Guest contributor
Alan Clements
Myanmar’s detained Nobel Peace laureate and former State Counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi, led the country’s democratically elected civilian government before the military seized power in February 2021.
Her captivity belongs to a longer history: the tens of thousands jailed across decades for challenging military rule, and the thousands of political prisoners who remain detained today.
Each has a name, a family, a life interrupted. Her global prominence places a responsibility on those of us demanding her freedom: to bring the others into the world’s hearing alongside her.
On October 22, Kim Aris was finally allowed to speak with his mother for the first time in more than five years.
Detained since the February 2021 coup, she has now spent more than 20 years in prison or under house arrest across successive periods of military rule—roughly a quarter of her life.
A son heard his mother’s voice. Behind that reunion are countless families still waiting for theirs. We should welcome that conversation. We should not confuse an exception granted by the authorities with a right restored.
The voice being withheld belongs to a woman whose significance reaches beyond her captivity.
Through my conversations with Daw Suu, I came to understand a vision of freedom in which dialogue could interrupt the momentum toward destruction, reconciliation could break the inheritance of revenge, and political courage could include addressing the humanity of an adversary.
These possibilities remain among the most urgently needed—and most readily dismissed—in our world.
In September, Kim launched “Free Her,” renewing his demand for his mother’s release and the freedom of all those unjustly imprisoned in Myanmar.
My colleague Fergus Harlow and I have spent years advancing another appeal: “Use Your Freedom.” Together, these words form a shared call to action. “Free Her” names the task. “Use Your Freedom” asks what each of us will do to advance it.
My relationship with Burma began nearly half a century ago. I lived there as a Buddhist monk, studying with Mahasi Sayadaw and Sayadaw U Pandita, before becoming a committed supporter of the country’s nonviolent struggle for democracy.
The questions that drew me into meditation followed me into political life: how does fear become obedience? How does suffering become cruelty? Can we confront oppression without allowing the oppressor to determine who we become?
In 1995 and 1996, during six months of conversations held under the dangers and restrictions of dictatorship, I sat with Daw Suu at her home in Rangoon for what became The Voice of Hope.
We shared a teacher, Sayadaw U Pandita, the Burmese meditation master whose exacting instruction brought attention to the intentions beneath our actions.
That kinship gave our discussions a depth beyond political analysis. We were exploring the relationship between the liberation of consciousness and the liberation of a country.
What remains most compelling to me is her insistence on keeping human possibility open across the dividing line of enmity. An adversary could be confronted, challenged, held responsible—and still addressed as someone capable of choosing differently.
In a political world that often treats an enemy’s capacity for change as a dangerous illusion, this was a demanding proposition. How could we seek a change in someone’s conduct while refusing to address that person as capable of change?
There is nothing passive about that question. Dialogue requires the courage to state what has happened, to hear what is difficult, and to remain present without surrendering one’s judgment.
Reconciliation worthy of the name must require truth, accountability, and respect for the dignity of those harmed. Otherwise, it becomes another arrangement through which the powerful ask the wounded to absorb the cost of peace.
To speak to the heart of an adversary is to seek whatever capacity for responsibility survives there. It offers a person a way to cease doing harm without pretending that the harm never happened.
For governments and mediators, the challenge is to preserve that possibility without rewarding coercion or bargaining away the rights of its victims. The invitation to change must be accompanied by measures that protect people if it is refused.
Daw Suu is also a woman confronting a military hierarchy in which men have long monopolized coercive power.
Her presence challenges a dominator’s understanding of leadership: command, submission, the suppression of dissent. In the vision she articulated to me, authority must earn trust, listen across difference, and remain answerable to the people.
She evokes for me an archetypal woman whose courage enlarges our understanding of power. The qualities at stake are human capacities, available to every gender.
Yet a woman asserting them against entrenched male authority gives them a particular political force: the capacity to remain in relationship without submitting, to listen without abandoning conviction, and to seek reconciliation without surrendering conscience.
Her age makes release urgent; her rights make it necessary. The vision of leadership she articulated also reaches beyond the circumstances of her detention.
It concerns the unfinished work of ending war, resisting dictatorship, and creating institutions through which people can live together without requiring one another’s submission.
My support for Burma’s struggle brought expulsion, vilification in state-controlled media, and seventeen years on a blacklist. When then-President Thein Sein lifted the ban on my return, the work continued.
With Fergus Harlow, it became the four-volume Burma’s Voices of Freedom, preserving the testimony of former political prisoners and others whose lives had sustained the democratic struggle.
