A cheer for Myanmar's lady in waiting

Marwaan Macan-Markar, Asia Times Online
June 9, 2005

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)