The Man Who Couldn't Go Home - blog

[katty]

more:

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=231053014&blogID=393472163

Monday, May 12, 2008

The Man Who Couldn’t Go Home


"Can you imagine that the cyclone Nargis was not the punishment of God or Buddha, but the gift of senseless deforestation, including the chinese pulp mill--600,000 bamboo trees died everyday since 2004 for the mill alone."

-Aung Kyaw Soe



I received the above email on May 7th; six days after the cyclone tore unabated through Burma's Irrawaddy delta region. The forest gobbling pulp mill referenced in Aung Kyaw Soe's email had been the site of his first major battle as a human rights activist in Burma.

I first met Aung last January in northern Thailand. He looked like a haggard seventeen-year old, hardly five feet tall, small-framed with a smooth, open face that belied his courageous record as a defender of human rights. In a soft Burmese accent, Aung related the life-changing events that had landed him in Chiang Mai rather than his home in Rangoon.

"I had been invited to attend the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong, given a roundtrip ticket from Rangoon, accommodations everything provided. I left the 24th of August (2007). "

It was an opportunity the twenty-seven year old felt honored to have, the result of his efforts to bring international attention to the suffering of the Burmese people under the harsh rule of the military junta —considered one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world with the second largest army in Asia.

"But when I arrived in Hong Kong, I was greeted with the terrible news—the other members of my human rights organization back in Rangoon had all been arrested. Close friends. People I lived with."