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Aung San Suu Kyi, a leaking roof, and the brother who won’t let her fix it

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on February 4, 2010

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Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi lives in this house on University Avenue in Yangon, on the shores of Inya Lake. The military has blocked off University Avenue since 1999, making the house inaccessible to anyone without special permission. Yangon, Myanmar, 1995. Image: tap tap tap /cc

Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

The dispute between Ms Suu Kyi and Aung San Oo, her elder brother and only surviving sibling, dates back to 1988 when their mother, Khin Kyi, living at the white, colonial-style building located in Rangoon’s University Avenue, suffered a stroke. As the health of their mother, the wife of Burma’s independence leader Aung San and a woman who served as Burma’s ambassador to India and Nepal, worsened, Ms Suu Kyi returned to Burma from her home in Oxford to care for her.

Nine months later her mother suffered a second stroke and died in late December, by which time the country’s fledgling democracy movement had already mounted fierce challenges to the government, in which up to 6,000 democracy activists had been killed.

Ms Suu Kyi, who had first encountered the protesting students when they brought wounded comrades for treatment at the hospital where she was caring for her mother, was swept up in the struggle. She began addressing huge crowds, and was quickly acclaimed the legitimate heir to her father as the champion of Burmese freedom.

According to her lawyer, Mr San Oo said that she could continue to live in the family home for as long as she wanted, only stipulating that if she sold it, he would receive half the proceeds. Nothing more was heard of the matter until 2000 when Ms Suu Kyi’s brother, who by this time had taken US citizenship and emigrated to California with his Burmese wife, launched a legal action in the Rangoon High Court for the house to be divided. On that occasion, Ms Suu Kyi’s lawyers were successful and defeated the action but the following year, her brother, who is an an engineer, filed suit again. The matter is still pending. More:

Rapping at the Burmese Junta

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on January 7, 2010

in Burma, People and human rights

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From Asia Sentinel:

The chain-link gate slides open to reveal a group of young shaven-headed Burmese men and two girls sitting outside a house in Mae Sot, a scruffy town on the Thai side of the Thai-Burmese border.

All are members of Generation Wave, an underground group dedicated to overthrowing the repressive military junta that has ruled Burma since 1962. The odds are against them, as they have been against a long series of movements harboring in Mae Sot and Chiang Mai in Thailand. Nonetheless, Generation Wave has a certain amount of panache, attempting to reach Burma’s youth by using rap and hip hop music and graffiti to inspire others to stand up to authority

“We’ve cut our hair Saffron style,” said Aung Min, one of GW’s founders, referring to the failed Saffron Uprising in 2007, in which tens of thousands took to the streets, led by Buddhist monks, only to have at least 135 people and possibly more shot down by the military. “If something happens in Burma we can go in there quickly and mingle with the monks.” More:

Aung San Suu Kyi: 5,000 days in captivity

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on July 5, 2009

in Burma and human rights

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To commemorate Aung San Suu Kyi’s 64th birthday on June 19, The Irrawaddy invited its readers to submit their artwork featuring the Nobel Peace Prize winner. The sketch above is by the artist Ko Khaing.

To commemorate Aung San Suu Kyi’s 64th birthday on June 19, The Irrawaddy invited its readers to submit their artwork featuring the Nobel Peace Prize winner. The sketch above is by the artist Ko Khaing.

Andrew Buncombe in the Independent:

Today, like most days, Aung San Suu Kyi will sit and wait. She will spend the day with the two women she has been detained with since 2003. That she is being held in a “guesthouse” in the grounds of Rangoon’s Insein jail, as opposed to her lakeside house where she has spent the past six years, makes little difference; she has no television, radio or phone. But today is special, and for the most dismal of reasons. It is the 5,000th day of her incarceration.

Ms Suu Kyi is being held at the prison, having been charged with violating the terms of her house arrest after a mysterious American swam to her home and spent the night there. In truth, the only crime committed by the graceful opposition leader was to win an election two decades ago. Even now, the junta is terrified that this slight 64-year-old widow has the power to do something they have never been able to do: lead and unite the people of Burma without the threat of force. That is why she is kept a prisoner, out of sight but never out of mind.

Yesterday, in a move that underlined the regime’s fear about Ms Suu Kyi’s latent power, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was refused permission to speak with her. On a controversial visit to Burma to try to convince Senior General Than Shwe to release more than 2,000 political prisoners and restart dialogue with the opposition, Mr Ban said his request for a meeting with Ms Suu Kyi had been turned down. “I pressed as hard as I could. I had hoped that he would agree to my request, but it is regrettable that he did not,” he told reporters. “I am deeply disappointed that they have missed a very important opportunity.” More:

When she’s 64

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on June 29, 2009

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Thanks to Sanjoy Narayan of the Hindustan Times for this brilliant link to 64 for Aung San Suu Kyi. The website is a place where you can leave words of support for Burma’s imprisoned democracy leader who turned 64 on June 19 this year.

