“The regime wants to silence her,” Zoya said. “They want people in Burma to forget about Aung San Suu Kyi. They want the world to forget. I believe they want to detain her for as long as they can, and if they release her, it will only be briefly.”
Thursday 30 September 2010 6:16 pm Jonathan Rugman
The AFP news agency is quoting unnamed Burmese officials as saying Aung San Suu Kyi will be released when her current term of house arrest expires on 13 November.
Well, we have heard that one before, and though Ms Suu Kyi’s phone line has been cut and her post is intercepted under orders from Burma’s power-crazed Generals, she has heard such promises before too.
Unable to telephone the NobeI Peace Prize winner herself, I rang the Foreign Office in London this afternoon to ask them what they made of the release report. “Take it with a pinch of salt”, somebody said.
Ms Suu Kyi’s lawyers have heard nothing about any release, and even if their client is freed, “freedom” is a relative concept. The terms of her bail order seem bound to gag her from any political activity. If Burma’s junta was serious about freedom and democracy, it could have released her before so-called elections, scheduled for 7 November.
Aung San Suu Kyi has spent most of the last 20 years under arrest. You may remember that her term was extended again last year after an American man, John Yettaw, swam across the lake to her home. Last time it was Mr Yettaw and his offensive flippers. Nobody knows what the next pretext for incarceration will be.
This afternoon I met Zoya Phan, a leading light in the pro-democracy Burma Campaign UK. I’d like to report that she was euphoric at the news of a possible release, but sadly I cannot.
“The regime wants to silence her,” Zoya said. “They want people in Burma to forget about Aung San Suu Kyi. They want the world to forget. I believe they want to detain her for as long as they can, and if they release her, it will only be briefly.”
If Zoya is right, the true barometer of progress in Burma will not be Miss Suu Kyi’s release. Nor will it be November’s elections, which will see military dictatorship continue under another guise, with the Generals taking off their uniforms and forming a so-called civilian government. A quarter of parliamentary seats will be reserved for the army anyway.
So what would be a true barometer of progress? Perhaps the release of almost 2,200 political prisoners we rarely hear anything about, of whom the remarkable Suu Kyi is the voiceless figurehead.
