Happy Birthday Aung San Suu Kyi
Burma’s National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi will be spending her 60th birthday under house arrest, her third year of imprisonment by the country’s ruling military junta. Despite her democratic election as leader of the country back in 1990, the military junta has refused to give up its control of modern day Myanmar or to acknowledge Suu Kyi’s legitimacy as the country’s elected leader. She has spent much of the last 15 years under house arrest and also had several botched attempts on her life.
A great book to help get some insight into Burma’s current troubles - and which also tells the stories and small victories of lots of different people in Burma - is Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories. (link to full review). Larkin’s book combines history with her own recent travels undercover in Burma, and adds a much need personal dimension to how this closed-off country is seen from the outside, including Suu Kyi’s own remarkable and quite terrifying story.
Here’s hoping Aung San Suu Kyi is free by her next birthday, and can begin the huge task of pulling Burma from the mire of the mess its military has created.
More on Aung San Suu Kyi:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia | Open Directory
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Aung San Suu Kyi - the French biography
- In Search Of George Orwell
- The relief of exile
- Post, as in posthumous
- Philip Larkin There hasn�t been much to say latel…
