SDLP youth mark Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday

international | rights, freedoms and repression | press release Tuesday June 19, 2007 23:54 by SDLP Youth - SDLP

SDLP Youth have sent greetings to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on the occasion of her 62nd Birthday, on 19th June.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has so far spent 11 years and 238 days in prison. Although she was supposed to be released on 26 May 2007, the brutal Burmese dictatorship has extended her detention for yet another year.

The Burmese Military regime is blight on world democracy. Unless aligned to government officials, most of the country’s 50 million inhabitants live without human rights and mainly in poverty, under a strict and often brutal regime which routinely employs forced labour, including children, and has been known to use rape as a weapon of war. There is no independent judiciary, and political opposition is violently suppressed.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratic opposition party won a landslide election victory in 1990 but the military junta refused to hand over power. In 1991 Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her commitment to peaceful change.

The situation has only got worse in the last year. The dictatorship forced all five Red Cross offices in Burma to close last October. After an international outcry, they were allowed to re-open in December, however the Red Cross were forced to leave the country last month after claims the dictatorship had brought any humanitarian work to a "near stand-still".

For more information visit http://www.burmaactionireland.org

"I would like the west to see us not as a country rather far away whose sufferings do not matter, but as fellow human beings in need of human rights and who could do so much for the world, if we were allowed. Use your liberty to promote ours"
- Daw Aung San Suu Kyi