57 University Drive by Aaron Forde

57 University Drive

57 UNI SITY D

IVERDR-

REFAC

Aung San Suu Kyi is a fighter, she is a mother and a daughter. She is a very canny diplomat. But to her, most importantly, she is Burmese. Her own homeland has had many centuries of turbulent times. From colonisation by the British, to being decimated by both sides during the entire second World War. The history of her beloved Burma, which is now known as Myanmar, has been destroyed by decades of deep and indemic corruption. Since 1962, when the current Junta took over, there have been many different groups trying their best to campaign for equal rights and a true democracy. Some fought for these rights with guns and some with words. All have failed. Until now.

This book will portray the path that Burma has taken over the last 70 years and Aung San Suu Kyi’s life in tandem. How the country and the woman have woven together as the years have gone by. It will document the acts of the brutal Military regime as well as trying to highlight how the world’s media portrayed the country’s struggles. The title of ‘57 University Drive’ has been taken from her home address which was her mother’s family home. Little did she know when she was growing up in this peaceful and loving environment that this very home would be her jail for 15 years. This is Burma’s story, this is Aung San Suu Kyi’s story. This is 57 University Drive.

Aung San Suu Kyi was the third born of three children of General Bogyoke Aung San and Daw Khin Kyi. She had two older brothers. Her father is well known to all in his country as the person who was responsible for achieving full Independence for Burma in 1948, and so is very much beloved to all in the country. He had a major role in negotiating with the ruling British, and he was able to win the respect of different ethnic groups through his gentle personality.

Her mother, Khin Kyi, had been quite active in women’s political groups before she married Aung San, and the couple often hosted large political gatherings in their home. Even after the birth of their three children, they continued. On July 19th, 1947 Aung San, who was at that stage the P.M. in waiting, along with six others of his shadow cabinet, was brutally and coldly assassinated by members of another political grouping who were opposed to his policies.

1945

Aung San SUu Kyi is born

SSASSI

U Nu assumed the role of senior spokesman in their resumed talks with the British in relation to the future of the country. A big issue was how much assistance Britain would offer after Independence. Sadly though, Aung San never got to see Burma finally achieve its independence, which occured on January 4th 1948. This date is now known as Independence day.

New York Times December 31st 1947

1947

Burma court finds ex-premier guilty; U Saw is sentenced to death as abettor of Aung San and his ministers”

Aung San assassinated

NATION

ဤန္ ဩရ္ဒေရ္ ထတ္ အဉ္ အစ္တိဩန္ ဤ မယ္ ဟvဧ စောမ္မိတ္တေဒ္ အဂဲန္သ္တ္ ထေ ထ္ရေဧ ဉေဝေလ္သ္ ဝိထ္ မ္ယ္ ပရေန္တ္သ္

After the assassination of Aung San, a replacement was required. His place was eventually filled to head up the new shadow government by U Nu, a much older but also a more experienced politician. He was a devout Buddhist and spiritualist. Anyone that spoke of him from those early days reported that he was an extremely fair and reasonable man to deal with.

New York Times March 13th 1952

1951

New Burma Government based on Election

8 First Elections

The first elections in Burma after Independence took place during a period between June 1951 and April 1952. This was due to many minority groups who were out to cause trouble due to them being excluded from the negotiations on the constitution. These groups attacked the civiian envigilators and even the Military security at polling stations all over Burma. This caused fear in people and so they did not vote. The army and regime run party, Anti Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPPL) won 60% of the vote which counted for 147 out of the total of 250 seats that were available. Turnout for the election was extremely low at 20%, as only 1.5 million of the voters out of the 8 million who were eligible to vote participated. As well as being in fear of reprisals at voting stations, the extremely high illiteracy rate also added to the poor turnout.

1952

A R e Y a pL

8 year plan announced

This 8 year plan was set out to encourage regional and industrial development and to help Burma progress from being a third world status country. These ambitious plans, were not very well thought out, and the funds were never in place to be able to implement them in any meaningful way. Unbelievably, just under 40% of all the funding was to come from printing money, which lead on to major inflation issues, only adding to Burma’s economic problems.

