Burmese leader will be topic of museum discussion

Edith Mirante will discuss “Aung San Suu Kyi and the Strength in Adversity of Burma’s Women” at Thursday’s Museum After Hours event.

The 7 p.m. presentation is in conjunction with the “Road to Equality” exhibit at the Clark County Historical Museum, 1511 Main St.

Mirante will discuss how Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the democracy movement in Myanmar, is using nonviolence to negotiate with the military dictatorship that has ruled the Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma since 1962.

Mirante also will speak of some of the other women, including physicians, rebel soldiers, and human rights activists, in Myanmar’s opposition movement that she has met, and describe the situation of its refugees who are settling in the Northwest.

Mirante, author of “The Wind in the Bamboo,” is founder-director of Project Maje, an independent source of information on Myanmar since 1986, and has authored numerous reports on Myanmar, Southeast Asia, human rights and deforestation. One of the few outsiders to travel into Myanmar’s war zones, she has testified before U.S. and international agencies, as well as spoken at national conferences of Amnesty International USA and Rainforest Action Network.