Free Burma and Kim's mum!

Today Burma's democratically elected leader, Nobel prize winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, turns 60, after 15 years under almost permanent house arrest. Her party won a landslide 82% victory in the 1990 elections, but the military dictatorship refused to recognise it and instead increased the repression of their rule.

My international focus has been largely orientated towards the Middle East, but many of my close friends at university were very actively involved in the Free Burma campaign. I was busy with other campaigns and never learnt in depth about the situation in Burma, but the photos of Aung San that many friends had on their walls are fixed in my mind. Typically she is photographed with arms crossed and often a flower in her hair. Firm and defiant of injustice and at the same time gentle and open. Of all the iconic portraits of heros and revolutionaries I find Aung San's the most human and the most inspiring.

When in 1999 Aung San's English husband Michael Aris died in Oxford, I realised that I had actually been at school a decade before with their younger son Kim. We were contemporaries at the Dragon School, a boarding school designed originally for the children of Oxford dons. My memory is pretty awful so I only have a few snapshots of him in my head. For whatever reason we both kept pet gerbils in the school's biology classroom, and I can remember discussing with him the intricacies of constructing elaborate runs for our rodents. I certainly had no idea that his mum was under house arrest at the time in a country I'd probably never heard of. Probably the anonymity was a good thing designed to give him a degree of normality at school, but I seem to remember he was treated quite badly at school, and I wish I had shown him friendship. Today he is receiving the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh on behalf of his mother. I don't know how long it is since he saw her last, probably 3-4 years. I haven't seen him now for almost 14 years, but he's in my prayers.

Please pray and campaign for freedom for Aung San and freedom for the people she has come to represent. As she says: "Please use your liberty to promote ours".