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RACIAL TABOO IN BURMA COPIED FROM COLONIALISM DENIES FREEDOM AND POWER TO DAW AUNG SAN SUU KYI
DON'T FORGET - JUNE 19 IS ALSO "WOMEN OF BURMA" DAY!! Last year, the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma endorsed this day, declaring June 19 as National Womens Day in Burma. The military regime was so upset thatthey "retaliated" by declaring July 3 to be Myanmar Women's Day. We hope you will celebrate the "right" women's day, which is Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday - Since 1997 Burma activists and their supporters have celebrated June 19, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday, as Women of Burma Day, a time for all of us to express our solidarity and support for women of all backgrounds who have been resisting the military regime in Burma. Women of different ethnicity, religion, educational background and occupation continue to work for peace and democracy while living inside Burma, in the border camps, or in exile.
This flamboyantly decorated barge was rowed in triumph on the Royal Lakes in Rangoon on January 4, 1948, the day of Burma's independence from British colonial rule. Yet within weeks of the happy event, this beautiful country was enmeshed in a civil war that has run its brutal way to the present day. The very essence of the problems besetting Burma today have roots dating back to the decades of British colonial rule. As BURMA RUBY is the story of prejudice between races and social classes, so today the democratically elected leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner, pictured above has been deemed unsuitable for high office by the military junta because she married an Englishman and not a Burman . She has been under strict surveillance and her movements monitored for over six years in her own country for refusing to leave and abandon it to the dictatorship of SLORC, who smear her with the title "bogadaw", wife of a white alien, a British academic, which, the military rulers have said, disqualifies her from any political office or from ever becoming Burma's national leader. "The people of the country have strongly pledged to safeguard the nation against destructive threats of negative-viewed axe-handles in the country, and the neo-colonialists." Than Shwe, Senior General and Ceremonial Chairman of the SPDC said as Myanmar (Burma) marked its 51st anniversary of formal independence on January 4, 1999 with a flag raising ceremony in Rangoon. "We have always fought and vanquished all attempts by treasonous internal elements and self-seeking malevolent external threats to break up the union." Than Shwe added in his speech. Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) is often pilloried in the official press as an "axe-handle" -- a term used by the junta against people it considers agents of foreign governments. But it is rare for a top junta member to publicly attack the Nobel Peace Laureate, though she is often accused of conspiring with foreigners. On the same day the state-run press reported 256 more NLD resignations, as it the Military Junta continued its dismantling of the country's main opposition political party. However, The Nation, AFP, headline from Rangoon reads "Burmese Opposition Party badly bloodied but still defiant." Burma's generals may have effectively crushed the infrastructure of Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition but will find it harder to stifle a grassroots yearning for democracy, activists and diplomats said. In recent months, the military government has stepped up its campaign against Suu Kyi's political party, detaining nearly a thousand of its members and refusing to let them return home until they sign "voluntary resignation'' letters from the party. Although the government-run New Light of Myanmar reported that resignations were voluntary NLD leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has insisted they were coerced. The latest resignations, which came from members in Shan State and Ayewaddy Division, or province, bring resignations so far to nearly 700. Also yesterday, the Burmese junta said it had set a 6.2 percent growth target for 1999. No details were given, but the junta said it was paying special attention to avoiding the recent economic setbacks suffered by the rest of Asia. Several States
in the USA have passed laws penalising companies who do business with
the military regime currently controlling Burma, while Europe and Japan
stand idly by, mouthing platitudes, condoning business links with Burma
by their inaction. 4.20 am, January 4, 1999, was the 51st Anniversary of the astrologically auspicious hour when Burma gained her independence from British colonial rule. With bad news of that sad country unfolding daily, the story of fictional RUBY CAMERON will show how more than half a century of nationhood has changed little in this beautiful country. You will find women like RUBY in the English-speaking world anywhere from Britain and across the oceans in North America, New Zealand and Australia. The assassination of Aung San in 1947 and the outbreak of civil war after Independence in 1948, did what the Japanese could not in three years of brutal occupation, make her abandon the land she loved, where she was born. She will be over seventy, possibly widowed, with a large family carrying the legacy she bequethed them at birth, a legacy of the British Raj - the genes of an exotic land thousands of miles away. Her story is a montage of the many real lives of third and fourth generation settlers with British roots during the first half of this century, people who submitted, but never surrendered, to Japanese rule for three years. Her story reaches a climax with the assassination of Aung San, the one man who could have successfully unified Burma, on the eve of his country's independence. RUBY's tale is of her influence on a generation trapped in the brief, uniquely turbulent times of the final decades of the Raj, and of native peoples sandwiched between the alien colonial cultures of Britain and Japan, who survive both. I had the idea to write the BURMA RUBY QUARTET in 1991, shortly after elections in Burma, which Daw Aung San Suu Kyi won with an overwhelming majority. She was then denied her democratic mandate and confined to her house. My first two books are dedicated to her famous father and to herself. If you, or anyone you know, is interested in discussing Britain's colonial past as it applied to Burma, do please enter the forum:
Published in hardback for £15.95($25.99) in June 1996 by
Put pressure on your Government to stop trading with BURMA until DAW AUNG SAN SUU KYI is handed the reins of power.
Burma Ruby has had
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