Zoya Phan

Zoya Phan (born 27 October 1980) is a political activist from Burma of Karen descent. She resides in the United Kingdom on political asylum, and is the International Coordinator of the human rights organization Burma Campaign UK. She is an outspoken critic of the Burmese government and has repeatedly called for democratic reform in Burma, as well as economic sanctions from both the British government and the United Nations. In April 2009, she published her autobiography, Little Daughter, in the UK, which was published under a different title in the United States in May 2010.

Biography

Early life

Zoya Phan was born in Manerplaw, then the headquarters of the Karen National Union (KNU), on 27 October 1980, the second of her parents' three biological children. Her father was Padoh Mahn Sha Lah Phan, General Secretary of the KNU, and her mother was Nant Kyin Shwe, a former soldier for the KNU. Zoya got her unusual name from her father, who named her after the Russian World War II hero Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya because he saw several parallels between the Soviet fight against the Nazis and the Karen struggle against the Burmese government. She spent most of her early life in a Karen village called Per He Lu, an hour's walk away from the KNU headquarters in Manerplaw. When she was six, she began to spend more time in Manerplaw, and it was there she had her first exposure to the fighting in Burma, as land mine victims frequently went to the hospital there for treatment.