Two years ago, she was a prisoner in her own home, cut off from the rest of the world, her homeland wasting from five decades of ruthless authoritarian rule- with nothing but bleak perpetuity on the horizon.
Yet on Saturday, Aung San Suu Kyi - the Burmese political reformer and one of the most extraordinary defenders of democracy in our time - took the stage in Norway and formally accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, twenty one years after it was awarded.
Even more inspiring than the ceremony in honor of Suu Kyi were the dramatic events in her homeland that enabled it. Until recently, the country was like a South-Asian version of North Korea: completely isolated and under sanctions from the international community, catastrophically underdeveloped, poor, and suffocating under an iron-fisted military junta. The UN ranked Myanmar 149th out of 187 countries in its 2011 Human Development Index.
However, at the end of 2010, a dramatic change occurred. The government shed its military trappings under a new leader, former general U Thein Sein. Suu Kyi- the charismatic and extremely popular opposition leader who had been under house arrest intermittently since 1992- was freed. Political, economic and social reforms rapidly followed and Suu Kyi was invited to speak to the president.
At the end of 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the country and met the president and Suu Kyi, ending Myanmar's international isolation and laying the groundwork for further diplomatic and commercial relations with the US and the rest of the world.
Undoubtedly, Myanmar is still desperately poor and far from free. But every indicator points to the emergence of true reform and a much brighter future in a place where hope seemed all but crushed just a couple years ago.
The lion's share of these events probably went unnoticed by most of the world. However, one group of people had the privilege of witnessing this remarkable turnaround. A group I will call, for lack of a better term, “Globophiles.”
There are several ways people survey news media. Some are drawn to politics, others prefer human interest stories. Globophiles are those who prefer foreign stories that have no tangible impact on either their own personal lives or homelands. The articles that catch the eye of these globophiles are stories from Botswana, Thailand, Yemen, Haiti, and recently, Myanmar.
Globophiles examine stories from the perspective of native citizens, rather than in terms of their broader geopolitical impact. Thus, the developments from Myanmar are fascinating not because they influence Israel, the US, or the West but because they mean so much to the fifty million residents of Myanmar.
There are times when stories turn the entire world into globophiles. But these stories almost always involve natural disasters or terrible national tragedies. The tsunami in Japan, the earthquake in Haiti, the terrorist massacre in Norway - these were moments when the world was momentarily able to reach across national boundaries and feel united in mourning.
The globophile strives to replicate this global solidarity every day. The globophile empathizes with other human beings from halfway across the globe, regardless of shared interests or common ground. This is often a difficult, even depressing habit. By exploring stories from remote parts of the world, globophiles also expose themselves to knowledge of human tragedies and atrocities that don't necessarily make the headlines - stories about the brutal kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe, rape in Congo or civil war in Sri Lanka.
But there are also rewards for individuals who follow such remote, international news stories. One such reward was to witness the miraculous changes occurring in Myanmar. Changes that culminated in to the moment when Aung San Suu Kyi rose to accept her Nobel Prize after so many years of hardship and oppression.
One of the most uplifting segments of Suu Kyi's speech was when she described what she felt upon first hearing, two decades ago, that she had been awarded the prize: “Often during my days of house arrest it felt as though I were no longer a part of the real world...What the Nobel Peace Prize did was to draw me once again into the world of other human beings...And what was more important, the Nobel Prize had drawn the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma. We were not going to be forgotten.”
In other words, the Nobel Prize did something usually reserved for natural disasters: for a few moments, it made us all globophiles.
Borders can be blinding. It is difficult to empathize with the lives of those who live in foreign countries or with those who live in other worlds entirely. As people say in Hebrew, “Far from the eye, far from the heart.”
But we must try to overcome this obstacle; if nothing else, we should be aware of the tragedies and joys that affect so many fellow humans in our world. So next time you see a small report about Coca-Cola coming to invest in Myanmar for the first time in 60 years, consider checking it out. Between the lines, you may see fifty million human faces who are ever so slightly better off.
The author is an American-Israeli student from Haifa, currently studying Economics and History at Columbia University, New York.
