Another excellent film to recommend: Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, an award-winning documentary that follows some young Burmese journalists, armed with cameras,  risking torture and life imprisonment to shoot footage of the 2007 uprising led by Buddhist monks. During the protest, some 100,000 Burmese citizens took to the streets. The footage, smuggled out of the country, documents the brutal clashes between citizens and the military. Burma VJ is currently running on HBO.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party is now illegal. The National League for Democracy was disbanded on May 6.  21 years after the electoral victory never accepted by the military junta and Aung San Suu Kyi’s 14 years of house arrest, the League is declared illegal because it refused to register for the upcoming elections.

And, of course, Aung San Suu Kyi is still a prisoner . . . But, the Rangoon City Development Committee has issued an order giving the 64-year-old Nobel laureate permission to repair the roof of her house, badly damaged by storms in 2008.

Suu Kyi is Buddhist. She meditates daily and “memorizes” Buddhist sutras. In her acceptance message for the 1990 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1991, published as Freedom from Fear, she wrote:

It would be difficult to dispel ignorance unless there is freedom to pursue the truth unfettered by fear. With so close a relationship between fear and corruption it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife corruption in all forms becomes deeply entrenched.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s pages here. You can also visit Amnesty International where you too can stand with her and the people of Burma.

Update: Suu Kyi supporters to form new political party.

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