Burma's totalitarians convict Nobel winner Suu Kyi

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The AP reports:

[Burma]'s generals have again succeeded in isolating democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, but her fleeting emergence during a grueling trial showed that her steely resolve and charisma remain intact.

A [Burma] court on Tuesday convicted the 64-year-old Nobel Peace laureate of violating her house arrest by allowing an uninvited American to stay at her home. Her sentence of three years in prison with hard labor was quickly commuted to 18 months house arrest after an order from the head of the military-ruled country, Senior Gen. Than Shwe.

Suu Kyi has been in detention for 14 of the last 20 years, and the extension will remove her from the political scene next year when the junta holds its first election since 1990. Her party won in the polls then but was never allowed to take power.

I'm sure it was the fairest of fair trials. And I'm sure the conviction has nothing to do with next year's "election," which will surely be "fair" and "open" and genuinely "democratic." (And note that the commutation is probably supposed to prove the junta's compassion and justice. Yeah, sure.)

What a bunch of reprehensible thugs tyrannize that poor country.

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And, as I put it here, let's all please call it Burma, not Myanmar:

Can we all please stop calling it Myanmar? That's the name the military junta -- then the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), since 1997 the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) -- gave the country when it declared martial law
in 1989.

As Yale law professor Amy Chua puts it in her book World on Fire (p. 23): "Members of the majority ethnic group in Burma are called Bamahs (in the spoken language) or Myanmahs (in the written language). The newly independent state that emerged from the end of British colonial rule in 1948 was called the Union of Burma. In 1989, SLORC changed the country's name to Myanmar. (It also changed the names of various cities: Rangoon, for example, is now called Yangon.) In deference to the democratic opposition party, which has refused to acquiesce in the name change, the United States government currently refers to the country as Burma, and I do the same."

We all should do the same. Burma it is.

Thank you.