ဧဣထေရ္ ဖ္ယ္သိစလ္လ္ယ္, vဧရ္ဗလ္လ္ယ္ အန္ဒ္ မေန္တလ္လ္ယ္ မယ္ ဗေ ဧffအစေဒ္, အန္ဒ္ ဣန္ ဩရ္ဒေရ္ ထတ္ ဤ မယ္ အစ္qဥဣ

New P.M. U Nu, in 1952 promised that every single family in Burma would own a home and a car and would have an income of $175 to $200 per month, at a minimum. In August of that year the P.M. convened the Pyidawtha or ‘The Happy Place’ conference where a further ten proposed elements of the new welfare state project were revealed to an audience who cheered triumphantly at each and every announcement. The Prime Minister revelled in the situation.

M 1956

Second Burma Elections

For two years Burma’s economy really floundered under then Prime Minister U Nu. He was removed forcibly from office in 1958 by an interim military government led by General Ne Win, who had been a loyal supporter of Aung San (Suu Kyi’s father) during the struggles throughout all of the 1940’s. Ne Win released a statement saying that he took over to “restore law and order. He forced many of the minority regions of the country to remain under the jurisdiction of the government. And though he allowed former Prime Minister U Nu to be re-elected in 1960, two years later he staged a coup and solidified his position as Burma’s ruling military dictator. Ne Win would rule with an iron fist during this time as the head of the feared military Junta. At this stage the international community was beginning to voice concerns.

TAKEOVER

Chicago Tribune November 21st 1958

1958

Democracy Takes Another Fall

The AFPFL had an unhindered run in the voting due to the fact that many of the other candidates were intimidated and threatened if they tried to canvas. There were many reports of the military pressurising voters on their way to the polling stations. It was very obvious as to how the citizens were to vote. At that time there were no international monitors to review the proceedings which allowed the government had free reign.

Military take control

On the 27th of April 1956 Burma went to the polls to select their choice of representative to fill 202 of the 250 seats in the Chamber of Deputies (Parliament). Of the other seats there were 36 that were decided automatically before the voting began, simply because there was no opposition candidate entered on the voting lists against the Government party, the Anti Fascist People’s Freedom League or the (AFPFL).

မေရိတ္ ဝ္ဟိဆ္ ဝိလ္လ္ ဗေသ္တောဝ္ ဥပောန္ မေ လောငေvဣတ္ယ္, ဟေအလ္ထ္, fရေဧဒောမ္ fရောမ္ ဒငေရ္သ္ အန္ဒ္ ဩထေရ္သ္ ဤ

ILITARY

M 1962

Burmese Military Coup

Only 2 years after U Nu had taken power as the P.M. of Burma, Ne Win wrested control in a military coup d’etat. He arrested U Nu and others and then established a socialist state run by a State revolutionary council of a few of his Senior military comrades. He then immediately established himself the Chairman elect of the Revolutionary Council, he also would appoint himself as P.M. He abolished the constitution, then set up an totalitarian xenophobic military run government. Even though the coup d’etat had been noted as being “bloodless” by the international media, the son of Shweang Thaik, the first Burmese president, was shot dead, while other officials would simply “disappear” without a trace. Only months later, in July 1962, riots erupted at The University of Rangoon. The council sent troops in to restore order. They fired on protestors, destroying a student union building. Ne Win then went on radio to address the nation and concluded his speech with “I declare that we will fight sword with sword and spear with spear.”

She lived in New York until 1971, where she would spend many of her free evenings and weekends volunteering at hospitals. It was work that she really enjoyed. All of this time she had kept in contact with a good friend from her days at Oxford. His name was Micheal Aris, and he was working on a project in Bhutan. The pair grew close over correspondence and Suu Kyi decided to leave New York and move to Bhutan.

ILITARY New York Times March 3rd 1962

1964

Suu Kyi moves to UK

Junta of 17 Is Governing Burma. General Win Defends Army Coup

COUP

ဟေအလ္ထ္ fရေဧဒောမ္ fရောမ္ ဒငေရ္သ္ အန္ဒ္ ဩထေရ္သ္; ဤ ရဲသေ မ္ယ္ ဇောဣနေဒ္ ဟန္ဒ္သ္ ဣန္ ရေvဧရန္စေ တော ထေ fဩ

Suu Kyi travelled to Oxford in the UK in 1964 where she entered college to study philosophy, economics and politics. She graduated in 1967. In 1969, she traveled to New York and moved in with a family friend Ma Than who was a very popular Burmese singer. She had initially gone there just to pursue graduate work, but these were postponed so she could join the secretariat of the UN, where she worked in the capacity of an assistant secretary.

