FREEDOM SHADOWS

After being a British colony for 60 years, first as part of India and later as a self-governing colony, Burma became independent in 1948. General Aung San, widely recognized as the creator and leading exponent of the cause and father of the current Democratic leader of the NLD, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, recently released from house arrest of more than 15 years, managed to gain the confidence of the different ethnic groups that formed the Burmese people in the Panglong Conference in February 1947. In July of that year he was killed, marking a before and after in the country's history and crumbling confidence in the unity of nationalities. In 1962, General Ne Win, alleging that the nation was about to break, made a coup and instituted a military government that plunged the newborn country into the most darkest miseries. Due to the sudden multiplication of prices (4 times above normal) Burma went from being one of the richest countries in Asia to one of the poorest in the world.

With the 1988 uprising in which more than 3000 people were killed, the devastating NLD's victory in 1990 elections, although the military junta didn't do the handover, and the Saffron Revolution, in which the monks, almost untouchable, made against the government, the Burmese people have shown their dignity and perseverance in the struggle for freedom and human rights.

This dictatorship of terror, unpunished for nearly 50 years, wrapped Burma and its people in utter secrecy. The military rule has been perpetuated by subjecting the people to brute force to the strong surveillance, the use of forced labor (including children and elderly) extrajudicial killings, ethnic cleansing, rape as a weapon of war, torture, murder, forced relocation of entire populations belonging to ethnic minorities and thousands of political prisoners quiet force for decades.

This is the mark of 9 women political prisoners, witnesses of horror and the silence of a whole country, willing to break it. All of them strong, fighting burmese women that went to hell... and came back.