Nobel Prize Highlights Noble Cause : Recognition: A college counselor sees hope for his native Myanmar and its struggle for freedom, and he describes his friend Aung San Suu Kyi as charismatic.

An Orange Coast College counselor who has struggled to help free his native Myanmar from a repressive military regime said Monday that Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel Peace Prize would bring international attention to his country’s fight for freedom.

“This is good for the country, good for the Burmese. I am very elated, and I am hopeful that it will turn around the situation with that country,” said U Kyaw Win, who publishes the Burma Bulletin Newsletter out of his Laguna Hills home.

“They (military leaders) cannot much longer continue to blacken the rest of the world out from what is happening on the inside. I don’t know how much egg they can take on their face, and this (prize) is an embarrassment for them,” he said.

Win hasn’t seen Aung San Suu Kyi since before her imprisonment and when Myanmar was still known as Burma, and he said he worries about her welfare. He was introduced in 1984 by his son, who has known her since the late 1970s when he attended school in Oxford, England. She lived there at the time.

He vividly remembers a delicious Christmas dinner she cooked at her home in India in 1987.

Suu Kyi’s father, assassinated more than four decades ago, was a political leader known as the Burmese equivalent of George Washington.

Nonetheless, at the time of that first dinner, Suu Kyi--whose name translates into “a strange collection of bright victories”--was apolitical. Win couldn’t even get her to talk about the politics of her country; she preferred instead to discuss her children and home life.

“She said she was neutral,” Win said. “But she knew she was treading a thin line because she wanted to be in the good graces of the military. She was free to go in and out of Burma at will, and she was afraid to jeopardize that.”

But even back then, Win remembers seeing an element of intensity in the 95-pound, “quiet, unassuming” woman, now 46, whom he calls Suu.

“I had a premonition that someday she would be the leading personality in Burmese affairs because you cannot escape history. The Burmese respect ancestor lineage, and her father was a great man. You could see it in her eyes, there was a spark to them, a glint, a type of look that says ‘history is not through with me yet,’ ” he said.

Her father, Aung San, led Burma to the brink of independence from British colonial rule before his assassination in 1947, when she was 2 years old.

“People think there is a certain aura to the daughter of a leader, and also she is a very smart girl, and very charismatic. Her reasoning is far superior to the leaders,” Win said.

It took the violence of 1988 to end Suu Kyi’s silence and spur her leadership. Thousands of Burmese people, many of them students, were beheaded or shot as the military tried to suppress a peaceful, pro-democracy uprising. She was taken into house arrest at her compound in the nation’s capital, Yangon, formerly Rangoon. In 1990, Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in a general election, but the military refused to honor the results.

In announcing the award, Francis Sejersted, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said “Suu Kyi’s struggle is one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades.” She is one of only eight women to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Win’s own 29-year fight has been tireless but frustrating.

Born in Myanmar but banned from returning there because of his political beliefs, Win is the Burmese ambassador to the United States for the provisional government, even though it has been denied power.

Win has been pushing for democracy since 1962, when the regime seized control, and has spent much of his time trying to get the U.S. government to sever ties with the military regime. Nearly his entire life’s savings have gone to the cause, and he recently returned from Burmese refugee camps in Thailand, where he delivered medicine and supplies.

His friend’s Nobel Prize is the highlight of Win’s long fight, but he hopes people don’t forget about his native country a few days after the spotlight fades.

No one knows yet whether Suu Kyi will be allowed to attend the Dec. 10 ceremony and receive her $1-million prize.

The military has said before that Suu Kyi is free to go if she renounces her politics and never returns again to Myanmar. But she has said she will leave only if all political prisoners in the country are freed and power is turned over to the party that won the election.

Win said he has one wish. To explain its significance, he recites an ancient Burmese myth.

“The story goes that there is a very elderly man who is blind and he has a young son who is his only means of livelihood,” Win began. “One day the young boy got hit by an arrow by someone from the castle who was hunting. The royal castle said they wanted to grant one wish to help the father, and when they asked him what it should be, he said he wanted to see his little boy come back with a pot of gold,” Win said.

“He wanted three things from that one wish--he wanted his eyesight back, his son back and he wanted to be rich. My wish is like that. It would be to see Suu return freely to Burma with the prize.”

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