On the 2nd of December 1968, Ne Win, Chairman of the Military Junta, or The Union Revolutionary Council, established a 33-man ‘Internal Unity Advisory Board’ or the IUAB; known more informally as ‘the thirty-three.’ This board consisted of former politicians, some of whom he had previously jailed, or had put into protective custody years earlier. The Board was assigned with the task of advising the Council for any possible suggestions to try to enhance Buma’s unity and to make suggestions for change.

The former Prime Minister was chosen, U Nu, in a very strange move, as one of the ‘thirty-three’ on the IUAB. In February of the following year, 1969, a report was submitted by to the Council. The report stated that Ne Win should hand power back to U Nu, and the Parliament that was abolished in 1962 should be reconvened. He proposed that Parliament would meet and formally appoint Ne Win as the President. This was not at all appreciated by the council which caused U Nu to flee to neighbouring India as he feared for his life.

New York Times August 12th 1969

1967

Ex Premier Nu Assails Burma Regime as Fascist.

Anti Chinese riots

CHINESE

The rioting contributed to very strained relations between China and Burma for years throughout the 70’s and 80’s despite the tentative but weak normalisation of the mood in 1970. While the roots of these riots lay in Burma’s political situation and tensions with the small Chinese minority groups. In the context of Cold War international relations, Beijing bore all the responsibility, and blame. This was due to its export of its own degrading and racist Cultural Revolution. Trust was a rare commodity at the time.

1969

U Nu Demands Power

RIOTS

fဩရေဟေအဒ္ အန္ဒ္ ဝောရ္သ္ဟိပ္, ဟောနောဥရ္, လော်က္ အတ္, အန္ဒ္ ဟုမ္ဗ္လ္ယ္ ပယ္ ဟောမဂေ တော ထေ ထ္ရေဧ ဌ္ရေဧ ဉေဝ

Though the diplomatic relations were quite calm between Burma and China in the 1960’s, tensions in the Burma capital, Rangoon, heightened when very violent Anti Chinese riots broke out on June the 26th 1967 and ran for days. The riots, which resulted from some Chinese students’ defiance of the Burma government’s strict ban on wearing Mao badges in school, led to the deterioration of the Chinese Burmese relations. China’s own very hard-line policy towards Burma certainly made the situation a lot worse.

Whilst there in Bhutan, Aung San Suu Kyi had grown much closer to Micheal Aris. He was employed as a private tutor by the Royal family of Bhutan and their lives seemed idyllic and perfect there. Their relationship blossomed and so in early March 1971 at the Taktsang temple, Aris proposed to her and she accepted. They returned to England a few months later and eventually were married in Chelsea registry office on the 1st of January 1972 . After the ceremony they enjoyed, with some friends and family, a traditional Buddhist blessing at the home of a friend. A few months later Micheal took up an academic position at Oxford where he worked on his doctrate.

Suu Kyi gave birth to their first child on April the 12th 1973, who they named Alexander. They would then have a second child, another son, who they named Kim. The young family dealt with all the usual issues of a family’s life during this time, like the house finances and childcare. Suu kyi was happy to be a housewife and became a very devoted mother to her two young children. She had told her husband from the beginning of their marriage that if her country ever needed her then she would have to return to Burma to serve the people there. It was definitely something he had always understood may happen, but hoped wouldn’t.

1972

Chicago Tribune December 8th 1974

Suu Kyi marries

26 Year Battle in the hidden war for Burma

Three Veterans of the referendum told Human Rights Watch that, even with all the rigging and the manipulation that had secured the outcome. In the lead up to the vote they had been free to campaign for or against the referendum. The constitution then reformed the central federal system, which established seven mainly ethnic Burman divisions and seven more ethnically distinct “states” to form the Socialist Union of Burma. This system has been in place right up to very recently.

