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My fellow Nobel Peace laureate, the Burmese opposition leader Aung
San Suu Kyi, is now spending her ninth year in detention. No one
has been allowed to see her in the last seven months. Fears grow
for her personal security. Myanmar's military dictators ignore the
appeals of the United Nations and the wider international community
to let this woman of peace go free.
If only as much noise, money and effort was spent supporting the
peacemakers of this world as is made in support of the use of war.
If only those governments that claim to be against war showed their
determination to support those at the front line of peace. If only
those who say that for them war is the last resort proved this by
supporting those struggling for nonviolent solutions to avert such
last resorts. Where are the statesmen, the visionaries of our time,
with regard to Suu Kyi's nonviolent struggle for freedom? The words
of protest at her detention from world leaders ring hollow when
they do not translate into action.
Whatever one's view of the war in Iraq, it continues to divide the
world. Questions over whether diplomacy had been fully exhausted,
whether there was a legal basis for the decision, whether the true
aims of the war have been revealed, all persist. I don't want to
go into these questions here. But the sincerity of governments on
both sides of that divide are being tested by Myanmar. Are both
sides truly committed to helping end the rule of oppressive dictators,
and to using all nonmilitary means at their disposal to do so? With
Myanmar, the answer so far has been a tragic no.
Suu Kyi and the people of Myanmar have not called for a military
coalition to invade their country. They have simply asked for the
maximum diplomatic and economic pressure against Myanmar's brutal
dictators. Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy,
won 82 percent of the seats in Myanmar's 1990 election. The generals
in power refuse to honor the express wishes of a nation.
Instead they perpetrate their own brutal rule with 1,300 political
prisoners, more child soldiers than any other country on earth,
lower health spending than any other country and rape used as a
weapon of war. The International Labor Organization has called the
regime's systematic use of forced labor a "crime against humanity."
The international response to this barbarity has been so weak that
the generals can smell the inertia; they feel they can continue
to get away with these things without sanction.
Indeed, starting Friday, the Asia-Europe Meeting will take place
in Vietnam. There in Hanoi, state terrorists from Myanmar will sit
and dine with your leaders. The same leaders who proclaim a war
against terror every time they are on television or in the newspaper.
The "coalition of the willing" and the "coalition
of the unwilling" ultimately have to show each other that something
concrete can be done on Myanmar. For the "willing" it's
to show that they will use other nonmilitary instruments at their
disposal to pursue justice, and for the "unwilling" it's
to prove that they have the determination to deal with a dictatorship
like Myanmar's, to prove they are not appeasers of tyranny.
If you protested the war in Iraq, ask your government what it is
doing to support Myanmar's peaceful struggle against its own oppressive
dictatorship. For those who praised their governments for being
against the war in Iraq, ask your governments what they are doing
to make Myanmar a shining example of how alternatives to war can
be effective. Because at the moment, governments on both sides of
the Iraq debate show no gumption, no will to apply serious pressure
on the oppressive dictatorship in Myanmar.
Myanmar, Asia, indeed the world, have a golden opportunity. We have
a charismatic leader determined to lead her movement and her people
in the way she would choose to govern, peacefully, with respect
and with human dignity. Just as Nelson Mandela no longer belongs
only to South Africans, I believe that in the future Suu Kyi will
be a shining light for Asia and the world.
You see, ultimately the Burmese people will prevail. Neither systems,
nor governments nor dictators are eternal, but the spirit of freedom
is. We must continue to ask the question, whose side are we on?
We cannot be neutral in the face of such barbarity. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. said that in the end we will remember not the words of
our enemies but the silence of our friends. For those who know oppression,
inaction is the most painful silence.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
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