Suu Kiy's 4,000 Days In Isolation













What's the longest period of time you've been away from your family? A week, ten days on a business trip? Imagine, if you can, spending 4,000 days under house arrest.

That's the milestone (or should it be millstone) that Aung San Suu Kyi passed on Monday. 4,000 days since she was first confined to the family villa on Rangoon's Inya Lake back in 1988. It's not the first time I've mentioned the leader of Burma's National League For Democracy (NLD) on my blog and it won't be the last. In an age where we are obsessed with the mundane and the trivial this is a woman who has been sent to what is effectively internal exile because she dared to hold views contrary to those of the ruling junta. Even when in 1990, two years after she had been placed under house arrest, her party won a landslide victory in the general elections she was not granted freedom.

Now she spends the day doing what? Nobody knows, the only human contact she has is the maid who has been her companion since the beginning of her internment. The status of her house arrest has been extended to forbid her from attending to her garden, so now she is truly housebound.

On Tuesday the Information Minister, Brigadier General Kyaw Hsaan finally admitted that the NLD had indeed won the majority of seats in 1990 but he countered the announcement by saying that "the voters did not know what they were doing, did not understand the NLD's politics or it's policies." He went on to add that in his opinion, " there was no need to meet or discuss the NLD again."

It's easy to be cynical about politics these days, particularly if you are under 70 and haven't had to fight for the right to vote in a democracy - but when you look at the bigger picture this is one brave woman who refused to change her principles and looks likely, unless the UN authorise military intervention in Burma, to spend the rest of her life as a prisoner in her own home.