Lonely Planet interviews Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi

Lonely Planet interviews Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi



Austin Bush
Lonely Planet Author

Burmese opposition politician and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was recently released from a period of house arrest that began in 1989. Lonely Planet author Austin Bush had the chance to Skype with her on topics ranging from her country’s name to what travellers can do to help the Burmese people.

LP: First of all, we have decided use both names for our Myanmar/Burma travel guide, but which do you prefer?

ASSK: I prefer ‘Burma’, because the name was changed [by the government] without any reference to the will of the people.

LP: Previously, you have been opposed to foreign tourists visiting Burma. However, you appear to have softened this stance over the last few years. How do you feel now about foreign tourists visiting the country? Can tourists do anything to benefit the move towards democracy?

ASSK: I think the NLD [National League for Democracy, the main opposition party] came to that decision about six to seven months ago. We are not in favour of group tourists, but we don’t mind if individuals come to Burma. Foreign tourists could benefit Burma if they go about [their travels] in the right way, by using facilities that help ordinary people and avoiding facilities that have close links to the government. If [tourists make the effort] to meet people working for democracy, then it might help.

LP: Why are there so many areas restricted to tourists in Burma? Do you think this will change in the near future?

ASSK: I’m not quite sure. Along the border areas it’s because hostilities might break out again. It also might have something to do with the fact that there aren’t enough facilities for tourists in remote areas.

LP: To many visitors, Yangon (Rangoon), the former Burmese capital, can appear as if it’s caught in a time warp. In your experience as someone who grew up there, how has the city changed over the years? What’s your favourite part of the city?

ASSK: I haven’t noticed any great changes since I’ve been under house arrest. The changes I’ve noticed are that there are many people using handphones [mobile phones], which I hadn’t seen seven years ago. But the streets and buildings appear the same…. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to explore Yangon. TheShwedagon is very important, and Sule Pagoda, but I spend much of my time at the NLD office.

LP: Your father, General Aung San, is viewed by many as the architect of Burmese independence. The museum dedicated to him, located in his former home, appears to be closed. Do you know why?

ASSK: I don’t think [the government] wants to encourage people to go there. They don’t want to remind people too much of my father. Officially they don’t allow portraits of my father to be hung in government offices over the last decade, probably because of the association with me and also because of how my father regarded the role of the army.

This interview with Aung San Suu Kyi will appear in the next edition of Lonely Planet’s Myanmar (Burma) guidebook.

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ကမာၻေက်ာ္ Lonely Planet စာအုပ္ဟာ ကမာၻနုိင္ငံၿခား ခရီးသြားဧည့္သည္ေတြအတြက္ အလြန္အားထားရတဲ့ စာအုပ္ပါ။ Lonely Planet စာအုပ္အတြက္ ၿမန္မာနိုင္ငံ ခရီးသြားၿခင္းအေပၚ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္ရဲ့ အၿမင္ကုိ အင္တာဗ်ဴးထားတာပါ။

04-Jan-2011 01:33:03

Austin Bush

Lonely Planet Author

LP: ပထမဆုံးအေနနဲ႔ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တုိ႔ Myanmar / Burma ဆုိတဲ့ အသုံးအနုံး ကုိသုံးဖုိ႔ဆုံးၿဖတ္ခဲ့တယ္။ ဘယ္စာလုံးကုိပုိႏွစ္သက္ပါသလဲ။

DSSK: ကြ်န္မကေတာ့ Burma ဆုိတဲ့ အမည္ကုိိႀကဳိက္ပါတယ္။ ဘာလုိ႔လဲဆုိေတာ့ အစုိးရက ဘာအေထာက္အထားမွ မရွိဘဲ လူေတြရဲ့ဆႏၵမပါပဲ ေၿပာင္းခဲ့လုိ႔ပါ။



LP: နုိင္ငံၿခားသားဧည့္သည္ေတြ ၿမန္မာနုိင္ငံကုိလာလည္တာကုိ ဆန္႔က်င္ခဲ့ဘူးတယ္ေနာ္။ ဘယ္လုိပဲၿဖစ္ၿဖစ္ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ႏွစ္အနည္းငယ္က ဒီအေပၚမွာ ခင္ဗ်ား ေဘာထား ေပ်ာ့ေၿပာင္းလာတယ္။ အခုေကာ နုိင္ငံၿခားသားဧည့္သည္ေတြ ၿမန္မာနုိင္ငံက ုိလာလည္တာကုိ ဘယ္လုိခံစားရလဲ။ နုိင္ငံၿခားသားဧည့္သည္ေတြဟာ ဒီမုိကေရစီ ေပၚထြန္းလာေရးမွာ အက်ဳိးၿပဳနုိင္မယ္လုိ႔ ထင္လား။

