Myanmar’s Suu Kyi to reveal favourite records

AFP/London

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will reveal her favourite records in the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs” to be aired on Sunday, it was revealed yesterday.

On the show, the longest-running on British radio which celebrated its 70th birthday last year, guests are asked which eight songs they would like with them as a castaway on the mythical island.

Presenter Kirsty Young travelled to the Myanmar capital Naypyidaw to record the programme.

“Most of her choices are for family reasons: connections to her childhood, to her own children,” Young told Radio Times magazine.

Suu Kyi spent much of the past two decades under house arrest in Myanmar after previously living in the English university city of Oxford.

The 67-year-old’s British husband Michael Aris was refused a visa to visit her before he died of cancer in 1999.

“She speaks very poignantly of the torment she went through. It was emotional torture for her, but she refuses to self-aggrandise and plays down her personal suffering,” said Young.

“There are some people who rise above the throng. She’s been through hell and back and yet she remains a woman of humour, intellect and dignity. She’s a showstopper.”

It took six months of negotiations to get the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner to appear and the interview fell through a few times before it went ahead.

The BBC Radio 4 station’s controller wrote to the chair of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy after hearing her say, while delivering her Nobel lecture in June, that she listened to “Desert Island Discs” while living in England. Young admitted she was overawed by Suu Kyi and said she had been “swotting for this interview like I was doing an exam”.

“The experience was so intense and had such a surreal quality about it that I forgot to ask her which of the eight tracks she would save.

“To get the Queen to appear is, perhaps, the only comparable guest on the ‘Desert Island Discs’ wish list.”