Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

During the past several weeks we have seen in the media the names of two of world’s most respected female freedom fighters, including the farewelling of one who did her best to help her people. I refer to two courageous women who have forged their names indelibly in the world’s history books, Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, and the late Cory Aquino, a former president of the Philippines.

Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi has spent more than 14 of the past 20 years under house arrest and now, thanks to that country’s brutal and arrogant military regime, this will continue for at least another 18 months following a decision by Burmese courts on 11 August. The court handed Suu Kyi a three-year prison term for violation of an internal security law, but that was halved on the orders of the military government, which said the 64-year-old Nobel Peace Laureate could serve the time in her Yangon home. The decision has, quite rightly, brought wide condemnation from around the world.

Suu Kyi is the daughter of politically active parents. Her father, Aung San, founded the modern Burmese army and negotiated Burma’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1947 but was assassinated by his rivals in the same year. Her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, gained prominence as a political figure in the newly formed Burmese government and was appointed Burmese ambassador to India and Nepal in 1960.

Aung San Suu Kyi married Dr Michael Aris, a scholar of Tibetan culture, and the following year gave birth to their first of two sons. Sadly, Michael was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 and died on his 53rd birthday, on 27 March 1999. Prior to that, Suu Kyi had returned to Burma in 1988 to tend to her ailing mother and to subsequently lead the pro-democracy movement. She was not present when her husband died overseas as by that time Suu Kyi was under house arrest and knew that even if she had left Burma the regime would not allow her to return.

On 26 August 1988, Suu Kyi addressed half a million people at a mass rally in front of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, calling for a democratic government. However, in September the military junta took power and later that same month the National League for Democracy was formed, with Suu Kyi as general secretary. On 20 July 1989 she was placed under house arrest. Suu Kyi has been placed under house arrest on numerous occasions since she began her political career, and during these periods, she has been prevented from meeting her party supporters, international visitors including the Secretary General of the United Nations, and international media. She has appealed against her detention, and many nations and world figures, including the Pope, have continued to call for her release and that of 2,100 other political prisoners in the country.

In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and to this have been added many other awards including the Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Peace and Reconciliation, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Jawaharlal Nehru Award and Honorary Companion of the Order of Australia.

This latest saga occurred when an American man identified as John Yettaw swam across Inya Lake to her house on 3 May this year, with Suu Kyi subsequently being arrested on 13 May for violating the terms of her house arrest. There is no doubt that the court case was fabricated by the barbaric military regime to keep the charismatic Suu Kyi out of circulation ahead of next year’s polls. While Suu Kyi will spend another 18 months under house arrest, the American who caused this outrage has been freed and is now in a Bangkok hospital. The court’s decision simply reinforces the world view that the brutal Burmese military regime is made up of terrified old men who will stop at nothing to retain their hold on power.

On a brighter note, Suu Kyi, who once opposed tourism to Burma, is now encouraging it. She now believes, according to the United Kingdom newspaper the Telegraph of 14 August this year, that tourism should be encouraged:

... provided it is run through private operations and not through the government, and that visitors might help draw attention to the oppression of the people by the military junta. She has made her views known through a close acquaintance and former member of her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).

Finally, I refer to the late Cory Aquino, who was the sixth of eight children in what was considered to be one of the richest Chinese-Mestizo families in the Philippines. Mrs Aquino was largely educated in the United States and returned to the Philippines in 1954, where she married Benigno Aquino Jr, the son of a former speaker of the national assembly, and had five children.

During her husband’s political career, Mrs Aquino remained in his shadow, although he consulted her regularly on political matters because he valued her judgments enormously. Benigno Aquino was jailed by President Marcos during the early 1970s. He was subsequently permitted to live in exile in Boston before he returned to the Philippines, without his family, on 21 August 1983 only to be assassinated on a staircase leading to the tarmac of the Manila international airport. I was actually in the Philippines at the time of the assassination. Cory Aquino and her family returned for his funeral and participated in many of the mass actions that were staged during the two years following the assassination of her husband.

When Marcos unexpectedly announced a snap presidential election to be held in February 1986, Aquino became, at first, a reluctant presidential candidate despite pleas that she was the only person who could unite the opposition against Marcos. However, clad in her trademark yellow, Cory Aquino proved to be a formidable and fearless campaigner. She vowed to dismantle the dictatorial edifice built by Marcos in his two decades in power and eliminate corruption. After protracted vote-counting marked by fraud and violence, on 16 February 1986 a rubber-stamp legislature officially proclaimed the re-election of Marcos to a new six-year term. Cory Aquino launched a civil disobedience campaign in protest. Millions of Filipinos responded and three days after the revolt began Marcos was forced to flee to the United States, where he died in 1989, and Cory Aquino took over as president.

The ouster of a dictatorship through non-violent popular protest became the model for democracy movements all over the world, and Mrs Aquino was named Time magazine’s Woman of the Year for 1986. In her six tumultuous years in office, Mrs Aquino resisted seven coup attempts or military revolts, battled a persistent communist insurgency and grappled with the effects of typhoons, floods, droughts, a major earthquake and a devastating volcanic eruption. As president, Cory Aquino also won the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award, the United Nations Silver Medal, and the Canadian International Prize for Freedom. She died on 1 August at the age of 76 after a battle with colon cancer. She was a true freedom fighter for the Philippines.

It is easy for Australians to take liberty for granted when they have never had it taken from them, but for the people of Burma and the Philippines, Aung San Suu Kyi and Cory Aquino have been courageous and determined fighters for freedom. Without them, the world would have been much the poorer.