Word: burma
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CHALLENGES TO FREEDOM IN BURMA...
...more than happy about the release of Burma's chief dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi, after six years of house arrest [BURMA, July 24]. She is the only person who can bring peace to Burma. With her humanitarianism, intellect and Buddhist gentleness, she brings a hitherto unseen sophistication to the politics of her country. The people of Burma deserve a better future. I only hope they will have the patience that will be needed for change. LINDA SCHWARTZ Adliswil, Germany...
Freedom, as Flannery O'Connor wrote, cannot be conceived simply. Few could understand this better than Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's chief dissident and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. Placed under house arrest by a military junta in 1989, Suu Kyi spent six years confined to her family's deteriorating lakeside bungalow in Rangoon. At any time, she was free to join her husband and two children in London -- knowing that the generals would never allow her back. That was a definition of freedom she refused to accept. When the junta abruptly announced last week that...
...certain, about Suu Kyi's liberty. It was tempting to imagine a Burmese equivalent of the release of Nelson Mandela: in other words, a signal that the 21 generals who govern the country through the State Law and Order Restoration Council, known by the acronym SLORC, intend to take Burma in a new direction with some important, if undefined, role for the steely lady...
...journalists who gathered. Many of her supporters suspect that the generals are merely trying to woo foreign governments, investors and such institutions as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund by making a single concession-the release of the lady -- with no intention of further loosening their hold on Burma. That grip is indeed tight: the government jails and tortures political prisoners, forces peasants to labor on roads and railways without pay, and is supervising the writing of a new constitution for its 45 million people that will enshrine the military's role in running the country...