regime.
Ms. Suu Kyi’s woes started when the military junta called a general election in 1990 and her party, the NLD, won decisively. Being the NLD’s candidate, she would have assumed the office of Prime Minister. Instead, the results were nullified, and the military refused to hand over power. This resulted in an international outcry, the consequence of which was her being placed under house arrest.
Since then Aung San Suu Kyi has spent 13 of the past 19 years in detention, most of it held nearly incommunicado at her home with the telephone line cut, mail intercepted and visitors restricted.
So she won’t be a pesky thorn to the military leader’s side, Ms. Suu Kyi has always been urged to join her family abroad in the U.K., but she knew that she would not be allowed to return to her beloved homeland.
Seeing a free Burma was her overwhelming desire, thus, she opted to make the painful sacrifice of staying and being separated from her husband and two sons. Her husband died in 1999 without seeing her.
Like the South African leader Nelson Mandela before her, Aung San Suu Kyi, has come to be seen internationally as a symbol of heroic and peaceful resistance in the face of oppression.
For the Burmese people, Aung San Suu Kyi represents their best and perhaps sole hope that one day there will be an end to the country’s military repression.
But, what seemed to be a propitious event for Ms. Suu Kyi, has turned instead into a nightmare.
Two weeks before her latest six-year detention was due to expire on May 27th, she was charged with breaking the terms of her house arrest and faces up to five years in jail after an American intruder sneaked into her lakeside home.
The charges stem from a bizarre incident involving U.S. citizen John William Yettaw, who, according to Burma’s state media, claimed to have swum across Inya Lake in Rangoon and spent two days in Ms. Suu Kyi’s compound earlier this month.
Opposition activists denounced theses charges as a ploy by the junta in the former Burma to keep Ms. Suu Kyi sidelined ahead of elections in 2010.
When will the oppression against a courageous woman, whose fault is simply to see her country and people freed from the yoke of tyranny and be able to exercise freedom under a democratic rule of law, end?
Are Burma’s ruling generals, themselves, derailing their own “roadmap to democracy” program leading up to multi-party elections in 2010?
Is Burma despot’s ire towards one heroic woman a reason enough to show their contempt for the welfare of the rest of the citizens?
Remember at the junta’s appalling response to the Cyclone Nargis victims, when the regime denied aid from humanitarian groups to reach them and over a hundred thousand unnecessary deaths happened because of this willful denial?
Is calling on the Burmese authorities to free Aung San Suu Kyi immediately and unconditionally and releasing condemnatory messages against the brutal regime are all that the international community can do?
Are the other members of the ASEAN group of nations, of which Myanmar is a member, letting this affront to the organization’s integrity pass without any strong rebukes?
Has the U.N lost its clout now?
Looks like economic sanctions are not working.
One suggestion is that “the most important thing that the West can do is to apply more and smarter pressure on the generals to force them to the negotiating table—not with us, but with the legitimate leaders of Burmese people. We can also press Burma’s neighbors—specifically India, Thailand, and China—to end their support for the regime.
Perhaps, if done relentlessly, it will work.
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