1973

Fixed Referendum

FI XED

ဌ္ရေဧ ဉေဝေလ္သ္, ထေ Bဥဒ္ဓ, ထေ ဎမ္မအန္ဒ္ ထေ ဿ္ဟင္ဟ, ဝိထ္ မ္ယ္ ပရေန္တ္သ္ အန္ဒ္ တေအဆေရ္သ္ ဩန္စေ, တ္ဝိစေ

During 1973 the Council staged a fresh referendum to adopt a new and revised constitution. This was part of the overall plan to gain legitimacy for continued military rule and economic reform. The vote was rigged and voters were manipulated. The voters had to deposit their votes in one of two boxes, marked either “Yes” (white box) and “No” (black black). Vote counts were changed in favour of a “Yes” vote, with results stating that more than 90% had voted in favour of the revised constitution.

New York Times August 18th 1977

1976

International monitoring of Burma required

H Guerilla Warfare

Now that full Military rule was in place under the new constitution, several of the minority groups entered into talks with a view to creating a larger union of like minded and fair people. The NDF was established on May 10th, 1976 at Manerplaw, Kawtoolay by twelve very different Ethnic political parties and organizations, such as the Arakan, Chin, Karen, Karenni, Kachin, Lahu, Mon, Pa-O, Palaung and Shan. The NDF was the first and the most successful union of all of the ethnic groups who were working together to develop a strategy for a Federal Union by toppling the military regime. The aims of the NDF were based around just two main principles. The first was self determination and equal rights for all the ethnic minorities. The second was the establishment of a Federal Union which was based on democratic principles. However, it wasn’t long before the NDF took up arms and a guerilla war against the government forces of the Junta.

The men were constantly being subjected to forced labour in very poor conditions. Typically, a man from the Rohingya tribe would have to give up at least one day a week to work for free on either military or state projects. They would also be required to spend one night on Military sentry duty. They lost a massive amount of their best arable land, which was forcibly confiscated and handed over to Buddhist

အန္ဒ္ ထ္ရေဧ တိမေသ္. အသ္ အ ရေသုလ္ယ္ ဩf ထိသ္ မေရိတောရိဩဥသ္ အစ္တ္ ဩf ပ္ရောသ္တ္ရတိဩန္ မယ္ ဤ ဗေ အတ္ ္

From 1978 the ruling Junta made worse the circumstances on the Rohingya people, which caused thousands to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh as a result of this new and cruel oppression. They were denied full Burmese rights since the ‘Nationality Law’ was enacted duringc1947. They were not allowed to travel without the official permissions, and they were required not to have more than two children.

UMAN 1978

Human Rights Violated

RIGHTS

The only real prison is fear and the only real freedom is freedom

Aung San Suu Kyi

1982

1982 Citizenship Law enacted

ITIZENSHI

IBOHPONE

March 1985, and the military Junta Government, the Burma Socialist Programme Party called a fresh general election to appease the pressure from international and internal groups and individuals. These elections were held from the 6th to the 20th of October of that year. The (BSPP) hailed the elections a success and stated that the turnout was in the vicinity of 90 to 95%. This was, however, strongly denied by international bodies covering the elections. Unsurprisingly the BSPP won all 489 seats in the Assembly. This was because Burma was a single party state at that time and was guaranteed the win. The NDF targeted the Military based at the polling stations and many were killed during this period.

1985

Chicago Tribune July 26th 1985

Corrupt elections

Rebel Blast Derails Train, Kills 61 in Burma

The ‘23’ Citizens, those persons who belonged to one of those main national races, or to those whose ancestors settled in the country prior to1823, which was at the start of British occupation of Arakan State, later, Burma. If this could not be proven then that person could only be classed as an associate citizen and so would have absolutely no rights. Most of the Rohingyan people had no way of proving the status even though they had been in the territory for over five hundred years. The Military leaders knew this and so were able to easily discriminate in what they saw as a fair and “legal Way.’To this day 1.8 million of these Rohingyan people are still ‘Stateless.’ Even though they are from the country.

