The brutal military junta ruling Burma has kept the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest most of the past 15 years. This living symbol of democracy and nonviolence, who will turn 60 on Sunday, continues to be surrounded by soldiers and barbed wire, her telephone cut, her mail intercepted, nearly all visitors prohibited.
Yet the people of Burma look to her still as the true leader of their country since her party, the National League for Democracy, won more than 80 percent of the seats in Parliament in 1990 elections that the junta nullified by force. And this week many people worldwide will gather to call for the release of Suu Kyi and all political prisoners and to urge democratic governments to match actions to their professed ideals.
There are guiding principles for those governments in the "Open Letter on the Occasion of Aung San Suu Kyi's 60th Birthday" signed by recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. "Many of us have witnessed sweeping changes in our own countries," the other Nobel laureates write. "We know that change will come" to Burma too. "But we also know from experience that tyranny does not crumble by itself. Freedom must be demanded and defended by those who have been denied it and by those who are already free."
The United States and other democracies have a chance to heed this plea at the meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Laos in late July. The Asean countries admitted the junta into their club eight years ago, credulously believing the dictators' pledge that they would democratize. Since Burma is scheduled to assume the chairmanship of Asean in 2006, the other members have to decide whether to risk alienating democracies elsewhere in the world by doing nothing or prevent the junta from taking the chairmanship.
When she goes to Laos for the Asean regional forum next month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has already called Burma under the generals an "outpost of tyranny," should make it plain that an illegitimate regime complicit in narcotics trafficking, forced labor, ethnic cleansing of minority peoples and the systematic raping of women and girls by soldiers must not be allowed to become the face that Asean shows to the world.