“Use your liberty to promote ours!”
Aung San Suu Kyi
One of Aung San Suu Kyi’s most famous addresses says “Free us from
fear” and starts with these words: “Corruption does not come from power
but from fear. The fear to lose power corrupts those who have the power
and, similarly, the fear of the plague of a corrupt power corrupts
those people who are the subjects of this power.”
The daughter of the leader of the Burmese liberation and author of
Burma’s constitution, General Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi inherited her
father’s charisma. A political militant she committed herself to the
defence of human rights in Burma, for which she was awarded the
ultimate recognition, the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1991.
Influenced by the philosophy and the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin
Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi together with her friends in politics
founded in 1988 the National League for Democracy. Her non violent
commitment for the establishment of a democratic regime brought her
great success in the population.
Such success urged the military junta holding power to arrest her on
July 20th 1989. The military government proposed to her to be released
on the condition that she leave the country, which she refused. The
junta placed her under house arrest in order to undermine her
influence. This did not stop the National League for Democracy from
winning more than 80% of the seats in the 1990 elections. The military
in power then refused the democratic outcome of the poll and instead
strengthened the repression and persecution of the opposition and the
ethnic minorities.
Aung San Suu Kyi has been silenced for close to 19 years, and her life
is a long endless series of house arrests imposed by the military
junta, except for scarce moments of liberty, and it is high time we
worked actively for her liberation in order to give her the possibility
to express herself fully again.
In this context, imagine the courage it takes to oppose the military
dictatorship in a politically opaque country like Burma. The military
junta ruthlessly strikes political opponents. It is a miracle Aung San
Suu Kyi is still alive.
Association Switzerland-Burma
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The Festival 
