Friday, June 20, 2008

Aung San Suu Kyi is 63 today ... and has spent the last 18 years under house arrest.


Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (pronounced Daw Aung Sawn Sue Chee) is one of the world’s most renown freedom fighters and advocates of nonviolence, having served as the figurehead for Burma’s struggle for democracy since 1988. Born on June 19th, 1945 to Burma’s independence hero, Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi was educated in Burma, India, and the United Kingdom. Her father was assassinated when she was only two years old.

In 1988, while living in London, she returned to Burma to nurse her dying mother, and was plunged into the country’s nationwide uprising that had just begun. Joining the newly-forming National League for Democracy political party, Suu Kyi gave numerous speeches calling for freedom and democracy. The military regime responded to the uprising with brute force, shooting and otherwise killing up to 10,000 demonstrators — student, women, children, and others — in a mater of months. Unable to maintain its grip on power, the regime was forced to call for a general election in 1990. More...

See also: Burmese prisoners executed during cyclone....

And this: Burma: this regime is good at killing people, not at helping them...

And this: Burma: how the military junta "encourages" voting...

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