Richard Cubie takes time out on a cold winter Wanaka night to shake an Amnesty International tin and remember the 20-year incarceration of Aung San Suu Kyi.
Saturday evening a week ago, I spent a minuscule part of my time, standing in the cold, shaking a tin for Amnesty International outside the local supermarket.
It was hardly a burden, given that I'd equipped myself with thermals, and I enjoyed the social interaction.
Of those who paused to exchange a few words or ask a question, those within the current "me" generation displayed some contemporary knowledge of Amnesty International and those of later years indicated with "Oh, yes ..." some flicker of recognition.
But possibly that was all it was, a flicker.
The concept of a Prisoner of Conscience, people imprisoned for their religious or political beliefs (as defined by Amnesty's founder Peter Benenson in 1961) rarely raises the pulse these days.
The space that used to be filled with demonstrations, letter writing, local branch meetings and sustained dialogues is in some part taken up with cyberspace dialogues - on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and the rest. Perhaps someone will invent a site called "Fritter" where we can log on, believe we're doing something important, communicate meaninglessly and interminably with fellow Fritterers and then log-off, only to realise that the dogs still need a walk.
These days, even the British Royals have succumbed to the notion that Flickr will serve to delight and inform anyone who cares to pay fleeting attention to their family snaps.
It won't.
The only people barred from Fritter and its stable mates would be Aung San Suu Kyi and those other people on Amnesty's list who have had their time, freedoms and lives stolen from them.
There are many heinous crimes that people commit against other people, but there are only a few that fall into the same category of sinister and violent crimes against the person, as those depriving people of their freedoms because of their beliefs.
Aung San Suu Kyi was the daughter of liberalising parents and the moderate intellectual classes, but what could have prepared her for the decades of imprisonment and mental torture that she has been subjected to; and for the physical illnesses she has had to endure in captivity and in isolation?
Were the Nobel Peace prize, awarded in 1991, and the other international prizes that she has received enough to sustain her?
Are the tireless efforts of experts within Amnesty International enough to reassure her that she is not forgotten; her plight just as fresh as it was 20 years ago on the first day?Aung San Suu Kyi turned 65 a couple of months ago and there is nothing on record that justifies 20 years of incarceration.
Of the regime responsible for this highly documented crime against humanity, Doug Bandow (senior fellow at the Cato Institute) wrote in the Huffington Post (June 19), Burma's record is execrable.
The group Freedom House recently ranked Burma at the bottom among the nine worst nations: the regime "suppresses nearly all basic rights, and commits human rights abuses with impunity".
Moreover, "the SPDC does not tolerate dissent and has a long history of imprisoning anyone who is critical of the Government".
The United States State Department reports that "government security forces allowed custodial deaths to occur and committed extrajudicial killings, disappearances, rape, and torture".
Burma's violations of religious liberty caused the US Commission on International Religious Freedom to cite it as a "country of particular concern".
There is no explanation as to why an answer has not been found by the international community for Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi over the past 20 years, other than that collectively not enough people have been prepared to give enough time and thought to finding the resolution.
Hence a reminder, as Freedom Week with which this month began, recedes into memory that as we Fritter time away congratulating ourselves on our ability to sign-up on cyber space protest lists, we make time instead to consider what it would take to restore time to those from whom it has been brutally stolen.
Richard Cubie lives in Wanaka.