Writes Sanjoy: Already, the website has garnered messages from people from around the globe-politicians, actors and celebrities but also individuals who have pledged their support and demanded the release of Suu Kyi who has been under detention for much of the past 19 years.

You can visit the site to read, hear and watch the hundreds of messages left by people, including luminaries from the world’s power list like actor George Clooney, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Czech leader Vaclav Havel, football star David Beckham, actor Daniel Craig, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President of the Maldives M Nasheed, author Salman Rushdie, actor Julia Roberts, UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron, Madeleine Albright, Steven Spielberg, Orhan Pamuk and several others.

There are tweets from Yoko Ono, a video from Richard Branson plus a blog that’s regularly updated on the website.

To send your own message or to link to the site click here.

Do not forget Burma

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on June 28, 2009

in Burma and human rights

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Laura Bush — yes, former First Lady and wife of poor, reviled Dubya — emerges a champion of an unlikely cause in The Washington Post

For two weeks, the world has been transfixed by images of Iranians taking to the streets to demand the most basic human freedoms and rights. Watching these courageous men and women, I am reminded of a similar scene nearly two years ago in Burma, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks peacefully marched through their nation’s streets. They, too, sought to reclaim basic human dignity for all Burmese citizens, but they were beaten back by that nation’s harsh regime.

Since those brutal days in September 2007, Burma’s suffering has intensified. In the past 21 months, the number of political prisoners incarcerated by the junta has doubled. Within the past 10 days, two Burmese citizens were sentenced to 18 months in prison. Their offense: praying in a Buddhist pagoda for the release of the jailed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. That is only the tip of the regime’s brutality. Inside Burma, more than 3,000 villages have been “forcibly displaced” — a number exceeding the mass relocations in genocide-racked Darfur. The military junta has forced tens of thousands of child soldiers into its army and routinely uses civilians as mine-sweepers and slave laborers. It has closed churches and mosques; it has imprisoned comedians for joking about the government and bloggers for writing about it. Human trafficking, where women and children are snatched and sold, is pervasive. Summary executions pass for justice, while lawyers are arrested for the “crime” of defending the persecuted.

[Pic: Jurablog's photostream under creative commons]

American ‘fool’ gets Suu Kyi into more trouble

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on May 15, 2009

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Burma’s detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been charged with violating the terms of her house arrest after an American man swam across a lake to gain access to her compound. Her trial has been set for May 18.

An AFP report says the 53-year-old American, John William Yettaw, is said to be a Mormon and Vietnam War veteran “with a quixotic world view.” The Nobel laureate campaigner’s chief lawyer said, “he is a fool.”

Detained American Visited Suu Kyi Before?

The opposition newspaper Irrawaddy said the American who swam across the lake to Suu Kyi’s house, may have made another secret visit to her last year. A report in the paper, quoting Burma’s state-run newspapers, says:

“Yettaw swam on the night of May 3 to the lakeside home of the 63-year-old Suu Kyi and left the same way on the night of May 5, before being arrested the next morning. The swimming distance between the house and where he was arrested is about 1 1/4 miles (2 kilometers).

“The reports said the man was found with an empty 1.3-gallon (5-liter) plastic water jug-presumably used as a floatation device-as well as a US passport, a flashlight, pliers, a camera, two $100 bills and some local currency.” Click here to read the full report.

He was on a “spiritual quest,” says his family

The Telegraph, UK, quoting the daughter of the American man who swam across the lake to Suu Kyi’s house, says he was already psychologically scarred by the Vietnam war, and “tipped over the edge by his 17-year old son’s death two years ago.”

“He probably thought he would be in and out and no one would know, because that’s what happened before,” said his wife, Betty Yettaw, referring to a previously unknown visit last summer when Mrs Suu Kyi’s maids turned him away without seeing her. More:

American man swims across lake to Suu Kyi’s house, spends three days there

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on May 7, 2009

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From the Times:

An American man has been arrested in Burma after allegedly spending three nights at the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s detained opposition leader.

John William Yeattaw, 53, was fished out of Yangon’s Inya Lake early on Wednesday after returning from a visit to Ms Suu Kyi’s lakeside home, according to the Myanma Ahlin newspaper. He had confessed to swimming across the lake on Sunday evening and sneaking into her home, the newspaper reported.

