Hommage to Aung San Suu Kyi (again)

I posted this illustration on my old blog last year, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi. Now she’s making headlines once again, as some of the monks who have taken to the streets to protest against the military dictatorship marched by her home in Rangoon (Yangon). As this happens on the other side of the world, a guy named Sean left me a nice and uplifting comment over at my ex blog where he compares my illustration to the famous Che Guevara graphic, and calls Suu Kyi a “brave peace warrior”. Because the other server may be taken down soon, I’ll publish the comment and the original post here. Just click the image to see it.

The story behind this illustration is a bit out of the ordinary. It was the first time I spent several weeks in a foreign country to do research that later was used for an illustration! In fact, in 2003, I travelled in Burma (Myanmar) as an undercover journalist (anything else than undercover would be both stupid and dangerous). This was not long after the military leaders had let Suu Kyi’s political party NLD (National League for Democracy) reopen offices around the country. I talked to NLD’s spokesman U Lwin who is …

… the party’s voice when Suu Kyi is in house arrest. I took pictures at their headquarters both in Rangoon and in another part of the country, where I also interviewed the local party leader. In order to protect the people I talked to I won’t go in details, but I took pictures all along the way of course, and a few of those pictures are used in this illustration. I used the bird and the star from the NLD flag and the picture of Aung San Suu Kyi that hung on the wall behind the local leader I interviewed.

I also did an interview with the Moustache Brothers in Mandalay, comedians who became world famous because they had to serve seven years of hard labor after poking fun at the military leaders. Thanks to Amnesty International and secret negotiations by Suu Kyi, they were released and are now back in business. They run their show every night, where they collected money for their families and attention to their political cause. But they are only allowed to perform to foreigners. Their work as village clowns, a discipline with long traditions in rural Burma, is history, it seems.

The brothers gave me this picture of Aung San Suu Kyi together with moustache brother U Pa Pa Lay before the 1990 election where NLD brought home three fourths of the votes. They wanted me to give it to the Burmese radio station in Oslo, Norway, but since I never managed to contact anybody there, I kept it. So if any of you know the Burmese radio people… email me!

My articles were published by various Norwegian newspapers as well as in a magazine funded by the Ministry of foreign aid and development.

To answer Sean’s question: I’d love to make tshirts or posters of the illustration, but I’m not sure how to let people know about them. I’m into serious screenprinting quality and I doubt that Cafepress.com would be able to do it properly… What do you think? Maybe Amnesty International would be interested in the image?