Again and again we are witness to the armed fists of societies where might is right crushing the desire for freedom.
Again and again we witness the desire for freedom bloodied, yet gathering strength again to be heard despite the predictable response of tyrants and dictators.
The recent spectacle of this comes from Burma where the people’s desire for freedom from long suffocating nights of totalitarian control is once again brutally crushed.
The shaven-head Buddhist monks in saffron robes, sworn to a life of poverty and free from wants, took to the streets of Rangoon, Burma’s capital, in peaceful protests against the fivefold increases in price of essential commodities hitting hard the general populace living mostly in miserable economic conditions.
IT’S CALLED BURMA
I choose to stick with the names “Rangoon” and “Burma” in solidarity with the Burmese seeking freedom, instead of using the names “Yangon” and “Myanmar” adopted in 1989 by the thuggish generals in power.
These recent protests led by monks coincided with the 19th anniversary of the Aug. 8, 1988 popular movement against the ruling military clique. The 1988 movement also was organized by monks and students and led to an escalating demand for freedom and democracy.
That uprising was smashed by the military the following month with loss of lives estimated by human rights groups to exceed 3,000.
But the 1988 movement for democracy brought to the political forefront Aung San Suu Kyi, then 43, and daughter of Burma’s slain national hero Aung San.
As Nelson Mandela came to represent the face of South Africa’s struggle for freedom, similarly Aung San Suu Kyi has come to represent the face of Burma’s sacrifices for freedom against immense odds at home and the general lack of concern internationally about a distant country of which not much is known.
The 1988 movement made the ruling military clique relent somewhat and the generals organized an election in 1990 which Suu Kyi, despite being under house arrest, won handily leading her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).
The military clique, however, refuses to recognize the election results, keeps Suu Kyi under house arrest, and continues, with strategic support from China, to hold the Burmese prisoners in their own country.
In 1991 Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but the generals were unmoved. The head of the military clique, 73-year-old General Than Shwe and his associates, remain determined to deny Suu Kyi and the NLD the opportunity to free Burma from its shackled present.
It is up to the democracies of the West to show their words of support are not mere pieties as Burma writhes in the fists of tyrants, since the United Nations is a sham assembly where the world’s scoundrels gather with impunity and mock democracies.
HARPER’S CHANCE
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has a unique opportunity to emulate former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his role in getting Mandela to walk free again.
Harper could step forward to lead a campaign to help meet Burma’s needs.
Canadians can hope for such leadership to forge a coordinated effort by democracies to sever all external support to the Burmese generals, to leverage the West’s influence with China, Russia and Burma’s neighbours to break with the prison wardens of Aung San Suu Kyi and her people, and repeat Canada’s role in the making of South Africa’s freedom.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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