Aung San Suu Kyi

I was dismayed by the May 16 editorial "On Trial in Burma," which included Thailand among the countries that the editorial said "had little or nothing to say" regarding the trial of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Quite the contrary. In a May 15 interview, Kasit Piromya, Thailand's foreign minister: -- Expressed his concerns regarding Aung San Suu Kyi's health and access to medical services. He welcomed the news that Burma's government had taken steps to ensure that she had adequate access to medical services.

RANGOON, BURMA — A new English word has entered colloquial Burmese, a word that could not even be uttered in public until recently. The word is "crony," and it describes the business elite who exploited their closeness to the country's military rulers to amass vast wealth in the past two decades. These well-connected elite made their money in industries such as construction, rubber and logging, as well as in arms dealing and drug smuggling. Their gains have only increased in the past two years, a...

YANGON, Myanmar -- Detained Myanmar pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi held talks Wednesday with a junta official, the second such meeting within a week following her call for a new era of cooperation, official sources said. The unannounced meeting between Suu Kyi and Relations Minister Aung Kyi at a government guest house near her lakeside home in Yangon lasted about half an hour, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Iraq Attackers kill 24 at Justice Ministry Attackers unleashed a carefully planned assault with car bombs and gunmen disguised as police on the Iraqi Justice Ministry on Thursday, killing at least 24 people as hundreds of others crouched terrified in their offices. The large and complex raid in the heart of downtown Baghdad came less than a week before the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The fighting lasted about an hour, ending with...

Chief Justice John Roberts last week did something that, in polarized Washington, may turn out to be more important than saving Obamacare . He showed that compromise can be consistent with principle. More than that: He showed that compromise, for someone who respects and knows how to use the democratic process, can be the best way to advance principle. It would have been unhealthy for the country if five Republican-appointed justices had nullified the Democratic-approved health-care law. Honoring...

Burmese opposition leader and former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi called Wednesday for an easing of U.S. sanctions on her country and targeted investment to help Burma shed its pariah past and crushing poverty. In an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters, the Nobel laureate expressed no bitterness toward the military regime that held her under house arrest for 15 years. She said her goal as an activist and politician is to promote lasting political reconciliation.

The elder stateswoman of the human rights struggle sat onstage in pearls and a floor-length traditionalskirt, pink roses pinned in her chignon. The shaggy-haired performance artist whose punk-rocker wife sits in a Moscow jail rose from the front row with the couple's 4-year-old daughter, who placed a bouquet of flowers in Aung San Suu Kyi 's lap. Four hundred young activists gathered Thursday at the steel-and-glass monument to the First Amendment...

IT HAS BEEN ALMOST a year since the world was stirred by thousands of Burmese monks and ordinary people taking to the streets to demand freedom -- and being bloodily crushed by one of the world's cruelest regimes. Governments everywhere proclaimed that such violence and repression could not stand, and they insisted that U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon do something. Mr. Ban sent his special envoy on a mission with explicit goals: Secure the release of democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, and help the National...

BIZARRE AND contemptible legal charges brought against Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who is due to be tried in Yangon on Monday, have produced a predictable but justified storm of outrage from Western democracies and the United Nations. Everyone from the British prime minister to Bono has condemned the prosecution of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and demanded her release. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has muted American outspokenness about human rights in several other countries and who previously ordered a review of U.S....

WITH BURMA moving toward democracy, there's no shortage of players willing to take some credit. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) said in a letter to The Post a couple of months ago that "without the intense efforts initiated from my office, including my groundbreaking visit to Burma in 2009, many of the democratic advances in Burma (also known as Myanmar) would not have taken place. " Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking on Sept. 19 as Burma's democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the Congressional Gold Medal , recounted her...

RANGOON, Burma — For most of two decades, while Aung San Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest, her deputy Win Tin was condemned to solitary confinement in prison, denied even pen and paper by his jailers. When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to bring democracy to Burma, he was comparatively forgotten by the outside world. But today, 83-year-old Win Tin is out of jail, free to write a weekly column and broadcast a weekly radio show, using satire to mercilessly mock...

Daw Su Su Nyunt squeezed my cupped hands, causing the grooved skin to bulge with definition. Using the fleshy road map as her guide, she read my future. "Foreigners and foreign countries are good for you," she said, peering at my life through a pair of broken eyeglasses. "2013 is good for travel, not only in Burma but in other countries. " Su Su, who works out of a tiny cube on a traffic island in Rangoon, has been making predictions about love, health, careers and travel since 1990.

When Burma's Zin Mar Aung was placed in solitary confinement in 1998 for trying to organize students, Bill Clinton was president of the United States. When she was released, Barack Obama was in the Oval Office. Zin Mar Aung says she had never heard of George W. Bush or his wife, Laura, who used her own bully pulpit to push for liberation of Burma's most famous political prisoner, democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, then under house arrest. Aung San Suu Kyi is known to many now because of the largely unacknowledged work of the...

RANGOON, Burma — For 15 years, Aung San Suu Kyi waited in her lakeside villa, confined to the small plot of land under house arrest, dreaming of her return to the world. On Monday, the world, or a big piece of it, came calling on her. The gates, topped with barbed wire, swung open, and a black presidential limousine pulled into the driveway. Out stepped President Obama , pressing his hands together and bowing ever so slightly — a gesture the Burmese democracy leader, dressed in...

WITH BURMA moving toward democracy, there's no shortage of players willing to take some credit. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) said in a letter to The Post a couple of months ago that "without the intense efforts initiated from my office, including my groundbreaking visit to Burma in 2009, many of the democratic advances in Burma (also known as Myanmar) would not have taken place. " Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking on Sept. 19 as Burma's democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the Congressional Gold Medal ,...

"SOMETIMES IT IS more difficult to learn to work together than to suffer individually," Aung San Suu Kyi observed to a Washington audience last week. Coming from a woman who has spent most of the past two decades in isolation, under house arrest, it was a striking statement. The Nobel Peace Prize winner from Burma was seeking support in Washington as her country, also known as Myanmar, emerges from a half-century of dictatorship. What seemed uppermost on her mind were the practical,...

The elder stateswoman of the human rights struggle sat onstage in pearls and a floor-length traditionalskirt, pink roses pinned in her chignon. The shaggy-haired performance artist whose punk-rocker wife sits in a Moscow jail rose from the front row with the couple's 4-year-old daughter, who placed a bouquet of flowers in Aung San Suu Kyi 's lap. Four hundred young activists gathered Thursday at the steel-and-glass monument to the First Amendment...

Some people find certain numbers to be of great significance. For example, the Chinese find the number 8 to be very lucky. Americans find 13 to be very unlucky. The big number this week is 47, as in the 47 percent of irresponsible, freeloading voters that Mitt Romney decided months ago he can't and won't try to win over. Turns out 47 percent has a historical place in presidential campaign history. President Richard M. Nixon may have been the first to employ it, using it to great effect 40...