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Honorary President
Aung Sang Suu kyi
"It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."
In the 2007 Michaelmas elections, the LSESU student body elected the Burmese opposition leader and human rights advocate, Aung San Suu Kyi, as their Honorary President.
In the general elections on 27 May 1990 nearly 8 million Burmese voters cast their vote for the National League for Democracy (NLD), giving the party 392 out of the 492 seats in the Burmese parliament. The ruling military junta annulled the results of the elections and placed the National League’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in house arrest, a punishment she had already experienced the year before due to her non-violent work for democracy and human rights.
Born in 1945, daughter of the assassinated Burmese independence leader General Aung San, Suu Kyi was brought up by her mother in Burma and India, and educated in Oxford and London. Her return to Burma to care for her dying mother in 1988 coincided with the mass student demonstrations for democratic reforms in August of that year, which were brutally repressed by the military junta. Suu Kyi entered politics, becoming co-founder and general secretary of the NLD in September 1988, and was put in house arrest for the first time in July 1989.
Aung San Suu Kyi has spent over 12 of the last 17 years in house arrest. When being given the offer of freedom on the condition that she leave Burma forever she has refused, preferring to stay with her people as a silent symbol of resistance to oppression. She remains separated from her sons, and was not allowed to see her British husband, who died in 1999, after he was diagnosed with cancer in 1997. She has received numerous awards for her Gandhi-inspired example of non-violent resistance, and is the only Nobel Peace Prize laureate in detention in the world today.
“Please use your liberty to promote ours.”