Editorial
Suu Kyi's continued captivity
The world must take a stand for her release
The military regime in Myanmar has once again spurned appeals from the outside world for freedom to be granted to democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Having already spent seventeen years in house arrest, the leader of the National League for Democracy has been served a fresh year's internment, a step that can only revive concerns about the state of human rights in a country truly isolated from the rest of the world. One would have thought that the ruling classes in Yangon would heed international opinion, particularly the joint appeal made by as many as 54 former heads of government and other luminaries only a couple of weeks ago for Suu Kyi's release and thereby demonstrate their willingness for a change of course. It is a blow for Myanmar that global opinion has thus been rudely pushed aside in the narrow interests of a junta. The refusal of the Yangon military authorities to lift the ban on Suu Kyi's movements must now be regarded as a fresh signal for a concerted campaign to convince them that the Nobel peace laureate must be freed in the larger interest of the country. The reasons why Suu Kyi needs to be released are simple enough. In the first place, with democracy or popular government quickly gaining ground as political realities nearly everywhere, it makes sense to think that Myanmar cannot afford to fall behind. In the second place, the isolation that the ironically named State Peace and Development Council (that is how the rulers call themselves) has pushed the country into has quite succeeded in stunting the political and intellectual growth of the people of Myanmar, a fact that hardly allows them to come level with nations beyond their frontiers. Since General Ne Win's military take-over in 1962 (Ne Win quit in 1988), Myanmar has been under a relentless military dictatorship. Attempts by Suu Kyi and her supporters to inaugurate a new era of democracy, as evidenced by the NLD's convincing victory at the eventually aborted elections of 1990, have never succeeded owing to the ruthlessness employed by the junta in putting down dissent. It is time for the outside world to increase pressure on Myanmar's rulers, both economically and politically, with a view to convincing them that they cannot continue to keep the country in the straitjacket they have so far. Nations which have engaged in trade with the country must accept the thought that as long as they ignore the pains the people of Myanmar go through in the political sense, they will only be adding to the trauma first inflicted on the country long ago.
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