ဗေ fရေဧဒ္ အတ္ အလ္လ္ တိမေသ္ fရောမ္ ထေ ဝောဧfဥလ္ ရေအလ္မ္သ္, ထေ ထ္ရေဧ ကိန္ဒ္သ္ ဩf စတသ္တ္ရောဖေသ္ , ထေ ဧဣ

On the return of many Rohingyan’s from their exile in Bangladesh in 1981, the Military Junta decided to enact a law that would demote the Rohingyans’ status further. The ‘Burma Citizenship Law’,of 1982 was to distinguish between the three main categories of all citizens. These were laid out as, firstly, full citizenship, associate citizenship, finally followed by the lowly naturalized citizenship. These people were issued with a colour coded card. The so called Citizenship Scrutiny Card was then consistent with their status. These id cards were pink, blue, and green respectively. This was viewed as a breach of human rights on the International stage and so further sanctions were put in place against the regime.

1987

Withdrawl of currency notes

Due to the economy spiralling, the leaders decided to take very drastic action. So on September 5th 1987, under the NE Win lead regime, the heads of the Military Junta signed an order that would dissolve the bills issued by The Bank of the Union of Myanmar, which were 25 Kyats, 35 Kyats, and the 75 Kyats bill. â&#x20AC;&#x192; These were replaced with the new 45 Kyat and 90 Kyats bills. Though there was not a motion made to even exchange the old bills by the regime. The Military owned radio station of Myanmar announced the withdrawal of the bills at 11am that day, which did not give the people much of an opportunity to make arrangements with their paper money. â&#x20AC;&#x192; It was the ordinary people and low grade state employees, along with many private companies that would suffer a catastrophic loss due to this currency abolishment. While all the friends and families of those closely associated with the regime and the Military were notified prior to the event.

On the 26th of August, Suu Kyi, who had only recently returned to Burma to nurse her mother, made a speech at Shwedagon and thus became the public face of the new democracy movement. In the same month she, and others, set up the NLD National League for Democracy) and vowed to oust the ruling Military Junta by using only peaceful means and in a totally democratic manner which was how her hero Gandhi succeeded against the might of the British Empire in India. On September 18th, dozens of soldiers sprayed their automatic machine gun fire into the crowds of protesters. At least 22 were killed in that one single incident. Protestors were rounded ip and carried away in trucks. Human rights groups say 3000 died.

1988

New York Times August 12th 1988

8888 Uprising

Uprising in Burma: The Old Regime Under Siege

ထေ ဧဣဃ္တ္ ကိန္ဒ္ ဩf ဝ္ရောင္ စိရ္စုမ္သ္တန္စေသ္, ထေ fဣvဧ ကိန္ဒ္သ္ ဩf ဧနေမိဧသ္, ထေ fဩဥရ္ ကိန္ဒ္သ္ ဩf မိသ္fဩရ္တ

Burma became a huge pressure cooker of tension due to the poor living conditions and corruption. Then on the 13th of March 1988 the situation escalated. Students protesting outside the Institute of Technology clashed with military personnel. Phone Maw, who was student, was shot dead. His death triggered more and more protests, which gathered pace as the students were joined by the ordinary citizens and the much revered Buddhist monks in an unprecedented move. On August the 8th 1988, known as 8888, hundreds of thousands of people protested all across Burma calling out for democracy. The student protestors wore their symbols of the peacock, monks carried their alms bowls upside down to show their protest.

In 1989, The SLORC changed the name of the country to Myanmar, they also changed the nations flag and National Anthem. One significant political party that emerged at this time was the National League for Democracy, or NLD, lead by Aung San Suu Kyi. She wrote an open letter to the regime demanding a free and independent committee to run fair and democratic elections. Defying the complete ban on all political gatherings, Suu Kyi spoke to large audiences all over the country as secretary-general of this newly formed NLD. Alarmed by her popularity, the SLORC placed her under house arrest in July 1989 at her home at 57 University Drive Yangoon. It was to be the start of a long road.

1989

Suu Kyi under house arrest

Saw Maung, a Military General, on the 18th of September 1988 had “staged” yet another coup which again imposed martial law and transferred control of the entire country to SLORC, the State Law and Order Restoration Council. In the midst of all of the unrest in 1988, a civilian, Dr. An Maung, had been appointed President and he had promised free and fair multi-party elections. Now, in the face of condemnation from the international community after the massacre of 8-8-88, the SLORC allowed new political parties to be formed and called a multi party election. However, they set about hampering the ability of the parties to campaign by simply arresting leaders and restricting their access to all news media.