DSSK: NLD အေနနဲ႔ ဒီလုိဆုံးၿဖတ္ခဲ့တာ လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၆ လ ၇လ ေလာက္ၿဖစ္မယ္ထင္တယ္။ ကြ်န္မတုိ႔အေနနဲ႔ အုပ္စုလုိက္လာတဲ့ ဧည့္သည္မ်ဳိးကုိေတာ့ မႏွစ္သက္ပါဘူး။ သီးၿခား(အုပ္စုမဟုတ္) လာတဲ့ ဧည့္သည္မ်ဳိးေတြကေတာ့ ကိစၥမရွိပါဘူး။ နည္းမွန္လမ္းမွန္နဲ႔ လာတဲ့ နုိင္ငံၿခားသားဧည့္သည္ေတြကေတာ့ အက်ဳိးၿပဳနိုင္ပါတယ္၊ အစုိးရနဲ႔ မပါတ္သက္ဘဲ သာမာန္လူေတြရဲ့ လုပ္ငန္း(ကား၊ဟုိတယ္၊စားေသာက္ဆုိင္) ကုိဆက္ႏြယ္ၿပီး လာေရာက္တာမ်ဳိးပါ။ နုိင္ငံၿခားသားဧည့္သည္ေတြဟာ ဒီမုိကေရစီဘက္ေတာ္သားေတြနဲ႔ ေတြ႔ဖုိ႔လာတာဆုိရင္လည္း ကူညီရာေရာက္ပါတယ္။



LP: ဘာေႀကာင့္ နုိင္ငံၿခားသားဧည့္သည္ေတြ လည္ပတ္ဖုိ႔ (အစုိးရက)ပိတ္ပင္ထားတဲ့ ေနရာေတြမ်ားေနရတာလဲ။ ဒါကေရာ အနာဂတ္ကုိ ေၿပာင္းလဲေစနုိင္လိမ့္မယ္လုိ႔ ထင္ပါသလား။

DSSK: ကြ်န္မေသေသခ်ာခ်ာေတာ့မသိဘူး။နယ္စပ္ေဒသေတြ တေလွ်ာက္မွာ မၿငိမ္မသက္တာေတြၿဖစ္ေနတာေတြ၊ လုံေလာက္တဲ့ နားခုိစားေသာက္ရန္ ေနရာေတြကလည္း လည္ပတ္မဲ့ေနရာေတြမွာ မရွိတာေတြ ေႀကာင့္လုိ႔ထင္ပါတယ္။



LP: ၿမိဳ.ေတာ္ေဟာင္း ရန္ကုန္ဟာလည္း အခ်ိန္ရဲ့ စီးဆင္းမႈေတြထဲမွာ ပါ၀င္ေနေတာ့ ေၿပာင္းလဲမႈေတြ ၿဖစ္ေပၚလာနုိင္လား။ ရန္ကုန္မွာ ႀကီးၿပင္းလာခဲ့တဲ့သူတေယာက္အေနနဲ႔ LP: လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ႏွစ္ေတြအတြင္း ဘာအေၿပာင္းအလဲေတြ ၿမင္မိပါသလဲ။ ၿမိဳ.ေတာ္ရဲ့ ဘယ္အစိတ္အပုိင္းကုိ အႀကဳိက္ဆုံးလဲ။

DSSK: ကြ်န္မ ေနအိမ္ အက်ယ္ခ်ဳပ္က် ကတဲက (ခုထိ) ႀကီးႀကီးမားမား ဘာအေၿပာင္းအလဲမွ သတိမထားမိပါဘူး။ လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၇ႏွစ္အလြန္က ကြ်န္မ မၿမင္ဘူးခဲ့တဲ့ moble ဖုန္းကုိလူအေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား သုံးေနတာကုိေတာ့ သတိထားမိပါတယ္။ လမ္းေတြ၊ အိမ္ေတြကေတာ့ ကြ်န္မၿမင္ဖူးခဲ့တဲ့ အရင္အတုိင္းပါပဲ။ ေရႊတိဂုံကေတာ့အရမ္းအေရးႀကီးပါတယ္ ၿပီးေတာ့ ဆူးေလ ဒါေပမဲ့ ကြ်န္မရဲ့ အခ်ိန္ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားကေတာ့ NLD ရုံးမွာပဲ ကုန္ဆုံးခဲ့တာပါ။



LP: ခင္ဗ်ားရဲ့အေဖ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းကုိ ၿမန္မာနုိင္ငံရဲ့ လြတ္လပ္ေရး ဗိသုကာလုိ႔ ၿမင္ႀကတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းၿပတုိက္ (ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနအိမ္ေဟာင္း) ကုိေတာ့ပိတ္ထားတယ္။ ဘာေႀကာင့္လုိ႔ထင္ပါသလဲ။

DSSK: ကြ်န္မထင္တာကေတာ့ အစုိးရက လူေတြ အဲ့ဒီကုိ မသြားေစခ်င္ဘူး။ လူေတြကုိ ကြ်န္မအေဖ အေႀကာင္း သတိမရေစခ်င္ဘူး။ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ဆယ္စုႏွစ္ေတြ ကတဲက ကြ်န္မ အေဖရဲ့ ပုံကုိ အစုိးရရုံးေတြမွာ တရား၀င္ခ်ိန္ဆြဲခြင့္ မၿပဴခဲ့ဘူး ၿဖစ္နုိင္တာက ကြ်န္မနဲ႔ ပါတ္သက္ပီးတြဲမၿမင္ေစခ်င္တာရယ္၊ တပ္မေတာ္အခန္းက႑မွာကြ်န္မအေဖရဲ့ ေလးစားခံရမႈ နဲ႔ က်မကုိ (တြဲမၿမင္ေစခ်င္တာၿဖစ္မယ္)။

***နာက္ထပ္အသစ္ထုတ္ေ၀မဲ့ Lonely Planet’s Myanmar (Burma) guidebook မွာထည့္သြင္းထုတ္ေ၀မွာ ၿဖစ္ပါတယ္။

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