Amaryllis Fox

Amaryllis Fox Instagram – I first went to Myanmar in Sep of 1999 as a teenage student journalist to interview Aung San Suu Kyi.
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Suu Kyi was then a global peace icon. Her country was in the grip of a brutal military regime, which tortured and killed its opponents, banned the internet, and exterminated its indigenous peoples.
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Members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) were forbidden from speaking with the press. Even as a student journalist, I was detained by military police & eventually deported for interviewing Suu Kyi.
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It was a grim time, but the weak flicker of democracy’s flame — protected and nurtured by activists meeting in secret attics and hidden basements — was growing slowly brighter.
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I didn’t return to Yangon until 2015, when that democratic flame seemed to have finally lit up the nation. I stood in the street outside NLD Headquarters, in the very spot where I had been arrested in 1999, and instead of military convoys and barbed wire, the road was full of democracy flags and jubilant singing, as the NLD won the country’s first free and fair election in a landslide.
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Even then, in the midst of that heart-swelling spasm of hope, the cracks in Burma’s fragile democratic experiment were beginning to show. Suu Kyi was struggling, often failing, to to be the noble leader we all expected. The hard-fought progress toward freedom was beginning to slip away, even as the world toasted its success.
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Fast forward to last night’s military coup. Democratic leaders rounded up and detained. Internet access and news channels gone dark. International airport shuttered. A year-long state of military emergency declared.
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In many ways, it feels like 1999 all over again. The Burma of caged windows & military checkpoints. How fleeting were those songs that flooded the streets in 2015. But I know in my soul they will be back. It may take years, but too many brave Burmese activists have fought for too long to give up now. Their dream of democracy will be realized once more. And until that day, we must stand with them. Advocate for them. And remember alongside them that government of, by, and for the people is a most fragile and precious treasure, both at home and overseas. | Posted on 02/Feb/2021 04:41:40