This was the elected government of Burma in exile, with Aung San Suu Kyi as it’s defacto leader. The regime would not recognise the grouo and came down harder on any of their gatherings. In 1991 Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in abstentia. It was for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights. Because she was under house arrest she was not permitted to travel to Norway to accept the award. Her eldest son, Alexander Aris, accepted the award on her behalf on the 10th of December 1991 in the City Hall Oslo.

Burma arrests key opposition leaders

1991

Suu Kyi wins Nobel Prize

Chicago Tribune September 8th 1990

မိသ္fဩရ္တုနေသ္, ထေ fဣvဧ ကိန္ဒ္သ္ ဩf လောသ္သ္, ထေ နိနေတ္ယ္ သိx ဩရ္ နိနေတ္ယ္ ဧဣဃ္တ္ ကိန္ဒ္သ္ ဩf ဒိသေအသေ

The promised elections were held in May 1990. The NLD, even with Suu Kyi under house arrest and with no access to the media, still won a landslide victory sweeping 80% of the parliamentary seats. Unsurprisingly though, SLORC then refused to transfer power to the NLD, claiming that transfer of power to a civilian government would not be possible until a new constitution was enacted. Later that same year, all of the people who were democratically elected formed the NCGUB, The National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma.

His regime set out to quell all of the internal revolts by many of the country’s various ethnic groups, entering into peace agreements or cease-fires with many of the militias that were fighting for their independence. However he also sought to crush those who would speak out against his policies. Than Shwe regularly attended Myanmar’s annual army parade but was otherwise rarely seen in public. His hard line stance against these minorities brought him a lot of international attention.

1992

Than Shwe takes control.

In mid 1992 Than Shwe replaced Saw Maung as Chairman of the SLORC, making him head of both state and the government at the same time. When he took over power, it was generally believed that he would be more moderate than his predecessors. However, the reforms that many in Burma had hoped for never took place. Shwe consistently would refuse to enter into discussions with the leader of the country’s biggest pro-democracy faction, Suu Kyi, who was still under house arrest.

The military were worried about her popularity growing throughout the country and internationally, so they decided to restrict her movements, both abroad and in Burma. During the first year of her new freedom, she was only permitted to take short trips in and around Rangoon. She continued to serve as the vocal leader of the NLD and their push for democracy. The Junta were now becoming very tense.

U.S. Weighs Reaction to Burmese Crackdown

1995

Suu Kyi released

New York Times October 5th 1996

ဒိသေအသေသ္, အန္ဒ္ ထေ သိxတ္ယ္ တ္ဝော ကိန္ဒ္သ္ ဩf ဝဝ္ရောင္ vဣဧဝ္သ္, အန္ဒ္ qဥဣစ္က္လ္ယ္ အတ္တဲန္ ထေ ပထ္, ထေ fရ

The Military were coming under international pressure to release Suu Kyi from house arrest. Even with heavy sanctions imposed on them she remained under military watch and house arrest until July 1995, when she was released to much fanfare. She appeared at the door of her home at number 57 University Drive wearing a long lavender coloured longyi, which is a traditional sarong in Burma.

The Regime loses patience with the NLD and so the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) decided to exert pressure on the opposition. They forced 2 elected NLD MP’s to resign their seats. On January the 15th, 1998, they publicly announced that U Aung Htoo, who had been elected to Gangaw constituency in 1990, had resigned as an M.P. U Aung Htoo was an education officer in the Gangaw area before joining the NLD in 1988, and had attended the their National Convention.

Another elected member of the NLD, sixty year old U Thein Zan, was forcibly dismissed as an MP in early February. He was elected to the constituency of the Magwe Division in the 1990 elections. In total, 53 of the NLD’s elected representatives were forced to resign from the party. While 68 others were forcibly dismissed as MPs. Another 37 NLD members who were fairly elected in the 1990 elections were arrested and then imprisoned without charges. It was certainly a period of high tension.