Today, more than 20 police entered Ms Suu Kyui’s compound where she has been kept under house arrest for more than 13 of the past 19 years. The compound is tightly guarded and she is not allowed visitors, aside from her doctor.

“He secretly entered the house and stayed there,” the newspaper reported, saying that he swam with an empty 5-litre plastic water jug, presumably to use as a float. More:

Why Gandhi still matters

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on January 30, 2009

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On Mahatma Gandhi’s 61st death anniversary, Ramchandra Guha writes for Mint Lounge

This photograph was taken by Ram Rahman in 2002, during an India Day parade in New York. A man dressed as Gandhi walks down Madison Avenue as others follow him, holding the tricolour in their hands. At Saffronart Gallery, Mumbai, till 15 February

This photograph was taken by Ram Rahman in 2002, during an India Day parade in New York. A man dressed as Gandhi walks down Madison Avenue as others follow him, holding the tricolour in their hands. At Saffronart Gallery, Mumbai, till 15 February

Since independence and Partition, no event has so divided the Indian people as the demolition of a mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya in December 1992. Hindu radicals claimed that the mosque, known as the Babri Masjid, was built on the ruins of a temple, and that the site itself was the birthplace of god Ram. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, bands of volunteers tried to storm the mosque, in the process provoking a series of bloody riots across northern India.

Not such a hero after all

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on November 11, 2008

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Aung San Suu Kyi made the world take notice of Burma’s struggle for democracy. But her failure to react to recent key crises means that many of her followers now question her ability to lead the fight against the military junta. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy in the Guardian:

Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma, is the world’s most famous political prisoner. She has spent the best part of the past 20 years under house arrest, detained by the military dictatorship she opposes. Her current imprisonment began in May 2003, when her convoy was attacked and 70 of her supporters killed by a militia of government-sponsored thugs known darkly as the Masters of Force. She has been confined to her Rangoon home ever since.

Suu Kyi was born into the family that drove Burma’s independence movement: her father was General Aung San, who was murdered by his political rivals in July 1947, shortly after negotiating his country’s independence from Britain. Suu Kyi was pushed into politics in 1988 after thousands of students protesters were gunned down on the streets of Rangoon – when she delivered her inaugural speech at Rangoon’s Shwe Dagon Pagoda on August 26 that year, a crowd of 500,000 came to hear her. A nation held in a headlock by a junta since 1962 fell behind her gutsy message of hope, and she led the NLD to a landslide election victory in May 1990, winning 392 out of 485 seats.

Burma’s bloody trade

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on October 29, 2008

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Rajeshree Sisodia recently entered Burma, where she spoke with workers dependant on the country’s exploitative jade mining industry. Here she reports for newstatesman.com:

Imperial green jade is unique to Burma – and jewellery made from it can sell for millions of dollars on the international market.
But the country’s mining industry is built on suffering: forced and child labour, land confiscation, drug abuse, sexual exploitation and environmental damage – all of which, according to pro-democracy campaigners, have scarred the trade.
More than 20,000 people migrate, or are forced to work for mine companies which are either partly or completely owned by the nation’s military leaders and its business partners.
From mining, to cutting, polishing, trading and selling, the regime’s generals control the gem industry with a vice-like grip. Profits from the lucrative trade filter down only as far as the junta, which spends around US$330million a year on arms – roughly twice the amount it invests in health and education combined. This in a nation ranked among Asia’s poorest; the average person earns less than US$1 a day.

Burma’s Fleeing Masses

Mark Fenn / Far Eastern Economics Review

With his good looks and fashionable clothes, 27-year-old Su could pass for an Asian pop star, or perhaps the small-time kickboxer he used to be back home. In fact, he works illegally as a waiter in a small restaurant in central Bangkok-one of an estimated two million migrants who have left impoverished Burma to seek a better life in Thailand. Fleeing poverty and sometimes brutal oppression at home, they often find themselves living in the shadows, persecuted and exploited in Burma’s wealthier neighbors. Not that Su considers himself a victim. A member of Burma’s Karen ethnic minority, he speaks English in staccato, half-finished sentences punctuated with swear words. He hates the Burmese junta and is a fervent supporter of the struggle for Karen independence. Su admires Burma’s imprisoned democracy icon and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as Che Guevara-and Rambo. In the latest Rambo film, released this year, the hero teams up with Karen rebels to take on the Burmese army. Pirated DVDs of the film, circulated underground, were reportedly a big hit in Burma. “I like the Rambo style,” says Su, smiling.

