Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is gravely ill. The world must act now

By Alan Clements

Recently Kim Aris, the youngest son of 80-year-old Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, told The Independent (UK) that his mother – Burma’s imprisoned democracy leader and Nobel Peace Laureate – is gravely ill with worsening heart disease.

He condemned the junta’s treatment of her as “cruel, life-threatening, and unacceptable,” and insisted with blunt clarity: “She must be freed.” His warning deepened into urgency: “Without proper medical examinations it is impossible to know what state her heart is in… I am extremely worried. There is no way of verifying if she is even alive.”

Daw Suu Kyi is now in her fifth year of solitary confinement, the fourth time she has been detained by Burma’s military rulers over the past three decades – more than 20 years of her life stolen by generals who fear her popularity and moral authority.

In the hours that followed, Reuters, The Irrawaddy, the Democratic Voice of Burma, and other outlets amplified the alarm, underscoring the seriousness of her condition and the magnitude of this moment.

Let us not overlook the weight of those words. She must be freed. Not later, not after negotiations, not at some vague point of political transition — but now.

Myanmar in chains

On February 1, 2021, Burma’s military staged a coup and overthrew the nation’s lawful, democratically elected leadership. President U Win Myint, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, ministers, parliamentarians – all imprisoned, disappeared, or killed. Democracy itself was overthrown in broad daylight.

Since that day, Myanmar has descended into widespread state-sponsored violence and repression. Villages, monasteries, and schools have been bombed into rubble. Civilians are hunted, tortured, executed, or simply disappeared. More than 20 million people are in desperate need of aid. Over 3 million have been driven from their homes. An entire nation is being starved, burned, and erased – in full view of a watching world.

The statistics are staggering. More than 29,000 people – boys and girls, men and women, monks and nuns, artists, teachers, civil servants, grandmothers – have been arrested, brutalized, or executed simply for daring to stand for freedom. More than 22,000 remain behind bars in Myanmar’s notorious prisons.

And now, as if to exemplify this architecture of cruelty, Aung San Suu Kyi – the woman who for decades embodied the hope of nonviolent resistance, who carried the aspirations of her people and inspired millions worldwide – is left to suffer alone in a cell.

The Junta’s calculated neglect

The military has leaked word of her deteriorating health. Dictatorships are never transparent; they script their narratives carefully. I know this script: “We didn’t kill her. Heart disease did.”

Recently, her son told me directly that she has been experiencing severe chest and heart pains — among the most foreboding of symptoms, requiring immediate and thorough medical examination. I say this as someone who has lived with heart disease myself, who has stared at the knife edge between life and death. I know that without immediate access to gold-standard cardiac care — MRIs, CTA scans, echocardiograms, and consultation with world-class cardiologists — survival is slim. A prison doctor’s cursory visit is no treatment. It is a mockery.

This is how tyrants operate: they deny care, delay intervention, and then shrug at the inevitable. It is murder by neglect.

A global emergency

This is not simply news. It is a global emergency. Daw Suu Kyi has been held in windowless solitary confinement for nearly five years. She has endured house arrests, repeated imprisonments, and endless defamation campaigns. And now – after decades of sacrifice – the junta would have her die in a concrete cell, unseen, her voice silenced forever.

Meanwhile, Min Aung Hlaing has the audacity to announce a sham “election” for late December. How obscene. Burma held a free and fair election in 2020. The people spoke overwhelmingly in favor of the National League for Democracy. The generals responded with tanks, bullets, and mass arrests. To call another election now, with the entire democratic leadership in prison, exile, or dead, is not only illegitimate. It is a grotesque parody of democracy.

The world’s indifference

And where is the world? Too often silent. Too often complicit through indifference – or through profit. Arms dealers fuel the junta’s killing machine. Oil and gas revenues keep the generals flush with cash. Governments issue statements of “concern” while quietly maintaining their trade.

The international press, too, has not been blameless. Major outlets repeated accusations against Aung San Suu Kyi — branding her complicit in crimes she neither condoned nor controlled — stripped of context, nuance, or recognition of the facts. These distortions became headlines, and headlines hardened into dogma.

