BBC News:
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.
