The youngest son of Myanmar’s ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi has called on the military to free her from jail.
“I can’t let my mother languish in prison,” Kim Aris told BBC Burmese in an exclusive interview in London, and urged the world to do more to help her.
Ms Suu Kyi was handed a 33-year sentence in a series of trials after a coup toppled her government in 2021.
Myanmar has since spiralled into a civil war, which has killed tens of thousands of people.
Mr Aris, a British national, says the army has not given him any information about his mother or the condition of her health. He says he has tried contacting the Burmese embassy, the British Foreign Office and the International Red Cross but none of them have been able to help.
“Before this, I didn’t want to speak to the media or get involved too much,” Mr Aris said in his first-ever interview with international media. He hadn’t spoken out when his mother was detained in for nearly 15 years between 1989 and 2010.
“It was better that I stayed out of politics. My mother never wanted me to be involved. But now that she has been sentenced, and the military are clearly not being reasonable, I think I can say what I want.”
Awarded the Nobel peace prize, Ms Suu Kyi was one of the world’s leading democracy icons. Her release from nearly 15 years of detention in 2010 was celebrated in Myanmar and around the world. But she was later criticised for defending her country against allegations of genocide at the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) after widespread claims that Myanmar had committed atrocities against Muslim Rohingya while her government was in power. Nearly a million of them have fled Myanmar in recent years, and now live as refugees in neighbouring Bangladesh.
Mr Aris did not respond to BBC’s questions about the criticisms of his mother before the coup, preferring instead to focus on her current plight.
Ms Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest following the coup, was moved to solitary confinement last year in a prison in the capital Nay Pyi Taw. Almost no news of her has emerged in the last two years. She was also rumoured to have been ill, but the the military denied the reports.
Mr Aris has also urged the international community to resolve the crisis in Myanmar, where the war’s toll continues to rise as the army uses deadly weaponry and air strikes to crush resistance.
He says the international community must start “doing something, including putting a proper arms embargo on the military, and even supporting those who are trying to fight the military”.
Despite sanctions and international isolation, Myanmar continues to import weapons, and the raw materials to make them.
He adds that they must also “start lobbying more strongly” for the release of his mother. He also urged the world to provide “proper aid for the people of Burma who are going through such hard times… and have nobody supporting them, other than the people of Burma”.
Mr Aris and his brother have been mostly separated from their mother since 1988, when Ms Suu Kyi, or “the Lady” as she is known, returned to Myanmar from the UK to care for her ailing mother.
The daughter of independence hero General Aung San, she emerged as a leader of the pro-democracy movement against the military dictatorship. She co-founded the National League for Democracy (NLD), but was put under house arrest in 1989.
In 1991, when she couldn’t leave Myanmar for fear of not being able to return, Mr Aris, 14 years old then, received the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf. She did not go back to see her husband before he died of cancer in 1999.
Mr Aris finally visited her in 2010 when she was released from detention. Before he left, he gave her a puppy he bought from a market in Yangon as a gift.
“He was the only puppy among all the other puppies in the cage that was actually awake… So he was the one that came home with me,” he recalls. “And since then, he’s proved a very faithful companion to my mother.”
In 2015, Ms Suu Kyi became the de facto leader after leading the NLD to a landslide victory following the first free elections to be held in the country in 25 years. Despite her fall from grace, she continues to be a hugely popular figure among the Burmese.
Taichito is still alive and Mr Aris is confident that he will soon be reunited with Ms Suu Kyi.
“The military will never win this war. It’s just a matter of how much longer it goes on,” he says. “The sooner they hand back power to my mother, and the democratically elected government, the sooner things can start to progress in their country.”
Sandar Win and Moe Myint are journalists with the BBC Burmese and based in London.
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