Petrified Truth

Aung San Suu Kyi

New reports about the condition of courageous Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi seem to confirm earlier reports that she may be making the ultimate sacrifice for her country and its oppressed people.

She was a legitimate recipient of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. Her plight and her cause deserve a lot more attention from the free world.

In her 15 years as leader of the Burmese people's struggle for democracy and an end to military dictatorship, Aung San Suu Kyi has constantly sacrificed herself.

She has spent a total of almost eight years jailed or under house arrest, she has lived without her children and now grandchildren and, when her husband lay dying of cancer in England several years ago, she chose to stay in Burma - knowing that to go to his side would certainly have meant permanent exile.

Ms Suu Kyi's singular courage and selflessness have been a strand of hope for a despairing nation, and the main reason the world has not forgotten Burma and the thuggery of its junta.

Now the Nobel laureate is said to have embarked on her most desperate, and risky, strategy to break the stalemate over Burma's future and end her latest, three-month imprisonment.

An announcement last weekend by the US State Department, which officials later reiterated was based on "credible reporting" by the American embassy in Rangoon, said Ms Suu Kyi, 58, has been on hunger strike for at least a week. The report has been hotly denied by the regime.

Members of Ms Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy in Burma and exile groups in Thailand said they believed she had begun a hunger strike and they held fears for her safety.

A cryptic message smuggled from a military intelligence camp 40 kilometres outside Rangoon - the latest of several places of detention since Ms Suu Kyi was arrested in late May during a bloody crackdown on the NLD - is believed to have been passed to the US embassy last week.

Officials of the exiled National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma based in Bangkok said a friend who took food, medicine and clothing to Ms Suu Kyi each week had been given the note on Wednesday of last week. Disguised to avoid the attention of the jailers, the note declared, with an asterisk for emphasis: "No need to send me any food at all."

A coalition spokesman, Sann Aung, told the Herald that reliable sources in Rangoon reported Ms Suu Kyi had been taken by ambulance to a hospital in the military cantonment in Rangoon on Tuesday - apparently so the military can more closely monitor her condition.

Without a united international stand, even Ms Suu Kyi's staunchest supporters remain pessimistic about her prospects of forcing change - with or without the desperate weapon of a hunger strike.

"It's a very sad situation. You have two strong camps, both of whom are very stubborn," says Aung Zaw, editor of Irrawaddy, an independent Burmese magazine published in Thailand.

"This is a last resort for her, but if this is the only option left for the Burmese struggle, what hope is there for us?"

via the Sydney Morning Herald

Posted by Alan at September 5, 2003 09:34 PM