Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma

Aung San Suu Kyi was born in Rangoon, Burma on June 19, 1945. She got her B.A. at Oxford University, went to New York and London for graduate studies, began research and publishing very early in her career. Her political career began in 1988 upon resignation of General Ne Win, who was the military dictator in Burma since 1962. There were mass uprisings and voter suppression by the military, killing thousands. The State Law & Order Restoration Council was established at this time to crack down on political gatherings for democracy.

Su Kyi got involved by making public speeches and writing letters to the government. The same year the National League for Democracy was formed with her as general-secretary. It was focused on non-violent resistance and struggle for democracy in Burma. In 1989 she was placed under house arrest. Despite her detention, NLD won the election with 82% of parliamentary seats. The SLORC refused to recognize the results and continued her detention until 1995, July. She could not even travel to accept the Nobel Peace Prize that she was awarded in 1991. She received other human rights prizes for her unbroken will for the fight for democracy and human rights in Burma.

Peace to the world...

On September 29, 1988 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. Some portions of the Acceptance Speech:

We are now at a time of extraordinary hope and promise for the United Nations, after a long period when the spectre, and too often the grim reality of war have darkened our planet, there is a new mood of understanding and common sense, a new determination to move away from international conflict and devote ourselves instead to the immense task of building a better world. Recently, we have seen several conflicts give way to negotiation and conciliation...

In the past forty years we have experienced perhaps the most revolutionary period in all of human history. The instruments of war have been developed to the point where war itself has become a futile anachronism, an anachronism so expensive and terrifying that even the richest and most powerful countries can no longer afford to contemplate it. We have redrawn the political map of the world so that for the first time in history the international community is not dominated by competing empires, but consists of more than 160 independent sovereign states. Thus collective responsibility for peace can be evolved in a truly representative international system. At the same time, the technological revolution of the past forty years, which has radically changed the way people live, work and communicate, presents enormous opportunities as well as grave risks. We must now reflect upon these changes and start to assimilate them.

Nadine Gordimer

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa in 1923... In 1991 she received the Nobel Prize in Literature... In the Banquet Speech she said (here):

Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations. We writers do not have the encouragement and mateyness I imagine, and even observe, among people whose work is a group activity. We are not orchestrated; poets sing unaccompanied, and prose writers have no cue on which to come in, each with an individual instrument of expression to make the harmony or dissonance complete. We must live fully in order to secrete the substance of our work, but we have to work alone. From this paradoxical inner solitude our writing is what Roland Barthes called 'the essential gesture' towards the people among whom we live, and to the world; it is the hand held out with the best we have to give.

When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas'. It was the dream of my contemporaries, white and black, to venture there as the only way to enter the world of artists. It took the realization that the colour bar - I use that old, concrete image of racism - was like the gate of the law in Kafka's parable, which was closed to the supplicant throughout his life because he didn't understand that only he could open it. It took this to make us realize that what we had to do to find the world was to enter our own world fully, first. We had to enter through the tragedy of our own particular place.

If the Nobel awards have a special meaning, it is that they carry this concept further. In their global eclecticism they recognize that no single society, no country or continent can presume to create a truly human culture for the world. To be among laureates, past and present, is at least to belong to some sort of one world.

Africa and its troubles...

The true story of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 can be glimpsed from the heart-aching book by Immaculee Ilibagiza "Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan genocide." It is startling to read the account of this Catholic woman, born in the province of Kibuye, in the village of Mataba, who hid in a secret bathroom from the killers and survived to tell the story of her family, her friends and country enmeshed in inhuman violence... It is also revealing to read how she learned to forgive and heal guided by her new-founded faith in God.
... Wangari Muta Maathai (above) was born on April 1, 1940 in Ihithe village, Tetu division, Nyeri District of Kenya. In 2004 she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her political and environmental activism...