That work continues amid renewed threats against Myanmar’s independent media and journalists in exile, accompanied by calls in the regime’s press for the “elimination” of those it deems destructive, inside or outside the country.
Fergus’s research and journalism have been indispensable to this ongoing work: examining evidence, preserving testimony, and documenting the convictions of people whose freedom the authorities had taken but whose voices they had not extinguished.
These encounters revealed how much courage survives outside the world’s attention. Daw Suu’s name should carry us toward those other lives.
Kim’s campaign already calls for all political prisoners to be freed. Our task is to give that solidarity substance, using the attention her name commands to make visible the student, journalist, organizer, and countless others whose names have never reached a foreign headline.
The case for their release rests on a principle larger than any individual: no government should be permitted to imprison people for peacefully exercising their political rights.
Respecting those rights is an obligation, not a concession the authorities may grant when convenient.
We should also resist making her release conditional upon what we hope she will accomplish afterward. She must be free to choose her role, to speak in her own words, to rest, to participate, to spend time with family.
Burma’s future belongs to its people in their diversity, including younger generations and ethnic communities whose political visions deserve full expression. Releasing her would restore a voice to that conversation; no single voice can substitute for the conversation itself.
For those of us outside captivity, the question becomes practical.
What freedom do we possess that could serve another person’s freedom? A classroom, a newspaper column, a congregation, a stage, an elected office, the ability to gather without fearing arrest: each offers room for action.
We can support Free Her and Use Your Freedom, bring prisoners’ testimony to wider audiences, sustain independent Myanmar journalism, and build public commitments that outlast a passing wave of attention.
For heads of government, foreign ministers, and regional leaders, the release of political prisoners must become a sustained diplomatic priority.
They should press for the immediate, unconditional release of Daw Suu and all those arbitrarily detained. While detention continues, they should insist on regular private family contact, access to independent medical professionals, and appropriate care.
ASEAN member states and other governments with channels to Myanmar’s authorities should coordinate those demands and seek independently verifiable progress.
Each government should assign clear responsibility for pursuing them and report publicly on progress wherever doing so would not endanger detainees or negotiations. Limited concessions must not be allowed to substitute for release.
A photograph, a visit, or a telephone call must be assessed against the rights still withheld. Basic human dignity must never become currency exchanged for diplomatic recognition.
Those within Myanmar bear risks many of us do not. People with greater protection should carry a greater share of visible advocacy, guided by those whose safety is at stake.
Artists can bring audiences; universities can bring scholarship and public attention; religious communities can bring disciplined compassion; citizens can require answers from their representatives. These efforts should reinforce one another and continue after the cameras leave.
No one can honestly promise that such efforts will secure release tomorrow. But an organized, sustained public demand can raise the political cost of continued detention.
It makes forgetting harder. It requires officials to answer questions they might prefer to outlast. It keeps human beings present in decisions that would otherwise reduce them to instruments of political advantage.
This is why I want these two appeals heard together. “Use Your Freedom” asks us to put the freedoms we possess at the service of those denied them.
“Free Her” gives that responsibility an immediate purpose. Beyond the prison door lies the larger work: a world in which dialogue has institutions strong enough to sustain it, reconciliation includes the wounded, and power must answer to those whose lives it governs.
The leadership required for that work begins with choices available now: whether to speak, whom to include, what to insist upon, and how long to remain engaged.
Governments possess influence; institutions possess reach; individuals possess freedoms that can become consequential when exercised together. None of us commands the outcome. Each of us can contribute to the conditions that make change possible.
A son’s conversation with his mother should require neither a global campaign nor a government’s exceptional permission. It should be ordinary.
The freedom to speak about conscience, courage, and coexistence should belong to her again—and to everyone whose voice detention has silenced.
Use your freedom. Free her. Free them all.
Let us act while those imprisoned can still live the freedom we demand for them—and choose for themselves what comes next.
Alan Clements is an author, investigative journalist, spoken-word artist, former Buddhist monk, and longtime advocate for Burma’s nonviolent struggle for freedom. A student of Mahasi Sayadaw and Sayadaw U Pandita—the latter also a teacher of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi—he has spent decades documenting the lives and convictions of people resisting authoritarian rule.
His Burma-related books include The Voice of Hope, his conversations with Aung San Suu Kyi; Burma: The Next Killing Fields?; Burma’s Revolution of the Spirit, the photographic book co-authored with Leslie Kean; and the four-volume Burma’s Voices of Freedom, co-authored with Fergus Harlow. With Harlow, he co-created the Use Your Freedom Global Campaign. His wider work explores nonviolence, conscience, reconciliation, and the responsibility to act.
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