RANGOON — If he were still alive, Win Tin would have turned 86 on Saturday. The former journalist, who died in 2014 at the age of 84, was a cofounder of the National League for Democracy (NLD), along with party chairwoman Aung San Suu Kyi, and was also highly respected for his relentless activism against Burma’s former military regime.
Win Tin was one of Burma’s longest serving political prisoners. Starting in 1989, he spent almost two decades behind bars for cofounding the NLD and later for attempting to inform the United Nations about human rights violations in the country’s prisons. When he was finally released, he was 78 years old.
Despite his criticism of Suu Kyi in recent years for her rapprochement with the military, which he deemed too conciliatory, his loyalty to Suu Kyi and the NLD was unshakeable. As the NLD readies to take the reins of government in just a few weeks’ time, there is little doubt that were he alive to see the day, the longtime people-power advocate would agree, at the very least, that it’s been a long time coming for Burma’s pro-democracy movement.
