Letter to Burma

The world's senior statesmen call for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.

IT'S A REMARKABLE list: 59 former presidents and prime ministers, from countries ranging from Mongolia to Chile and from Argentina to Zambia. They are Hindus and Muslims, Catholics and Buddhists, socialists and right-wingers.

What could possibly unite them? Dismay that Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel peace laureate and fighter for democracy, remains under house arrest in her Southeast Asian homeland of Burma (also known as Myanmar). The 59 signed a letter, released yesterday by Norway's former prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, calling for her freedom. "Aung San Suu Kyi is not calling for revolution in Burma, but rather peaceful, nonviolent dialogue," the former leaders noted. They urged Burma's "senior general," Than Shwe, to take her up on the offer.

Indeed, Aung San Suu Kyi has been amazingly consistent in her support of nonviolence and democracy through nearly two decades of provocation and oppression from Burma's dictators. In 1990, her National League for Democracy won more than four out of every five parliamentary seats in a free election, but the junta imprisoned many of the winners and refused to cede power. Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for 11 of the subsequent 17 years and in solitary confinement since 2003. The corrupt regime meanwhile has driven its resource-rich nation of 50 million people deeper and deeper into poverty. It has burned 3,000 villages in campaigns of ethnic cleansing; used rape and forced child labor to decimate ethnic groups on its enemy list; and forced 1 million refugees into neighboring countries.

Not long ago a majority of the U.N. Security Council voted to deplore such tactics in a resolution that was vetoed (not surprisingly) by China and Russia and opposed (more surprisingly) by South Africa. No former leader from those three countries signed the letter. But three U.S. ex-presidents did: Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And it's a mark of Burma's growing isolation that the signatories included so many respected leaders from Asian countries that until recently argued against any form of pressure: Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos of the Philippines, not to mention leaders from India, Pakistan, Thailand and more. Gen. Than Shwe should read his mail carefully today.