ARIS 1998

Regime pressurise opposition

GOODBYE

New York Times March 28th 1999

1999

Burma’s opposition leader’s husband dies; denied last visit

Micheal Aris dies

Suu Kyi then turned down a late government offer of free passage to Great Britain to see Micheal. A government statement then said it remained ‘sympathetic’ to her husband’s visa application, but that they were ‘very concerned’ that he should have to travel so far while he was extremely ill. ‘With this in mind’ an official met with Suu Kyi at her Rangoon home and offered her ‘all possible assistance with her ill husband’s final wish. Regretfully she refused and the discussion then ended with the official being asked to leave her residence immediately.’ The military had put eronious restrictions on travelling in and out of the country which included her barring from political activity. She refused as she feared being refused access back into Burma.

ထေ fရုဣတိဩန္, အန္ဒ္ ထေ နောဗ္လေ ဎမ္မဩf ဏိဗ္ဗန. Wဧ ဟုမ္ဗ္လ္ယ္ ပယ္ ဟောမဂေ တော ထေ ဌ္ရေဧ ဉေဝေလ္သ္ အဂဲန္

Suu Kyi’s husband, Micheal Aris died in Oxford on his fifty third birthday, the 27th of March 1999. He was diagnosed with cancer of the prostate which unfortunately quickly spread to both his spine and lungs. Aris died peacefully and without pain, but according to a family member, he had been extremely desperate to say his last goodbye to his dear wife. Relatives were at his bedside in The Churchill Hospital when he died at 6.30am. He was refused a last ditch visa for a final visit with her in Burma. She in turn would not leave, because she feared she may not be allowed to return. Aris had not seen his wife since 1995. Despite frequent appeals over the last few weeks, his request for one last visit to see his wife was denied by the Army Junta.

The Military Junta detained and kept Suu Kyi under house arrest because it saw her as someone who was “likely to undermine the community and stability” of the country, and used both Article 10(a) and 10(b) of the 1975 State Protection Act, which could grant them power to imprison people for five years without a trial, and Section 22 of the “Law which will safeguard the State from all the dangers of those who would desire to Cause Subversive Acts” as their legal tools against her.

She continuously appealed her detention, and many nations and figures continued to call for her release and that of the over 2,000 other known political prisoners in the country. The appeals fell on deaf ears, however, and the regime ruled the country with an iron fist, rounding up many of the opposition supporters, arresting them and imprisoning them at will. Further international sanctions were implemented by the United States and by Europe which really started to take effect at this time.

2003

4 NLD members killed

ACTOTNA

After it was then stopped, many rowdy regime supporters appeared shouting slogans against the NLD and Suu Kyi in particular. They were armed with sharpened sticks and iron bars when they attacked the convoy. They pulled people out of cars and beat them on the head and body, killing four. Amazingly afterwards, Suu Kyi was arrested along with many of the other members of the party. After they were arrested they were driven back to Rangoon, where they were then detained in prison at Insein for nearly three months, before they are moved into house arrest once again.

New York Times May 28th 2006

2006

Myanmar Extends Dissident’s House Arrest

remains under house arrest

AVCOKY

On May the 30th 2003 four people died and fifty people were injured in a premeditated attack on many top position, party members. The regime stated that these attacks happened due to “unrest” which was incited by the members of the NLD. These members, which also included their leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, had been travelling for days through remote northern Myanmar visiting party members. The assault began before 8 pm, when nearly 200 members and supporters, travelling in a convoy drove through a village in upper regional Myanmar. It was stopped by two persons in monks’ robes.

On the evening of November 13th 2010, uu Kyi was released from house arrest after over six years in detention and only six days since the latest general election. An election,however, in which her NLD party did not contest due to the laws that prevented people with a criminal record or anyone married to a foreigner standing for election. Her husband was from Britain, plus she was deemed to be a criminal under these new laws.

She appeared in front of an adoring crowd of supporters who rushed to her house with flowers and gifts. The State owned newspaper, New Light of Myanmar, had noted that she was granted her pardon after she had served her sentence “in good conduct”. The New York Times though reported that the Junta had released her because it felt it was in a confident position to control her and her supporters now that the elections were over.

