• By
Mariana Cook
Aung San Suu Kyi



I don’t think you can say that a certain kind of person is particularly attracted to human rights. It attracts all kinds of people for very many different reasons. Some become involved in the struggle because of a personal experience; others are drawn to it because of the way they have been brought up, the values that they were taught as children. I belong more to the second category than to the first category, although what I saw in Burma during the 1988 uprising convinced me that we all had to work for human rights.

In 1990, we had the first democratic elections in Burma in about 26 years. I did not run, because I was under house arrest by then. Many of the leaders of the National League for Democracy were placed under house arrest before the elections—probably because it was felt that without our leadership the party could not fare well. But, in fact, we won a landslide victory. This was a bit of a shock to the military junta, who decided that they would ignore the results of the elections.


I have often wondered why people treat others in such an autocratic way. Now we know, of course, what it is like to be deprived of one’s basic rights, and we would not subject anybody to that kind of experience. Putting it in a very general way, it is a mixture of greed and fear that pushes people to ill-treat others. They want to preserve their own security and enjoy the privileges to which their position entitles them. And also ignorance, because there are some people who really believe that it is all right to treat those who are “different” from them in any way they like. There must be some who are by nature sadistic, but I do not think that they are in the majority.

We have very good laws in Burma, some of which were carried over from the colonial period, and if we were treated in accordance with those laws, we would be perfectly all right. Those now in power have very little knowledge of what laws actually do exist in this country. We have noticed again and again that if we point out that there is a law saying that you cannot do this, they will open their eyes very wide and run back to their books and look it up. But often people do not question them because the ruling powers can do whatever they want to. We teach people that they must ask questions and not take it for granted that whoever is treating them poorly has a right to do so. We have published a pamphlet for the families of political prisoners to instruct them on what rights they have and what rights the prisoners have, and to encourage them to demand these rights.

You cannot say that these rights are never respected. If we stand firm and united, and present the letter of the law, sometimes we are successful in arguing the case of the rights of political prisoners. Perhaps we have won two or three cases in court out of the thousands of cases pleaded by our Legal Aid Committee. Nonetheless, I think our people appreciate the fact that they have somebody to stand up for them in court, to make it known that they are being treated unjustly and against all legal norms.

Our education system is in shambles. Young people in Burma may not know what a democracy is, but they certainly know that they do not want what they are getting now: they want to be well educated. That is a beginning. The next step is to make them understand that if they want things to be better, they have to do something about making things better. It is difficult to make them understand that they can do something. It is not just that they have to do something; they can do something. They are capable of doing something. They must try to bring about the changes that they want, instead of leaving it to the National League for Democracy, or to me, or to other political parties.

AUNG SAN SUU KYI (b. 1945) is a Burmese opposition politician, the former General Secretary of the National League for Democracy (NLD), and the daughter of Aung San—the father of modern-day Burma. The military junta first placed her under house arrest following popular democratic protests in 1989. Subsequently, she has been detained or under house arrest on at least six separate occasions, totaling 15 years. In 1991 she received the Nobel Peace Prize honoring her as “one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades.” She was released once again from house arrest in November 2010 and was elected to a seat in Parliament in spring 2012. Burma’s leaders continue to ignore the fact that she and her political party, the NLD, won the majority of votes in a 1990 national election.


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