Free Aung San Suu Kyi

It was in the corridors of a Rangoon hospital in 1988 that a scholar and housewife from Oxford, in Burma to nurse her gravely ill mother, ran into students who had been shot and beaten by riot police and soldiers as the Burmese government set about suppressing a surge of democracy.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Suu to her friends in the West, was deeply upset by what they told her. Since moving to New Delhi in her teens, when her mother was Burma’s ambassador to India, she had made her life away from home. She had a British husband, the scholar Michael Aris, and two young sons, a settled, serene, suburban life in Oxford. But the violent destruction of the first real, popular effort to change her country’s course since a coup d’etat in 1962 was something she could not ignore. Despite all the excellent reasons for walking away, she chose instead to walk into the heart of the inferno. She has been there ever since.

Aung San Suu Kyi is a heroine of our time, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a prisoner in her Rangoon home for 12 of the past 18 years. But for the people of Burma those grand phrases do not describe her. She is the daughter of Aung San, who was father of the Burmese army, founder of the independent Burmese nation, assassinated in his prime; hero of the struggle against both Japanese and British imperialists. She is a fellow-Burmese who has sacrificed a life of unimaginable privilege to live in solidarity with them. She is a devout Buddhist. And she is the person who transformed the Burmese freedom struggle not only through her presence at its head, but by her resolve to bring the best of the western tradition she knows intimately – tolerance of dissent and diversity, respect for human rights, the stress on moral decency – into Burmese public life.

After the uprising of the monks in Burma last September and the intervention of the United Nations’ special envoy Ibrahim Gambari, Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed to meet her colleagues in the National League for Democracy (NLD) for the first time in four years. She was also told that she will be allowed to "negotiate" with members of the State Peace and Development Council, Burma's ruling junta.

But at the end of the meeting she was taken back to the house where she lives in enforced isolation, behind barbed wire and under armed guard, without so much as a telephone.

If these gestures were intended to show that the generals have moderated their policies under pressure from world opinion, they had the opposite effect: they only underlined their intransigence, and the atrocious cruelty of their treatment of the woman who won Burma's general election in 1991 at the head of the NLD, but who has been under house arrest for 12 of the past 18 years.

Since 1988 Aung San Suu Kyi has given her people, and the world, an extraordinary demonstration of courage, of grace under pressure. This website is one small way to indicate our gratitude, and solidarity. Contributions from people who feel the same way are welcomed, at free.suukyi08@gmail.com.