Why Gazans And Prisoners Like Suu Kyi, Barghouti And Narges Are My Valentines

(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Revolutionaries who choose to fight for others are driven by a fierce love for humanity

• PUBLISHED: Fri 13 Feb 2026, 12:11 PM UPDATED: Fri 13 Feb 2026, 3:20 PM

• By:
• Suresh Pattali

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In the study of my Ajman home is a bistro table printed with a mosaic of numbers mostly in black and red. At the centre of the collage is the iconic black mug of Che Guevara with the number 1928, the year he was born. And hanging right above from the wall facing me is a large wooden plaque painted with Alberto Korda's March 5, 1960, photograph of Che Guevara, one of the most reproduced photographic images in the world. The publication of his picture was like an explosion, to quote Korda, not just in the world of photography, but in the hearts of millions of people across the world.

The portrait Guerrillero Heroico, known as“the face that launched a thousand T-shirts”, reminds us that you don't have to be a communist to romance communism - and a communist. The Che image still inspires protest movements across the world, irrespective of the cause and ideology. As I keep looking at the portrait in front of me, what reflects in his eyes is a command to read his lips. While Mona Lisa's ambiguous expression oscillates between melancholy and contentment, the romantic revolutionary's lips quiver a language of mixed feelings - stoicism, pain, anger, absolute implacability and, of course, a smirk reserved for all the capitalists whose days he thought were numbered.

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A couple of years ago, I portrayed Shutti, my little grandson, as my Valentine. As we celebrate the occasion tomorrow, I'm here again with an attempt to romance a few political personalities, perceived incongruous for the occasion. After all, in Che's own words, a true revolutionary is“guided by great feelings of love”.

Che, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary and a medical doctor assassinated by Bolivian agents in 1967, has been etched in every cell of mine (no tattoo though) from the days I started to see his portrait hanging in all the places right and wrong - party offices, book stores, bus stops, family patios, beach tea shops, frame shops, barber shops and even on the walls of public loos amid a mess of rightwing and leftwing graffitis.

Che was not introduced to me by anyone; he just came and roosted in my heart, one of millions he now calls home. We still read pages after pages about him - an exercise that would last a lifetime. Thank you, Comrade Valentine.

Let me now move on to my other Valentines.

I don't know where my baby is

But I'll find him, somewhere, somehow

I've got to let him know how much I care

I'll never give up looking for my baby

If you replace him with her in Lisa Stansfield's 1998 ballad All Around the World, the song becomes an uncannily accurate description of my state of mind whenever I think of my chief Valentine. No one quite knows where she is now, having been forced out of public view since 2021.

While other boys grew up on Mark Twain, I spent my adolescence collecting newspaper clippings about her. At family gatherings, her name surfaced often - usually in conversations about her father's assassination - because neighbours of ours had worked and lived in what was then Burma.

It was not a crush, not at first. She was far older, belonged to the upper reaches of another nation's political and moral universe, and seemed impossibly distant.

Yet I never stopped chasing her.

A career in journalism gave shape and legitimacy to that pursuit, hardening my resolve that one day I would meet the woman I had admired for a lifetime. Her incarceration for more than a decade did nothing to dim the fire in my heart.

Then came 2010.

Someone shouted across the newsroom,“Suresh, your heartthrob has been released.” My heart nearly leapt out of my chest.

“I want to talk to her, Patrick,” I told the executive editor.“Who's stopping you? Godspeed, mate,” he said.

It was an outrageous thought. A wild dream. Speaking to Aung San Suu Kyi - the icon of Myanmar's democracy movement and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate - just days after her release from nearly 15 years of incarceration felt next to impossible. In 2010, calling Myanmar was like dialling another planet. It took two weeks of persistence and prayer to establish even the faintest connection with a Myanmar opposition figure in exile.

“Are you mad?” snapped U Nyo Ohn Myint, then exiled in Thailand.“BBC and CNN are still stuck in Bangkok trying to get visas. And you want to speak to Daw on the phone?”