After Saffron Revolution, all is black in Myanmar

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on September 25, 2008

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Rajeshree Sisodia in The National:

Yangon: In many ways this is a story of failure. Of a government that failed to deliver on long-made promises of freedom and democracy; of a people who stood up not once but twice against repression, and were cut down both times; and of an international community that champions human rights but has so far failed to turn rhetoric into reality.

A year ago, spiralling inflation and growing political repression in Myanmar led tens of thousands of people, including Buddhist monks and nuns, to take to the streets in peaceful protest. The mass demonstrations, known as the Saffron Revolution for the colour of the monks’ robes, were brutally suppressed.

On Sept 27 2007, soldiers and riot police, armed with assault rifles, tanks and smoke bombs, opened fire, killing about 50 people. Thousands were rounded up and detained.

It was as if a mirror had been held up to reflect the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations, or 88 Generation uprising, when thousands of students protested to demand multiparty democratic elections. The dissent two decades ago was similarly smothered; thousands paid with their lives.

Locked in Burma

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on September 4, 2008

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After 13 years of detention, Aung San Suu Kyi perfectly represents the suffering of the Burmese people, effectively trapped in the world’s biggest prison. Pressure is building on the UN to act. Simon Tisdall in The Guardian:

It is hard to imagine what life must be like for Aung San Suu Kyi, locked up inside her Rangoon home, separated from her children, denied visitors, her phone line cut, her mail intercepted. Burma’s opposition leader, whose 1990 election victory was annulled by the military, is now in her 13th year of detention. She has been held continually since 2003. In June she spent her 63rd birthday alone.

Unconfirmed reports suggest Suu Kyi, who has suffered health problems in the past, is unwell again. Her lawyer, Kyi Win, who was allowed to see her last month, quoted her as saying: “I am tired and I need some rest.” Following her refusal of a food delivery, there is also speculation the pro-democracy campaigner and Nobel peace prizewinner has begun a hunger strike. Her lawyer said her weight had fallen below the 7st she was known to weigh in 2003.

While uncertainty surrounds Suu Kyi’s plight, there is nothing at all ambiguous about Burma’s political, social and human rights situation one year after the junta brutally suppressed the Buddhist-monk-led “saffron revolution”.

The world’s 100 most powerful women

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on August 29, 2008

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Forbes’ list has five names from this part of the world:

#3 Indra K. Nooyi, Chairman, chief executive, PepsiCo, U.S.: Nooyi continues to grow PepsiCo, the $39 billion food and beverage giant, through new product offerings and acquisitions

#21 Sonia Gandhi, President, Indian National Congress Party, India:Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of India’s most powerful political party, the Indian National Congress Party, has by now assumed the role of elder stateswoman.

#38 Aung San Suu Kyi, Deposed prime minister; Nobel peace laureate, Myanmar: Since the democratic elections in 1990, when she was elected prime minister, Suu Kyi, 63, has been kept from power and is now in the sixth consecutive year of house arrest.

#59 Mayawati Kumari, Chief minister, Uttar Pradesh, India: In the running to be prime minister, from her perch as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

#99 Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairman and managing director, Biocon, India: Trained in Australia as a brewer, she founded Biocon in 1978 to make industrial enzymes with a small Irish company, Biocon Biochemicals.

Click here for the complete Forbes list and the profiles:

A new generation of activists arises in Burma

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on July 21, 2008

in Books and Burma

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Network strengthened by Junta’s crackdown and post-cyclone bungling. From The Washington Post:

Rangoon: They operate in the shadows, slipping by moonlight from safe house to safe house, changing their cellphones to hide their tracks and meeting under cover of monasteries or clinics to plot changes that have eluded their country for 46 years.

If one gets arrested, another steps forward.

“I feel like the last man standing. All the responsibility is on my shoulders. . . . There is no turning back. If I turn back, I betray all my comrades,” said a Burmese activist who heads a leading dissident group, the 88 Generation Students, named for a failed uprising in 1988. He took command after the arrest last August of its five most prominent leaders.

The road to ‘Animal Farm,’ through Burma

In The Washington Post, a review of Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin:

Fresh out of Eton, George Orwell spent five years in Burma as a policeman in the colonial service. He left in 1927, fed up with “the dirty work of Empire,” but the country never quite left him. It provided the material for the novel “Burmese Days” and one of his most famous essays, “Shooting an Elephant.” In his final days, as he lay dying of tuberculosis, he sketched out a novella, “A Smoking Room Story,” about a young Englishman changed forever by his experiences in colonial Burma.

