Detained Suu Kyi to be made honorary Canadian citizen

by CAMPBELL CLARK — May 5, 2008

OTTAWA -- Canada will grant honorary citizenship to Myanmar's detained dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday in recognition of her long struggle for democracy, and those who pressed for the honour hope that images of the ceremony will make it to her homeland in outlawed broadcasts.

Ms. Suu Kyi has spent much of the past 18 years in detention and under house arrest in Myanmar, also known as Burma, since the military junta cancelled the results of a 1990 election won by her National League for Democracy.

Her cousin Sein Win, the Washington-based chairman of the NLD's government in exile, will accept the honorary citizenship from Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier.

The timing of the event was set solely because of schedules and logistics, a Foreign Affairs official said, although it happens to come just before a May 10 referendum on a new constitution drafted by Myanmar's military regime.

Ms. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, will become the fourth person, and the first woman, to be granted honorary citizenship - after Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who was honoured posthumously for his efforts to rescue Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust.

And although Ms. Suu Kyi's democratic movement is taboo in a country run by a regime that places strict controls on the news media, there is hope that the honour will have echoes with people in Myanmar.

The Montreal-based human-rights organization Rights and Democracy will film the ceremony and send the footage to the Democratic Voice of Burma, the dissident radio and satellite-TV network, now based in Norway, which beams illegal broadcasts into Myanmar.

"They will know that they're not isolated in their struggle against a vicious dictatorship," said Larry Bagnell, the Liberal MP who helped found the multi-partisan Parliamentary Friends of Burma, which pushed for the honorary citizenship. "They know the world is watching."

The group's push for the recognition of Ms. Suu Kyi and for tougher sanctions, backed by influential Conservative MPs such as Jason Kenney, now the junior minister for multiculturalism, became timely when last fall's September uprising was met with a harsh crackdown by Myanmar's military.

Mr. Bagnell said some wondered whether Canada was beginning to hand out honorary citizenships too often - Ms. Suu Kyi is the third since 2001 - but it was not a major obstacle. "I don't think there is a long line of people of that stature," he said.

Source:The Globe and Mail