Join the Global Campaign to Free Aung San Suu Kyi

Key Link ~
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/index.php

Join the Global Campaign to Free Aung San Suu Kyi
2, December 2005

As of today Aung San Suu Kyi has been detained for a total of:
10 years and 39 days

Show your support and join the global campaign to free Aung San Suu Kyi.

Aung San Suu Kyi is now serving her third term of house arrest. She was arrested on 30 May, 2003 after the regime's militia attacked her convoy and killed up to 100 of her supporters.

Take action now to help free Aung San Suu Kyi.

Find out more about Aung San Suu Kyi
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Pages ~
http://www.dassk.org/index.php

View the MTV video campaigns to free Aung San Suu Kyi:

'House Arrest' Dec 2003
(This requires QuickTime - download it here)

Free Your Mind' Aug 2003
(This requires RealPlayer - download it here)

"Please use your liberty to promote ours" ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

Burma is ruled by one of the most brutal military dictatorships in the world; a dictatorship charged by the United Nations with a “crime against humanity” for its systematic abuses of human rights, and condemned internationally for refusing to transfer power to the legally elected Government of the country – the party led by Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Burma Campaign UK is part of a global movement campaigning for human rights and democracy in Burma.

Our campaigns aim to increase economic pressure on the regime by discouraging investment and tourism.

We lobby the UK government and the European Union to increase political pressure on the regime.

The Burma Campaign UK is the only national organisation in the UK dedicated to campaigning for human rights and democracy in Burma.

Time for the United Nations to Act

10=Ten Years of Empty Words
As Aung San Suu Kyi reaches ten years in detention, this new report highlights the failure of the United Nations to take any effective action against the regime in Burma, and calls for United Nations Security Council intervention
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/reports/10_years.pdf


Take action now and call on the British government to support UNSC action.

News Releases:
New Report Exposes Torture in Burma’s Prisons
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/pm/weblog.php?id=P189

UN Security Council to Debate Burma Crisis
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/pm/weblog.php?id=P188

TOTAL Climbdown on Burma Court Case
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk%2Fpm%2Fweblog.php%3Fid%3DP189
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It's the Burmese who are asking for Sanctions
by Jody Williams

This month the UN Commission on Human Rights issued its latest, now annual, condemnation of ongoing rights violations in Myanmar, highlighting in particular the continued detention of Aung San Suu Kyi, general secretary of the National League for Democracy, and her deputy, Tin Oo, who have been held under house arrest since they were attacked in May 2003.

I was able to meet with Suu Kyi at her home in Yangon, the capital, just three months before that attack, while she was traveling in the north of Myanmar to promote democracy.

During that visit, she said that although the authorities had tried to destroy the NLD after prohibiting its candidates, and those of other prodemocratic parties, from convening a Parliament after their decisive electoral victory in 1990, a combination of internal and external pressures had allowed the parties to survive.

She said that the NLD was continuing to ask for international sanctions to isolate the military regime and help force peaceful change in the country.

Now the people of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, are again asking the international community to stand with them as they engage in the largest civil disobedience action the country has ever seen. The NLD, which has never legally been banned in Myanmar, initiated a public petition late last year calling on the authorities to release Suu Kyi.

A member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines visiting Myanmar recently was told that by late February, almost a half a million people had added their names to that call.

The simple act of signing a petition is illegal under the military junta's draconian laws, and people who have previously circulated petitions requesting political change or challenging decisions of the junta now languish in jail. When the ICBL representative asked if people were afraid to sign the petition, members of the NLD's Central Committee responded, "Yes, they are afraid. But they sign."

The petition campaign continues to grow, virtually ignored or unknown outside Myanmar. Just as the 1990 election showed massive popular support for democratic governance, this petition shows popular condemnation of the seizure and detention of Myanmar's Nobel Peace laureate.

For every person who risks signing the petition, there are many more who are sympathetic but afraid to take action. Yet many Burmese people continue to be willing to take significant risks to try to bring about peaceful change. It is now time for external pressure to be stepped up and consistently applied.

Some argue that sanctions against the military junta should be dropped and replaced by "constructive engagement" with the regime. This is despite the call of the NLD itself for sanctions, and the clear example of the international isolation and economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa that helped internal forces bring democracy to that nation.

