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A cheer for Myanmar's lady in
waiting
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - Though she appears destined to
mark her 60th birthday as a prisoner of Myanmar's
military regime, jailed opposition leader Aung San
Suu Kyi will not be forgotten by the country's
diaspora and her legions of sympathizers across
the world.
From Scotland to Thailand and
Texas to Tokyo, plans are afoot to highlight her
courage as a champion of democracy on her
birthday, June 19.
The messages appearing
on the web pages of one Myanmar pro-democracy
group - the Washington DC-based US Campaign for
Burma, or USCB (Myanmar was formerly known as
Burma) - reflect the moral high ground Suu Kyi
enjoys on the world's political stage. After all,
not only is she a Nobel Peace laureate, but she is
the only one among the other winners of the global
peace prize who is a prisoner. Her plight has
prompted South Africa's Bishop Desmond Tutu,
another Nobel Peace laureate, to declare on the
USCB website that "as long as she remains under
arrest, none of us is truly free".
Other
supporters plan to raise a cry for her freedom by
staging protests outside Myanmar's embassies in
capitals across three continents. These cities
including Tokyo, Seoul, New Delhi, London and
Washington DC.
"This outpouring of support
will not be easy for the military regime to
sidestep," Debbie Stothard of the Alternative
Association of Southeast Asian Nations Network on
Myanmar, a regional human-rights lobby, told Inter
Press Service. "Despite her isolation, she still
commands immense support and solidarity."
Over the years, Suu Kyi's birthday has
become a "powerful focal point" used by
human-rights groups and critics of Myanmar's
military junta to highlight Suu Kyi's
ill-treatment and the ongoing plight of many
political prisoners in Myanmar, said Stothard.
Currently, there are close to 1,300
political prisoners in Myanmar's jails, including
parliamentarians, writers, Buddhist monks and
pro-democracy activists. Win Tin, a 75-year-old
journalist, has been in prison for 16 years.
Such victimization followed the harsh
crackdown on a democracy uprising in Myanmar in
September 1988. The results of a parliamentary
election in May 1990, which the National League
for Democracy (NLD), the party Suu Kyi heads, won
by a landslide, were then ignored by the junta.
After that, the military government that had ruled
the Southeast Asian country since a 1962 coup
continued in power with increasing brutality.
The junta's treatment of Suu Kyi has, in
fact, come to symbolize its ironclad rule. Her
latest stretch under house arrest, which began in
May 2003, is the most severe of the nine years and
230 days she has spent as a prisoner of the ruling
generals.
She has had no contact with the
diplomatic community for months, she has been
denied meetings with UN officials and
non-governmental groups and all communication with
other NLD leaders has been cut off. Even Suu Kyi's
personal physician, Dr Tin Myo Win, has been
restricted from meeting her, unlike during the two
previous periods she was under house arrest, from
1989-95 and 2000-02.
"Earlier, her family
doctor was free to visit Aung San Suu Kyi, even
twice a week," NLD member Zin Linn told IPS. "But
now he has to get permission from the government
before he goes, and his visits have become rare,
once a month or even longer."
According to
Zin, himself a political prisoner for seven years
in the 1990s, the doctor is now subject to a level
of checks that was absent before. "They conduct a
body search and go through his medical equipment
before and after he visits Aung San Suu Kyi at
home."
For Myanmar journalists in exile,
there is little mystery behind such treatment.
"This is an attempt by the regime to completely
cut her off and make her politically irrelevant,"
said Aung Zaw, editor of The Irrawaddy, a weekly
news magazine on Myanmar's affairs published in
northern Thailand.
The silence from Suu
Kyi and the world she currently inhabits reflects
how far the junta has gone to isolate her, noted
Aung Zaw. "There is no news, not a word coming out
from her and what she is doing. It was never the
case before."
Yangon's fear of Suu Kyi's
popularity stems from the hundreds of thousands of
people who came to hear her during the political
campaigns she conducted after she was released
from 19 months of house arrest in May 2002.
During her one year in freedom that
followed, she is reported to have visited 135
townships and 12 states and provincial regions in
Myanmar. The crowds she drew during those
gatherings came from Myanmar's many ethnic
communities.
Then in May 2003 the junta
struck: thugs linked to the military regime
attacked Suu Kyi and leading members of her
political party while they were campaigning in a
town north of Yangon. Suu Kyi and senior NLD
leaders were placed under house arrest soon after.
But attempts to silence Suu Kyi have
proven counterproductive, since the level of
support she enjoys within Myanmar has not waned,
said Stothard. Some of these sympathizers, in
fact, have taken a grave political risk to sign a
petition being circulated in Myanmar calling for
Suu Kyi's unconditional release, she revealed.
"To sign this petition is an act of
defiance," Stothard said. "The people are doing so
because she is such a powerful political symbol in
Myanmar. People believe in her."
To date,
close to 300,000 people have signed the petition,
which also calls for the right to freedom of
association for all political and ethnic groups in
Myanmar, said NLD's Zin Linn. "This petition will
be submitted to the regime and the UN."
(Inter Press
Service) |
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