Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was reunited yesterday with her youngest son, whom she last saw a decade ago, in an emotional moment at the Yangon airport 10 days after she was released from detention.
Kim Aris, 33, was finally granted a visa by the military regime after waiting for several weeks in Thailand.
Just before walking into the airport terminal, the 65-year old Aung San Suu Kyi, who was released on Nov. 13 after more than seven years under house arrest, told reporters: “I am very happy.”
PHOTO: EPA
Tears welled up in Aung San Suu Kyi’s eyes when she first saw her son. A smiling Aung San Suu Kyi slipped her arm around his waist as the two posed briefly for photographers and then they walked out of the airport holding hands.
Clearly showing support for his mother’s cause, Aris bared his left arm before airport security and the public to reveal a tattoo of the flag and symbol of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy. Aung San Suu Kyi looked at it closely and smiled. The flag and symbol feature a fighting peacock and a star.
Through her lawyer Nyan Win, Aung San Suu Kyi thanked the authorities for issuing the visa to her son, who resides in Britain and last saw his mother in December 2000. He has repeatedly been denied visas ever since by the ruling junta.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the 1991 Nobel Peace prize for her nonviolent struggle for democracy, was first arrested in 1989 when Kim was 11 and elder son Alexander 16. She has been detained for 15 of the past 21 years.
In an interview last week, Aung San Suu Kyi acknowledged that her years of political work had been difficult for her family.
“I knew there would be problems,” she said of her mid-life decision to go into politics. “If you make the choice you have to be prepared to accept the consequences.”
Aung San Suu Kyi, who was largely raised overseas, married the British academic Michael Aris and raised their two sons in England.
However, in 1988, at age 43, she returned home to take care of her ailing mother as mass protests were breaking out against military rule. She was quickly thrust into a leadership role, mainly because she was the daughter of Aung San, the country’s martyred founding father.
Elder son Alexander accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on his mother’s behalf in 1991 — while she was serving an earlier term of house arrest — and reportedly lives in the US.
Michael Aris died of prostate cancer in 1999 at age 53, after having been denied visas to see his wife for the three years leading up to his death. Aung San Suu Kyi has never met her two grandchildren.
While her family supported her, she said her sons had suffered particularly badly.
“They haven’t done very well after the breakup of the family, especially after their father died, because Michael was a very good father,” she said. “Once he was no longer there, things were not as easy as they might have been.”
However, she added that she always had their support.
“My sons are very good to me,” she said. “They’ve been very kind and understanding all along.”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS