Aung San Suu Kyi: Free at Last!

photo from New York Times/European Pressphoto

I am so happy to relay this news… news that many people thought might never come to pass:

After days of rumors, it’s now official: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the bodhisattva of Burma and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is now free after 21 years of detention and house arrest.

As the New York Times reported this morning, she was “greeted at the gate of her compound by thousands of jubilant supporters.” The article goes on to say:

She stood waving and smiling in a pink, long-sleeved shirt, as people cheered, chanted and sang the national anthem in a blur of camera flashes. She held a white handkerchief in one hand.

“Thank you for welcoming me like this,” she said, clutching the iron bars of her gate as she looked out at the cheering crowd. “We haven’t seen each other for so long, I have so much to tell you.”

She said she would speak again on Sunday at the headquarters of her now defunct political party, the National League for Democracy.

“We must unite!” she said. “If we are united, we can get what we want.”

There is much more to say about what happens in Burma next, of course, but in this moment, let us rejoice that this woman who has given so much of her life for the freedom of her brothers and sisters in Burma can now taste freedom herself.