Slap at Myanmar’s Generals

Agathering of Nobel Peace Prize winners is an impressive sight--more than a dozen men and women who dedicate their lives, often at great personal risk, to turning swords into plowshares and transforming soldiers into peacekeepers. Last weekend in Oslo, past winners applauded this year’s honoree, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The laureates also lent their presence and prestige to a rally for one of their group whose absence was a silent indictment.

Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, the impoverished Asian nation formerly known as Burma, has been unable to visit Norway to claim her prize since it was awarded in 1991.

Hundreds of people shrugged off a cold rain to hear South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu contrast the military autocrats of Myanmar, “armed to the teeth,” with Suu Kyi, “in moral stature ... a giant.” The Oslo gathering and rallies in other cities including Washington should remind the generals that in the rest of the world, virtual prisoner Suu Kyi is still Myanmar’s respected leader.

Suu Kyi is the daughter of Aung San, a leader in Burma’s fight against Japanese occupation in World War II and the later campaign for independence from British rule. He was assassinated when Suu Kyi was young, and she grew up in India and Britain, where she attended Oxford. She returned to Burma in 1988 and led a democratic movement to replace the military regime that had ruled since 1962. Although the military barred her candidacy, her party won about 80% of the vote in parliamentary elections. The generals responded by declaring the results void.

Suu Kyi has been restricted in her travels around the country or confined to her home for most of the last 12 years. The government mean-spiritedly refused to let her husband visit her from Britain before he died of cancer two years ago. He did not see his wife in the three years before his death.

President Bush praised Suu Kyi as an inspiration and a “powerful force for good.” Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a staunch supporter of Suu Kyi, spoke on her behalf in Washington, and the British government reiterated its support.

New U.S. investment in Myanmar has been prohibited since 1996, and Washington has blocked international lending to the country. The generals occasionally release leaders of Suu Kyi’s political party from house arrest and have held secret talks with her, but without any breakthrough.

The action that counts would be granting her full freedom to speak and travel. The next step, letting political parties flourish, would even win aid and investment. But the brutal generals are on the wrong side of history, along with North Korea’s leaders, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and the Taliban. Only when the generals are peacefully gone and Suu Kyi has collected her peace prize in person will Myanmar begin to rejoin the mainstream.