Interviews with Khin Ohmar

I do learn and cherish and take inspiration for my ongoing struggle from the struggle including South Africa and East Timor. And even though there are many differences of the struggles between Burma and South Africa and East Timor, the core of our struggle, the bottom line of our struggle, are all the same, is that the freedom, democracy, and human rights.

So I do look up to, starting from the very respectful leader, like Nelson Mandela, [former guerrilla leader and later President East Timor] Xanana Gusmao and [resistance spokesman and later President of East Timor José] Ramos-Horta. Those are people who I always look into how they also organize and mobilize their people, and led their people to lift up with this spirit for freedom, and continue their struggle and their fight for freedom, until they get to their day when the light comes.

And for me personally, now it’s 22 years. It’s quite long. I told my mother that “I’ll be back home in three months.” I had no idea where this is going to lead, and how long this is going to take. But you know, after 22 years, I look back, and I don’t regret what I have done and what I’m doing and how I will continue, you know, until the day that I die. Even if I don’t see the fruits of this struggle, I will still carry on.

Because when I think of what Nelson Mandela did, 27 years in prison, Xanana, and even particularly my personal hero I will say – I don’t even want to use the word as “hero.” But I would say my personal teacher is Aung Saw Suu Kyi because Daw Aung Saw Suu Kyi, I mean she’s a mother of two, you know? She was still young when she entered this whole movement.

When she started, she was only 45. I remember. And she didn’t have to, with her life, having a very comfortable life in England with her husband and the whole family, she didn’t have to do what she is doing for the people of Burma now. But she is doing that, and she has been.

And for me, whenever she had a chance to send a message out from that house where she lives alone, every single time she was able to send a message out, even with the time of [Ibrahim] Gambari, the UN special envoy, or meeting with this U.S. Assistant Secretary Kurt Campbell or anybody; when you actually follow what she’s been saying, after all these years being in prison in one house alone by herself, it’s a spirit that you just can’t even imagine, you know?

I mean sometime, yes, I get disappointed and frustrated in this 22-year struggle sometimes. I feel like to the point of maybe that’s it, for me to even take a break, you know? I thought about taking breaks from time to time. But I don’t. And I can’t. And I’m not able to take a break. It’s because when I think of Daw Aung Suu Kyi still in prison; when I think of Nelson Mandela, 27 years, and now South Africa is free.

Khin Ohmar is a Burmese democracy activist who lives and works in Mae Sot, Thailand. She is a leader of the Women’s League of Burma, the main umbrella organization for women’s organizations in exile and inside Burma.

Khin has served as a spokesperson for the Burmese democracy movement in the United Nations General Assembly and in other international forums. She also serves as coordinator of the Burma Partnership, a regional coalition of civil society groups supporting democracy in Burma, and she is an organizer of the ASEAN civil society and human rights consultation processes.

Admitted to the United States as a refugee after being persecuted for her participation in the 1988 student demonstrations, Khin became a United States citizen and worked for refugee and human rights organizations in Washington, D.C., before moving back to the Thai-Burma border area in the late 1990s.

Burma, a Southeast Asian country with about 57 million people, is ruled by a military regime that seized power in 1962. Although the reformist National League for Democracy (NLD) won overwhelmingly in a 1990 election, the country’s military rulers ignored the results and arrested NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 “for her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.” The military government held a referendum on a new constitution in 2008 and a parliamentary election in 2010, neither of which was regarded by international observers as free or fair, and both of which resulted in overwhelming majorities for pro-government positions and candidates. The military regime has committed widespread and systematic human rights violations, including extrajudicial killing, torture, rape, and denial of freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion.

Throughout its existence, the regime has been at war with a number of Burma’s ethnic minority groups. Ethnic minority voters overwhelmingly supported the NLD in the 1990 election, and after the suppression of the democracy movement several of these groups continued or resumed armed resistance to the de facto government. Although the government signed cease-fire agreements with several of these groups ostensibly granting them autonomy within their respective regions, the Burmese military has used a range of brutal techniques, including the killing of civilians, forced labor, rape, and the destruction of homes, crops, and villages, in cease-fire zones as well as in areas where there is still armed resistance.

In 2007, as on several previous occasions, there were mass demonstrations throughout the country demanding freedom and democracy. The 2007 demonstrations were led by Buddhist monks and eventually became known as the “Saffron Revolution” after the color of the monks’ robes. The armed forces brutally suppressed these demonstrations—estimates of the number of protestors killed range from 31 to several thousand—and intensified popular dissatisfaction with the government by the killing, beating, and public humiliation of monks.

The nominally civilian government resulting from the 2010 election has been widely regarded as a façade for continuing military rule. However, in October 2011, the government released 206 of Burma’s estimated 2,000 prisoners of conscience. The next month, the government announced that it would soon release all remaining political prisoners. The NLD, which had declined to participate in the 2010 election, registered to participate in the next election and announced that Aung San Suu Kyi would be among the NLD candidates.

Although the military regime announced in 1989 that it had changed the English name of the country from Burma to “Myanmar,” the United States government and other international supporters of democracy in Burma have generally continued to call the country Burma because this is the name preferred by Aung San Suu Kyi and other democracy advocates who won the 1990 election.