The Arrest and Torture of an American in Burma (And Why You Never Heard of Him) -- Politics Daily

A leader of what came to be known as the 88 Students Generation, -- a pro-democracy movement inside Burma that held massive, student-led demonstrations in 1988, and ended with the killing of over 3,000 protestors at the hands of the military -- Kyaw Zaw Lwin was granted asylum in the U.S. in the wake of the uprising. He moved here in 1993, and became a citizen, relocating as Burmese exiles have to the Washington, DC area, where he became friends with my grandmother.

Some thirty years earlier, this is where she and my mother, also seeking refuge from the repressive Burmese military government, settled upon arrival in the States. As anyone in D.C. can tell you, Washington is a small town, and it is especially so if you are part of the community of Burmese exiles clustered in and around the Beltway. There is the local monastery where everyone pays his respects to the monks, there is the Asian grocery store where you can buy imported pickled tea leaves and smelly durian fruit, and the Burmese restaurant downtown that makes a decent noodle soup. There is also an activist exile network, populated by Burmese who have watched, helplessly for the most part, as their country and its people have been stomped into the ground by a regime intent on maintaining control of the country's rich natural resources at all costs.

The Arrest and Torture of an American in Burma (And Why You Never Heard of Him) -- Politics Daily