Congratulations to María Corina Machado, Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2025. Machado is an opposition leader in Venezuela. Her attempts to create a transition from the dictatorship of President for Life Nicolas Maduro to a democratic society has earned her much deserved renown.
Machado was barred from running in last year’s presidential elections won by President Nicolás Maduro. The polls were widely dismissed internationally as neither free nor fair. Despite the ban, she managed to attract huge crowds in Caracas to rally for their chosen candidate. Machado has refused to leave the country even though the Maduro government has threatened her with arrest (BBC).
Meanwhile US President for Life hopeful Donald Trump has been doing everything he can to shift attention of the world and Venezuelans away from the opposition movement by providing them with a common enemy – the US Navy (4dforum). He wanted the Nobel Peace Prize; imagine that.
Nobel Peace Prize winners of the opposition kind have had rough goes of it in the past. I am reminded of Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar. The Myanmar military junta went to great lengths to discredit her. They allowed her to run, and win, elections. She was set up as a puppet figurehead however. They used her to take the blame for their campaigns against the Rohingya and the Karen peoples. The even sent her to the UN’s International Criminal Court to stand for the crimes of the regime. Her story is below.
Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi is the focus of this BBC story. She is the daughter of General Aung San, an independence hero assassinated in 1947. She lived overseas until 1988 when she returned to take care of her elderly mother. When political upheaval started against then dictator General Ne Win she joined in. The uprising was put down by the Burmese military. Between 1989 and 2010 she spent most of her time under house arrest. As the daughter of a national hero she could not be made to disappear easily.
During this time the Myanmar ( then Burmese ) military routinely persecuted Karen peoples (from YouTube). Karen people are mostly subsistence farmers who follow various religions including Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism and animism. In January of 2000, members of God’s Army seized a hospital in Thailand. They held it’s inhabitants hostage and demanded an end to the US backed Thai Army’s shelling of Karen villages. They were eliminated by Thai security forces and the movement faded into irrelevance.
It wasn’t until 2012 that her party was allowed to take seats in parliament. Their win allowed Aung San Suu Kyi to take a seat as a Prime Minister. Everyone was happy and the United States lifted sanctions.
In 2014 she warned that no real change toward democracy had taken place. The military holds a veto over any constitutional changes. The Myanmar Constitution is a sham. The “democratic” government is a convenient cover for a military junta that has never really stopped ruling the nation. Now they are persecuting the Rohingya people; Muslim, nomadic boat people who are disliked by the mainly Buddhist population. Muslim invaders attempted to take over that region of the world during their expansionist period. The Taliban destroyed Buddhist Iconic statues in Afghanistan. The military is playing to the crowd.
Madam Aung San’s hands are tied. Why did the military send her and not the president, Win Myint, or some other representative? This whole thing is simply a setup to knock her down, and it’s working. She has no choice but to argue for her nation in the International Court. She’s still effectively under house arrest. The Burmese people have been abandoned by the West under the pretense of democratic change. Hopefully the representatives from the court’s member nations and the press will see through the military’s ruse. It may be time to reinstate sanctions against the Myanmar Republic. We should announce to the world we see through the manipulations of Myanmar’s military regime.
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