Aung San Suu Kyi’s son received a letter from the Nobel Peace Prize

What we told

A famous stranger was entering the light. In October 2023, Kim Aris, the youngest son of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese leader from 2016 to 2021, removed from power by a military coup, lent himself to the first portrait of his life in the written press, in M The magazine of the World. He who, at 46 years old, had been operating in the shadows for decades had decided to alert public opinion to the fate of his mother, sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison by the army which had dismissed her and placed her in complete isolation in a prison in Naypyidaw, the capital of Burma.

The son had no further news from his mother since the putsch of February 1, 2021, which ended ten years of democratic transition and plunged the country into a violent civil war between the junta and multiple guerrillas. Aged 78, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner, formerly under house arrest, would this time be detained in much more spartan conditions, deprived of medical care and contact with other prisoners. “I don’t want us to abandon him or forget him,” pleaded Kim Aris, whose father was the British Tibetologist Michael Aris, who died in 1999. Once a carpenter, the son lived in London, where his parents met. And now carries her mother’s voice internationally.

What has happened since

In mid-January 2024, a handwritten letter signed May may (” Mom “, in Burmese) arrived in London. Addressed to Kim Aris, the precious letter was given to him by the Foreign Office, the British equivalent of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After three years of waiting, Aung San Suu Kyi finally wrote to him from prison. “I was surprised,” admits his son, “but I immediately recognized his handwriting. »

The content of the letter is sober. The former leader, who is not used to speaking out, knows that this letter will be read and reread by her jailers. According to Kim Aris, she says she is doing well, but suffers from osteoporosis and tooth pain. “which prevent him from eating properly”. That the temperature in his cell suddenly dropped in November, with the arrival of the cool season in Burma. May she remain optimistic. May she think of her family, send them affection. But she does not deliver any messages of a political nature.

This proof of life, the first obtained by his relatives in three years, emerges as the junta suffers scathing defeats in several Burmese provinces. At the end of October 2023, an offensive led by three guerrillas in northern Shan State, in the east of the country, chased the military from strategic towns along the border with China, leading to the surrender of thousands of soldiers. This breakthrough galvanized the opposition and shed harsh light on the state of the troops of General Min Aung Hlaing, in power since the coup. Would the letter be a concession, a gesture of appeasement coming from a regime in dire straits? “It’s hard to know what the military has in mind, but I don’t think so,” says Kim Aris. They won’t even let my mother see her lawyers. »

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