To His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama,

With our deepest respect and devotion,

We humbly present to you the enclosed book — Conversation with a Dictator: A Challenge to the Authoritarian Assault — as the heart of an international campaign to raise urgent awareness for over 22,000 political prisoners in Myanmar. Among them is your fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, a lifelong practitioner of the Dhamma, and a sister in the path of nonviolence: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Since the military coup of February 2021, the people of Myanmar have endured unspeakable suffering. Villages, monasteries, and schools bombed, civilians tortured, executed, and disappeared, democracy shattered in plain view of the world. Aung San Suu Kyi and much of her democratically elected government remain silenced, locked in brutal confinement, denied medicine, sunlight, or family contact. Many prisoners have already died. For Aung San Suu Kyi herself, there are reports of serious heart complications, and no proof of life.

This campaign is rooted in the very principles that Your Holiness has embodied for decades: nonviolence, compassion, and truth as the pillars of political life. It is also rooted in Aung San Suu Kyi’s own appeal to the world: “Please use your liberty to promote ours.”

We know, as you do, how narratives can obscure truth. In recent years, much of the international media misrepresented Aung San Suu Kyi, casting her as complicit in crimes she neither condoned nor controlled. The accusations, though grave, were not substantiated by the UN’s 2018 Fact-Finding Mission nor by the U.S. State Department’s own investigations. Our own eight years of research, published in Burma’s Voices of Freedom, show a different reality: Aung San Suu Kyi consistently called for citizenship rights for the Rohingya, chaired investigative commissions, initiated reforms, and urged accountability for the military’s abuses—even when it cost her politically on all sides.

Yet the distortion weakened global solidarity and emboldened tyranny. Now, Myanmar’s generals exploit that silence to prepare a sham election, entrenching their rule while the true opposition rots in prison. Over 20 million people are in desperate need of aid. Over 3 million are displaced. An entire nation is being starved, bombed, erased.

Your Holiness, you know Aung San Suu Kyi not only as a Nobel Laureate but as a practitioner of the same great Dhamma you have carried across the world. She and Alan Clements co-authored the internationally acclaimed The Voice of Hope (1996), after her first six years of detention, bringing her people’s nonviolent revolution of the spirit to the global stage. You also wrote an eloquent foreword to his first book, Burma: The Next Killing Fields? as well as Burma’s Struggle for Democracy and Dignity. And most recently, Alan authored Tonight I Met a Deva: An Angel of Love to bring the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths to children around the world, of which you graced the book with a foreword.

This lineage of truth-telling and conscience is now offered to you, with the plea that you lend your incomparable voice. Your words will not only strengthen the struggle of Myanmar’s prisoners but will inspire leaders, activists, and ordinary people everywhere to speak out. You hold the moral authority to awaken the conscience of the world, just as you have done for Tibet and for so many silenced peoples.

We do not ask you to defend one leader’s reputation. We ask you to defend the principle that has guided your entire life: that compassion, truth, and nonviolence are stronger than fear, lies, and oppression. Aung San Suu Kyi is not merely a political prisoner—she is a sister in the Dharma, a Nobel Laureate, and the spiritual heart of a people who refuse to surrender their dignity.

Your Holiness, the generals’ cruelty is vast. But it is not inevitable—if voices like yours rise above the silence. With deepest reverence, we ask: will you speak out for Aung San Suu Kyi, and for the 22,000 prisoners who languish with her?

With bowed heads and unshakable devotion,

Fergus Harlow
Campaign Director, Use Your Freedom

Alan Clements
Author, Conversation with a Dictator & Unsilenced, Former Buddhist monk, Yangon