Aung San Suu Kyi

Date

1945–

Description

City of birth: Rangoon
Country of birth: Burma
Field of activity: Politics — activism, governance

More detail coming ...

Quotes

‘We first started campaigning for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi nearly two decades ago. We did it as long-time Amnesty International supporters and, like so many others, because we were horrified by the brutality of the military and their repressions of basic freedoms. … When Aung San Suu Kyi was released, we punched the air. When she came to Dublin to thank Ireland and Amnesty International, we Irish could not have been more proud. … Who could have predicted that if more than 600,000 people were fleeing from a brutal army for fear of their lives, the woman who many of us believed would have the clearest and loudest voice on the crisis would go quiet. For these atrocities against the Rohingya people to be happening on her watch blows our minds and breaks our hearts.’

Author

Members of the band U2 – Adam Clayton, Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr.

Speaker

Members of the band U2 – Adam Clayton, Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr.

Title of the publication

‘This We Never Imagined’

Other contributors

n/a

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

U2 website

City of publication

Dublin

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

Ireland

Publication date

11 November 2017

Location [pp. or web]

https://www.u2.com/news/title/this-we-never-imagined

Original language

English

Genre

Statement

Context

In 2016, the Rohingyas of northern Myanmar were forcibly displaced by Burmese military, with subsequent rounds of violence. In 2017 Aung San Suu Kyi set up the Rakhine Advisory Commission, led by the late Kofi Annan, but its recommendations though agreed to by Aung San Suu Kyi, have not since been put into effect. She has not publicly criticized the Myanmar military during this period.

‘The first autobiography I ever read was providentially, or prophetically, or perhaps both, Seven Years Solitary, by a Hungarian woman who had been in the wrong faction during the Communist Party purges of the early 1950s. At 13-years-old, I was fascinated by the determination and ingenuity with which one woman alone was able to keep her mind sharp and her spirit unbroken through the years when her only human contact was with men whose everyday preoccupation was to try to break her. …. What kind of people deliberately choose to walk the path of deprivation? Max Weber identifies three qualities of decisive importance for politicians as passion, a sense of responsibility, and a sense of proportion. The first — passion — he interprets as the passionate dedication to a cause. Such a passion is of crucial importance for those who engage in the most dangerous kind of politics: the politics of dissent. Such a passion has to be at the core of each and every person who makes the decision, declared or undeclared, to live in a world apart from the rest of their fellow citizens; a precarious world with its own unwritten rules and regulations. The world of dissidence. …. Passion translates as suffering and I would contend that in the political context, as in the religious one, it implies suffering by choice: a deliberate decision to grasp the cup that we would rather let pass. It is not a decision made lightly — we do not enjoy suffering; we are not masochists. It is because of the high value we put on the object of our passion that we are able, sometimes in spite of ourselves, to choose suffering. … Whenever I was asked at the end of each stretch of house arrest how it felt to be free, I would answer that I felt no different because my mind had always been free. I have spoken out often of the inner freedom that comes out from following a course in harmony with one's conscience.’

Author

Aung San Suu Kyi

Speaker

Aung San Suu Kyi

Title of the publication

‘The Reith Lectures’

Other contributors

Sue Lawley, host

Publisher (or journal name with vol. and number)

BBC Radio 4

City of publication

London

Country of publication (modern nation-state equivalent)

United Kingdom

Publication date

15 July 2011

Location [pp. or web]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012402s ; https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0126d70

Other location

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/2011_reith1.pdf

Original language

English

Genre

Lecture

Context

The Reith Lectures commissioned by the BBC and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, are a series of annual radio lectures given by leading figures of the day. The lectures were inaugurated in 1948 by the BBC to mark the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Lord Reith, the corporation's first director-general.

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