Trying to put a name to the face of evil

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on May 3, 2008

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Can the right celebrities raise concern for Myanmar? Alex Williams in The New York Times:

“Hitler is alive in Burma” reads the words scrawled on a cardboard sign, held aloft by a sweet-faced Ellen Page, the “Juno” star, in a 90-second human-rights public awareness message that began showing on video-sharing Web sites last week.

The spot is one of 30 produced for U.S. Campaign for Burma, starring celebrities like Will Ferrell and Jennifer Aniston. They will be distributed on Fanista.com, a social-networking and entertainment retail site, then passed along to sites like YouTube and Google Video every day for the next month. The goal of the campaign is to thrust the cause of human rights in Burma – now known as Myanmar – into the orbit of A-list activist causes, along with Tibet and Darfur, and to encourage international pressure on a government that activists say is one of the world’s most oppressive.

[Picture: Ellen Page of “Juno” holds a picture of Myanmar’s dictator, Senior Gen. Than Shwe.]

Forgotten Burma

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on May 2, 2008

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As the country prepares to vote in a discredited referendum, Rachel Aspden visits the forgotten Burmese resistance – the eastern ethnic groups promised independence 60 years ago. From New Statesman:

As the sun sinks over the steep jungle hills of the Thailand-Burma border, a saffron-robed monk walks towards his temple’s golden shrine. Across a shallow gully, four grey- uniformed Burmese soldiers watch him through binoculars, their rifles poised. Below them is a huddle of abandoned, burnt-out houses.

“Six years ago, they destroyed the temple and ran the new border straight through the middle,” says the monk. “On the Thai side we are safe for the moment. On the other . . .”

Pra Preecha is a refugee from Shan State in eastern Burma. Last September, when his fellow monks led 50,000 street protesters against the military government in Rangoon, the international media heralded a “saffron revolution”. It seemed that one of the world’s most brutal and insular regimes was about to crumble. But the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) clamped down hard on protesters and sympathisers – “scores, perhaps hundreds, of monks were abducted, tortured and killed”, says Pra Preecha – and the moment for change passed.

In Burma, assassination of a rebel leader

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on February 19, 2008

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In the Wall Street Journal, Aung Zaw, editor of Irrawaddy magazine, a publication based in Thailand that covers Burma, on the murder of Karen National Union leader Mahn Sha.

On Valentine’s Day, two gunmen walked up to a wooden house in this border town and assassinated one of Burma’s most prominent ethnic minority leaders. The killing inflicts a serious blow to Burma’s flagging pro-democracy movement.

Mahn Sha was the leader of the Karen National Union, an armed rebel group fighting for autonomy from Burma’s ruling military junta. He joined the KNU in 1966 after finishing his studies in history at Rangoon University. Over the next few decades, he rose steadily through the ranks, finally serving as General Saw Bo Mya’s personal secretary. At the KNU’s 12th Party Congress in 2000, he was elected secretary-general, the third highest-ranking position in the KNU.

Detours in Burma’s roadmap to democracy

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on February 16, 2008

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The planned constitution, referendum and 2010 elections look to be a grand — if empty — show, writes Daniel Ten Kate in Asia Sentinel

Constitutions, elections and a multi-party democracy are often welcome news among the international community, but the terms mean little coming from Burma’s generals, especially in a new “democratic” process that will likely turn the current junta leader into an all-powerful president.

While the constitution has yet to be completed or made public, exile groups say the “basic principles” that guide it specifically preclude anyone from serving as president who has a spouse, children or spouses of children that are citizens of a foreign country—a rule designed to exclude Aung San Suu Kyi, who was married to a British academic and has two children who live in the United Kingdom.

In a sign of how secretive the constitution-drafting process has been so far, many people both inside and outside Burma were surprised when the junta announced over the weekend its plan to quickly draft a constitution, put it up for a referendum in May and then hold elections in 2010.

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Aung San Suu Kyi: Prepare for the worst

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on January 30, 2008

in Burma and Leaders

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Aung Hla Tun has a report on the detained Myanmar opposition leader in Reuters

Detained Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is frustrated at a lack of talks on political reform with the ruling military junta since last year’s bloody crackdown on dissent, her party said on Wednesday.

After a rare meeting between the Nobel peace laureate and leaders of her National League for Democracy (NLD), spokesman Nyan Win said Suu Kyi held out little hope that unprecedented international pressure on the generals would bear fruit.

“Let’s hope for the best and prepare for the worst,” he quoted her as saying, adding she worried that Wednesday’s 90-minute meeting, and another immediately afterwards with junta liaison minister Aung Kyi, might give rise to “false hope”.

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