Hope for Myanmar People
By Sein Win and Jared Genser
October 24 marked 13 years that the world's only imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Myanmar's democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has spent under house arrest in her country.
Stoically battling ill health and relentless in her pursuit of freedom for her people, the lady's unjust imprisonment is a powerful reminder of a brief moment of freedom realized by Myanmar's people and the dream that remains unfulfilled.
While some governments find it convenient to treat the symptoms of this regime's malfeasance ― the terrible humanitarian challenges facing its people ― the root cause of these problems is the fundamental the lack of accountability that comes from a military dictatorship ruling with an iron fist.
Myanmar's recent engagement with the international community in the wake of Cyclone Nargis is yet another skillfully deployed smokescreen by the regime designed to postpone any meaningful discussion of political reform.
Nevertheless, the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and that of other political prisoners in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, remains the only true bellwether by which to measure if Myanmar is serious about political reform.
Aung San Suu Kyi led her National League for Democracy to an overwhelming victory in 1990. The NLD and its allies alone gained 82 percent of the total vote in what was the last free and fair election in Myanmar.
The military, in power since a 1962 coup, refused to recognize the result and annulled the parliament. The National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma is comprised of those elected officials, never allowed to take office, who remain in exile.
Since even before those elections, Aung San Suu Kyi has been in and out of house arrest for the majority of the last 19 years, and non-stop since 2003, following a rally in Depayin, where regime thugs murdered more than 70 democracy activists in an attempt on her life. She escaped with minor injuries.
Her release has been called for from sources as diverse as the current U.S. First Lady Laura Bush, financier and philanthropist George Soros, Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Desmond M. Tutu and Lech Walesa and entertainers Bono and Jim Carrey.
In May last year, some 59 former presidents and prime ministers, including Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Vaclav Havel, George H.W. Bush, and Benazir Bhutto put their names to a letter urging her release.
All recognize democracy in Myanmar will remain a distant dream until Aung San Suu Kyi, along with some 2,000 more political prisoners, is released and an inclusive and time-bound tripartite dialogue between the NLD, ethnic groups, and the junta achieves a restoration of democracy to Myanmar.
This much was confirmed again in the report recently released by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. He noted his frustration with the junta's unwillingness to agree to talks with the Aung San Suu Kyi.
``Now is the time," he says, for the military and the NLD, ``to find ways to talk to each other and work together in the interest of the nation."
The fact one of our generation's bravest and most enduring servants of human rights and justice remains under detention diminishes us all and mocks our notion of a global community.
That all the weight behind the campaign to release her has so far failed to move the junta stands as a victory for oppression and a distinct failure of the international political system.
Yet, the shallow realities ruling the Myanmarese regime expose an intrinsic weakness in its administration. This is emphasized in Aung San Suu Kyi's famous ``Freedom from Fear" speech, delivered in absentia in Strasbourg in 1991 on the occasion of her being awarded the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize.
In her speech, she stated ``Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day … A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom."
She added, ``Fear is not the natural state of civilized man." In Myanmar, as elsewhere, dictatorship is against nature.
As such, in the name of a generation, we call for the immediate release of Aung San Suu Kyi and her fellow political prisoners.
We urge the international community and especially Secretary General Ban and the U.N. Security Council to end one of the most sustained, corrosive, and damaging regimes of our era and to push for the beginning of the end of Myanmar's decades-long oppression.
In doing so, we call for the restoration of democracy to Myanmar and for the natural state of Myanmar, of a peace-loving, tolerant and prosperous society, to once again flourish. All must know it will not occur while Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues remain imprisoned.
Sein Win is chairman of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Myanmar. Jared Genser is president of Freedom Now and counsel to Aung San Suu Kyi.