Yet the record tells a different story. The UN’s fact-finding mission in 2018, the U.S. State Department’s investigations, and my eight years of on-the-ground research — published in Burma’s Voices of Freedom, a four-volume set of long-form interviews co-authored with my colleague Fergus Harlow — reveal a far more complex and damning picture of military culpability.

Still, reputations were tarnished, narratives twisted, and Aung San Suu Kyi was abandoned by many who once hailed her. In that abandonment, the generals found cover. Silence became complicity.

But this is not the hour to re-litigate old accusations. This is the hour to save a life.

A call to conscience

The appeal must be universal. President Donald Trump. UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The European Union. Pope Leo XIV. His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Every parliamentarian from Ottawa to Oslo, from London to Canberra. Influencers, artists, musicians, athletes. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd. Julian Assange. World leaders, elders, Nobel laureates. Every voice counts. Every voice is needed.

The time for cautious statements and vague condemnations has passed. Aung San Suu Kyi’s son himself fears he cannot even confirm that his mother is alive. Imagine that: a son uncertain if his mother still breathes. What greater indictment of the junta’s cruelty? What greater call to conscience?

Beyond one life

Aung San Suu Kyi’s condition is not only about her. She is the symbol of a nation of nearly 60 million people. She is the face of a revolution rooted not in violence but in mindfulness, reconciliation, and dialogue. Burma is a country as large as France, as diverse as the European Union – 131 ethnic groups, dozens of languages, and a living tradition of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and humanism interwoven. It is the modern-day seat of Vipassanā – insight meditation – preserved from the time of the Buddha.

The junta would strangle this richness into silence. But the people of Burma will not be silenced. Nor should the world.

Lessons from hHistory

Decades ago, the Dalai Lama warned: “If we do not save Tibet now, there will be no Tibet to save.” The same holds true for Burma today. Already, vast swaths of the country lie in ruins. Entire villages have been razed. The Rohingya have no homeland to return to. To delay is to condemn.

History has taught us – from Srebrenica to Rwanda, from Gaza to Xinjiang – that silence is complicity. Delay is death.

My witness

I speak not as a detached commentator but as someone who has lived much of my adult life in Burma – first as a Buddhist monk in Rangoon, later as a journalist documenting human rights abuses until I was expelled and blacklisted by the regime. I have co-authored books with Aung San Suu Kyi and long supported Burma’s nonviolent struggle for democracy.

I have walked its streets, studied its Dhamma, shared meals with its poets and monks, and watched my friends – U Tin Oo, U Win Tin, U Win Htein – endure decades in prison, tortured yet unyielding. I have seen their courage. I have heard their laughter even in chains. That spirit still lives in every prisoner of conscience in Myanmar today.

And I will never forget Aung San Suu Kyi’s words: Use your freedom to support ours. That plea echoes louder today than ever.

The imperative

So, I say now, with no hesitation: World leaders, use your freedom. Use your conscience. Demand the immediate and unconditional release of Aung San Suu Kyi, President U Win Myint, and every political prisoner in Myanmar.

Do not let Aung San Suu Kyi die in a cell. Do not let history record that the world watched, issued statements, and shrugged while a Nobel Peace Laureate was allowed to succumb to neglect.

Headline it. Demand it. Speak it. Act on it.

Burma matters. Myanmar matters.

This is not only about a nation’s future. It is about the moral credibility of the free world. If we abandon Burma, if we abandon Aung San Suu Kyi, what hope remains for democracy anywhere?

As I write these words, I recall the anguish in a son’s voice: “She must be freed.” I hear her own words echoing from 1995: “Use your freedom to support ours.”

The choice is before us. To heed the call. Or to betray it.

Act now.

About Me

I was among the first Westerners to be ordained as a Buddhist monk in Burma, later expelled by the dictatorship. For decades I returned as a journalist to document human rights abuses until permanently blacklisted. I co-authored The Voice of Hope with Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma: The Next Killing Fields? (with a foreword by the Dalai Lama), and Burma’s Voices of Freedom (with Fergus Harlow). I also co-founded UseYourFreedom.org, a campaign advocating for Aung San Suu Kyi’s release by gifting copies of my most recent book, Conversation with a Dictator: A Challenge to the Authoritarian Assault, along with personal letters to world leaders.