For nonviolent sanctions to work, there must be a global consensus, not just the current series of disconnected and uncoordinated national policies. Myanmar has never lost the support of key states, which help supply it with arms, for example, such as Singapore and Pakistan - neither a beacon of democracy.

The military junta must not be allowed to continue to hold democracy hostage in Myanmar. External pressure must be applied in support of activists if we want nonviolent political change.

The international community must unite in applying effective pressure on the Burmese dictatorship - politically and economically - until it cedes power to those who earned it legitimately at the ballot box.

Note: Jody Williams is founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

First published on April 26, 2005 by the International Herald Tribune
Websource~
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk%2Fpm%2Fweblog.php%3Fid%3DP189

© 2005 IHT
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The Burmese Dictatorship
By Archbishop Desmond Tutu

7 October 2004

My fellow Nobel Peace laureate, the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, is now spending her ninth year in detention. No one has been allowed to see her in the last seven months. Fears grow for her personal security. Myanmar's military dictators ignore the appeals of the United Nations and the wider international community to let this woman of peace go free.

If only as much noise, money and effort was spent supporting the peacemakers of this world as is made in support of the use of war. If only those governments that claim to be against war showed their determination to support those at the front line of peace. If only those who say that for them war is the last resort proved this by supporting those struggling for nonviolent solutions to avert such last resorts. Where are the statesmen, the visionaries of our time, with regard to Suu Kyi's nonviolent struggle for freedom? The words of protest at her detention from world leaders ring hollow when they do not translate into action.

Whatever one's view of the war in Iraq, it continues to divide the world. Questions over whether diplomacy had been fully exhausted, whether there was a legal basis for the decision, whether the true aims of the war have been revealed, all persist. I don't want to go into these questions here. But the sincerity of governments on both sides of that divide are being tested by Myanmar. Are both sides truly committed to helping end the rule of oppressive dictators, and to using all nonmilitary means at their disposal to do so? With Myanmar, the answer so far has been a tragic no.

Suu Kyi and the people of Myanmar have not called for a military coalition to invade their country. They have simply asked for the maximum diplomatic and economic pressure against Myanmar's brutal dictators. Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, won 82 percent of the seats in Myanmar's 1990 election. The generals in power refuse to honor the express wishes of a nation.

Instead they perpetrate their own brutal rule with 1,300 political prisoners, more child soldiers than any other country on earth, lower health spending than any other country and rape used as a weapon of war. The International Labor Organization has called the regime's systematic use of forced labor a "crime against humanity." The international response to this barbarity has been so weak that the generals can smell the inertia; they feel they can continue to get away with these things without sanction.

Indeed, starting Friday, the Asia-Europe Meeting will take place in Vietnam. There in Hanoi, state terrorists from Myanmar will sit and dine with your leaders. The same leaders who proclaim a war against terror every time they are on television or in the newspaper.

The "coalition of the willing" and the "coalition of the unwilling" ultimately have to show each other that something concrete can be done on Myanmar. For the "willing" it's to show that they will use other nonmilitary instruments at their disposal to pursue justice, and for the "unwilling" it's to prove that they have the determination to deal with a dictatorship like Myanmar's, to prove they are not appeasers of tyranny.

If you protested the war in Iraq, ask your government what it is doing to support Myanmar's peaceful struggle against its own oppressive dictatorship. For those who praised their governments for being against the war in Iraq, ask your governments what they are doing to make Myanmar a shining example of how alternatives to war can be effective. Because at the moment, governments on both sides of the Iraq debate show no gumption, no will to apply serious pressure on the oppressive dictatorship in Myanmar.

Myanmar, Asia, indeed the world, have a golden opportunity. We have a charismatic leader determined to lead her movement and her people in the way she would choose to govern, peacefully, with respect and with human dignity. Just as Nelson Mandela no longer belongs only to South Africans, I believe that in the future Suu Kyi will be a shining light for Asia and the world.

You see, ultimately the Burmese people will prevail. Neither systems, nor governments nor dictators are eternal, but the spirit of freedom is. We must continue to ask the question, whose side are we on? We cannot be neutral in the face of such barbarity. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. For those who know oppression, inaction is the most painful silence.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/pm/weblog.php?id=P189
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Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Pages ~
http://www.dassk.org/index.php

Ten Years of Empty Words
http://www.burmacampaign.org.uk/reports/10_years.pdf
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