A virtually unknown figure stepped into the spotlight. In October 2023, Kim Aris, the youngest son of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's leader from 2016 to 2021, ousted from power by a military coup, gave the first newspaper interview of his life to M Le Magazine du Monde. At 46, after living in the shadows for decades, he chose to raise awareness about his mother's situation. She was sentenced to 27 years in prison by the military that overthrew her and has been held in complete isolation in a Naypyidaw prison, the capital of Myanmar.

Since the coup d'état of February 1, 2021, which ended a decade of democratic transition and plunged the country into a violent civil war between the junta and various guerrillas, the son has had no further news of his mother. At 78, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, formerly under house arrest, is now being held in much more difficult conditions, deprived of medical care and contact with other prisoners. "I don't want her to be abandoned or forgotten," pleaded Aris, whose father was the British Tibetologist Michael Aris, who died in 1999. Once a carpenter, his son now lives in London, where his parents met. He now carries his mother's voice internationally.

In mid-January 2024, a handwritten letter signed May May ("mother" in Myanmar) arrived in London. Addressed to Kim, the precious letter was handed to him by the British Foreign Office. After three years of waiting, Aung San Suu Kyi was finally writing to him from prison. "I was surprised," admitted her son, "but I immediately recognized her handwriting."

The contents of the letter are sober. The former leader, reluctant to share her feelings freely, knew that her letter would be read and reread by her jailers. According to Kim, she wrote that she is in good health but suffers from osteoporosis and tooth issues, "which makes eating very difficult at times." She mentioned that the temperature in her cell suddenly dropped in November, with the arrival of the cool season in Myanmar. She remains optimistic. She thinks of her family and sends them her love. But she avoided any political messages.

This proof of life, the first obtained by her family in three years, comes at a time when the junta is suffering severe defeats in several of Myanmar's provinces. At the end of October 2023, an offensive led by three guerrilla groups in the north of Shan State, in the east of the country, drove the military out of strategic towns along the border with China, leading to the surrender of thousands of soldiers. This breakthrough energized the opposition and cast a harsh light on the state of General Min Aung Hlaing's troops, in power since the coup. Is this letter a concession, a gesture of appeasement from a regime in distress? "It's hard to know what the military has in mind, but I don't think so," said Aris. "They won't even let my mother see her lawyers."

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