2008

The Yettaw incident

FSRUU E EKDYOIM

Later that morning at 5am, Yettaw was arrested close to the lake’s West bank, tired and dishevelled. Suu Kyi was then arrested and charged under the country’s Law Safeguarding the State from the Dangers of Subversive Elements, which carried a maximum 3 year jail term. Suu Kyi, and both of her caretakers, were removed to the Insein prison, again, where they stayed for the duration of the trial. The judge accepted only one of the four witnesses the defence hadput forward, while accepting fourteen of the twenty-three that the government nominated. After this corrupt trial, Suu Kyi was found guilty and ordered to three years. This was changed by a Junta official who overruled the judge. Her sentence had been reduced from 3 years jail to an extra 18 months house arrest.

2010

New York Times September 28th 2009

Suu Kyi finally released

Faint Hopes For Myanmar

The 4th of May 2008. John Yettaw swims over two kilometres across Lake Inya in Yangon to the house on University Drive where Suu Kyi was under house arrest. He somehow then managed to evade all the guards and entered the house just before 5 am. He came upon Suu Kyi’s two female assistants and informed them that he was tired, hungry and suffered from diabetes. He asked Suu Kyi if he could stay at the house for a few days to recover. She refused, and her caretakers threatened to turn him in to the authorities, but Suu Kyi then agreed to let him stay on the ground floor after he begun to complain of leg cramps. During his stay, they provided him with rehydration salts and meals to build up his strength. Yettaw decided to leave later that night and left just before midnight.

HOPE

2012

New York Times November 13th 2015

Regime softens

Myanmar General’s set the stage for their own exit

On August 27th, Thein Sein, the incumbent president, announced a major cabinet reshuffle of nine ministers and fifteen of his deputy ministers, to try to consolidate the authority of his office by removing hardliner ministers and replacing them with political allies. He lifted the ban on over 2,000 blacklisted individuals which then allowed them to return to Burma without fearing any charges. Moe Thee Zun, the student leader of the 1988 protests known as 8888 returned after nearly 23 years to join in the fight for democracy. This year also sees the visit of U.S. president Barack Obama who promised the ‘hand of friendship and support’ in return for further reforms and equal rights. This was an historic occassion.

A new round of by-elections were held on April 1st, 2012. They were to cover thirty seven seats in the lower house, which is known as The House of Representatives, 6 seats in the upper house, known as The House of Nationalities, and two seats in two Northern regional areas. The lower house has 440 seats, and the Upper 224 seats. Suu Kyi’s party, the NLD, which boycotted the general elections in 2010, was this time allowed to participate in these by-elections. Suu Kyi stood in a Rangoon area constituency in the lower house, covering the dirt poor and very diverse township of Kawhmu. The NLD was widely expected to win these by-elections, but the size of the victory had surprised many observers and the military.

EQUALITY JUSTICE DEMOCRACY FREEDOM FAIRNESS HOPE

BURMA

2015

Free Elections for Burma

The NLD won that election but the results were annulled and many of her colleagues imprisoned.The president’s spokesman said that the government would obey the results and the transfer of power would be peaceful and smooth. Suu Kyi does not have complete power, and the Generals, who have amassed many billions of dollars in wealth over the years, will still control the most powerful ministerial portfolios, these being interior, defence and border affairs. She has invited the army chief of staff, the President and finally the parliamentary speaker to meet and discuss the election and has said that she will attempt to form a government based on fairness and of reconciliation. Many of the fifty one million hope that the NLD will push through with political reform but will also try to develop the poor education and health systems, and create jobs in South-East Asia’s poorest nation. It is a massive challenge but one that needs to be met.

After almost thirty long and hard years of campaigning, Suu Kyi’s party, the NLD, won a landslide victory after the latest general elections which were held on the 8th of November 2015. The election commission in the new capital Naypyidaw, said that the party had gained 348 seats across both the lower and upper houses of parliament, which was19 more than the 329 needed for an absolute majority. These elections were the country’s first real open vote since 2011, ending close to 50 years of military rule. The NLD now has control and can choose the next president of Burma. Though Suu Kyi is constitutionally barred from the presidency, She has let it be known to all hat she will hold the full power in the NLD government. She has stated that she will be ‘above the President.’ The current regime leaders and the military have signalled that they will accept the election result, stamping out fears of a repeat of 1990’s vote which was ignored.

ÂŠ Aaron Forde 2015