Nov. 13: The Burma pro-democracy leader, Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, was freed from seven-and-a-half years of house arrest on Saturday and was greeted at the gate of her compound by thousands of jubilant supporters.
She stood waving and smiling as people cheered, chanted and sang the national anthem in a blur of camera flashes. She held a white handkerchief in one hand. “Thank you for welcoming me like this,” she said, clutching the iron bars of her gate. “We haven’t seen each other for so long, I have so much to tell you.”
She said she would speak again on Sunday at the headquarters of her now defunct political party, the National League for Democracy. “We must unite!” she said. “If we are united, we can get what we want.”
Ms Kyi, 65, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has come to symbolise nonviolent resistance both within and outside Burma, and what the playwright Vaclav Havel called “the power of the powerless.” She had spent 15 of the last 21 years under house arrest, and her release had been the leading demand of West pressuring the junta on human rights and political freedom.
The junta did not make a public statement regarding her release. But her lawyer, Mr U. Nyan Win, was asked by someone in the crowd whether Ms Kyi was really free. “Yes,” he said. And shortly afterward, the barricades around her compound were removed, and the security men walked away.