“Yes,” I said.

“She doesn't have a mobile. The army hasn't allowed her a landline.”

“I don't care,” I replied.“I must speak to her.”

What followed was a chain of covert facsimile messages sent from Bangkok to the National League for Democracy. U Thein, an elderly party leader with access to a mobile phone, was arranged to visit her. A time was fixed. The operation unfolded with surgical precision. After 20 minutes of relentless dialling, the phone rang. It was handed to a 65-year-old Oxonian, whose greeting was as calm and luminous as a hero's.

“I'm Suresh, a journalist-and probably your most loyal admirer. Welcome to a Khaleej Times conversation.”

“My pleasure meeting you,” she said.

The rest is history. A dream realised. And yes - a world exclusive.

The first call was brief; the line snapped. It took another 15 days to reconnect, hampered by poor signals and her indisposition. When we finally spoke again, the conversation unfolded generously - laced with humour, emotion, reflection and a sense of shared camaraderie.

“I hope one day we'll meet. You never know times might change and situations might change,” she said, leaving behind a rare sense of cingulomania, fulfilled at last.

What unfolded over the next decade pained me more than anything that came before. Aung San Suu Kyi fell from democratic grace into near-total international isolation over Myanmar's alleged ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya community. Once revered as a global icon of conscience, she was subjected to a torrent of demands to strip her of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.

Her silence spoke louder than any defence could. It revealed the gag she lived with. In truth, Suu Kyi was never fully free - not even after her release in 2010, negotiated with the very junta that had imprisoned her for nearly 15 years. Had she spoken as the world demanded, her life might well have been in danger. Moral courage was constrained by fear, power, and survival.

Who, after all, is without failure?

Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid revolutionary and recipient of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, was not an infallible statesman. Celebrated globally as a symbol of reconciliation and forgiveness, he too carried contradictions. Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously warned against turning Mandela into a saint, reminding us that such mythology distorts the truth.

There is ample evidence of Mandela's shortcomings in office. Job-creation programmes faltered, the gap between rich and poor remained stark, violent crime stayed alarmingly high, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic was disastrously neglected during his administration. He posted corrupt politicians as key members of his cabinet.

Yet Mandela was never cast into oblivion. The world did not revoke his honours or exile him from moral memory.

Suu Kyi, by contrast, was treated with a severity bordering on cruelty. More than 10 major international honours were revoked or suspended over her silence and inaction on the Rohingya crisis.

Ousted from power by a military coup in 2021, Aung San Suu Kyi is now serving a cumulative prison sentence of 33 years. No one knows precisely where she is being held. She now joins a grim fraternity of political icons who have endured some of the longest incarcerations in modern history. They are, in their own way, my Valentines, who chose to give up everything to fight for others. Love at its zenith!

Among them are Marwan Barghouti, fondly called the Palestinian Mandela; and Nael Barghouti, recognised by Guinness World Records as the world's longest-held political prisoner.

Arrested, released, and re-arrested repeatedly, Nael spent a total of 45 years in Israeli prisons. Released in 2025, Nael now lives in exile in Egypt, while Marwan has been in an Israeli prison for 23 years.

“Prison did not teach me,” he once said.“I taught prison what freedom is. I taught prison that the will of a person who believes in their rights cannot be broken by prison, by a jailer, or by bars. Someone who lives the meaning of freedom inside prison is the truly free person,” says Nael.

And not to forget a 53-year-old human rights activist in our backyard. Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 2023, has spent more than 10 years of her life in prison in Iran. The Narges Foundation says a recent sentence brings the total time she has been ordered to spend in prison to 44 years.

If the Palestinian Mandela - and the millions of Gazans who have endured the recent genocide and thousands who have embraced martyrdom - are not my Valentines, then who else could be? Revolutionaries and freedom fighters, after all, are driven by a fierce love for humanity.

(The writer is Executive Editor, Khaleej Times.)

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