AUNG SAN SUU KYI’S FALL FROM GRACE

Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the coveted Nobel Peace Prize, knows too well what it is like to be persecuted. So why is the political leader of Myanmar allowing hundreds of thousands of Rohingyan Muslims to be driven from their country in what the UN descri

During the long, hard years under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi lived alone in a decaying lakeside villa, denied news, medicine, even contact with her children, but sustained by an outside world that revered her as a heroine. Worthy Western institutions showered her with awards and honours, and right-thinking celebrities from George Clooney to Yoko Ono joined the rolling campaign for her release.

Suu Kyi’s remarkable one-woman battle to bring democracy to her native Myanmar (formerly Burma), became a global cause célèbre, and when, barely two years ago, she became the country’s first civilian leader in decades, millions rejoiced.

Today, 72-year-old Suu Kyi is an international pariah, her saintly reputation shattered. The same organisations that handed her prizes are scrambling to disassociate themselves from her, and her Hollywood fan club has retreated into embarrassed silence. Her old Oxford college, St Hugh’s, has taken her portrait down, and The Nobel Peace Prize committee, which gave her its award in 1991, is under pressure to rescind the honour.

At the core of Suu Kyi’s fall from grace is an unfolding human disaster in the west of the country, where hundreds of thousands of Muslims, a religious minority known as the Rohingya, have been driven from their homes in a wave of military operations characterised by the

United Nations as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Witnesses have described mass shootings, rapes and burnings, and the exodus has created a vast refugee crisis in neighbouring Bangladesh.

To the dismay of her former admirers, Suu Kyi has refused not only to intervene, but even to criticise the military’s onslaught. In the few – mostly prickly and defensive – statements she has made, she has dismissed the allegations of atrocities as exaggerations, and claimed that the actions are needed to curb terrorism.

Last month, Bill Richardson, a former American ambassador to the UN and personal friend of Suu Kyi, who has been trying to broker a solution to the crisis, stormed out of talks with her, complaining, “She has developed an arrogance of power. I have known her for a long time and am fond of her but she doesn’t want to accept what is actually happening, and I’m not going to be part of a whitewash.”

The harsh sentiments are echoed by Mark Farmaner, a veteran British campaigner for Suu Kyi’s release, who heads the UK-Burma group. “I was one of those who absolutely believed in her commitment to human rights and democracy,” he says. “I met her when she was under house arrest, and I heard her talk very movingly and seriously about these things. But what we are seeing from her now is paranoia and intolerance. She’s become an authoritarian and thrown in her lot with the hardline elements. I find it hard to believe she is behaving this way. She is not just going along with the military, she is actively encouraging them, and making things worse.”

The Rohingya have been present in Myanmar for centuries, without ever being accepted by the majority Buddhist population. In recent years, the rise of political Islam has heightened suspicions about the dangers a growing Muslim population might pose, and according to Francis Wade, author of a book about the crisis, Suu Kyi shares these fears.

“She and her party have been fully complicit with the military in fuelling the anti-Rohingya mentality,” he says.

Two years ago, a Rohingya insurgent group, known, improbably, as the Salvation Army, staged a series of attacks on police and army posts. The Myanmar military responded with a sweeping counter-offensive that has driven an estimated 800,000 terrified and destitute Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh.

Bill Richardson calls it “one of the biggest humanitarian crises in history”.

Under the deal that brought Suu Kyi to power, she holds the post of State Counsellor – roughly equivalent to Prime Minister – but has little control over a military still dominated by the hardline Buddhist nationalists who locked her up for 20 years. Even so, when the assault against the Rohingya began, Suu Kyi’s backers in the West were confident she would use her moral authority to denounce the killings. “If anything,” despairs Mark Farmaner, “she has done the opposite.”

What has happened? Wasn’t Suu

Kyi supposed to be a female Mandela who would sacrifice anything to bring peace and justice to her country?

Well, yes, but the situation is more complicated than that, and to understand the howls of “betrayal” from her admirers, it is necessary to look back at the experiences that shaped Suu Kyi’s life

Born in 1945, she was the daughter of Burma’s greatest modern hero, General Aung San, who had led his country to the brink of independence from Britain, only to be shot dead by a political rival. Suu Kyi was just two when she lost her father, and having virtually no memory of him, seems to have become obsessed with his life and achievements. “I think she had this incredible sort of daughter’s hero worship for her father,” says Peter Carey, an Oxford historian and close friend of Suu Kyi’s late husband, Michael Aris.

Yet for the first half of her life, she seemed content to keep a distance from her homeland’s politics. A famous beauty at Oxford, she was wooed and won by Michael, a young university professor, who married her in a Buddhist ceremony in London in 1972. They quickly had two sons, Alex and Kim, and settled down to a comfortable family life in England.

According to Kim, now 38, these were happy times. “It was an amazing childhood,” he once told me in an interview. “There were always interesting people coming to the house, we travelled a lot, and my mother was incredibly loving and a fabulous cook.” Then, on March 31, 1988, came a telephone call from Burma that would be – although

Suu Kyi couldn't have known it at the time – her summons to arms.

Her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, had fallen seriously ill and Suu Kyi told Michael she was going to Burma immediately. “It was a quiet evening in Oxford, like many others,” her husband wrote later. “Our sons were in bed and we were reading when the telephone rang. Suu picked up the phone to learn that her mother had suffered a severe stroke. She put the phone down at once and started to pack. I had a premonition that our lives would change forever.”

Suu Kyi arrived to find the air of Burma’s capital, Rangoon, filled with tear gas. Protests against military rule were breaking out everywhere, and the army suppressed them ruthlessly. As Suu tended to her 76-year-old mother at the family’s villa, she felt destiny tugging at her sleeve.

Days after her arrival, a nationwide pro-democracy strike was called. Millions joined in, but at midnight, the army – having failed to clear the massed crowds off the nation's streets – opened fire. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed.

Suu Kyi, in her first overtly political action, wrote an open letter to the government demanding preparations for multi-party elections, and a week later, on the steps of the 2500-year-old Shwedagon Pagoda, addressed a vast crowd with a call for resistance.

A month later she formed her prodemocracy party, the NLD, with herself as general secretary. By the time her mother died a few months later, she had decided to give herself fully to the struggle. As the first rains of the monsoon swept the city, Suu Kyi told Michael that there could be no question of her returning to England. Nor could he or the boys join her in Burma, where she feared the regime would use them as weapons against her. They must stay in England and continue their lives as best they could. One day, she hoped, they would all be together again.

“It was jolly difficult for him,” says Peter Carey. “The old warm-hearted Aris household had gone.” In the next year’s elections, Suu Kyi’s party won 82 per cent of the vote. The regime ignored the result, and in effect put her under house arrest. In the next 10 years, Michael and the children would see her just twice.

In early 1999, Michael was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “Don’t worry, old boy, I’ll see it off,” he told Peter, but his condition worsened rapidly. Realising that he was dying, he tried to obtain a Burmese visa to see Suu Kyi for a last time. “Just to say goodbye.”

The regime refused to issue him one. “They told him,” Kim recalled bitterly, “that he would be a drain on the country's medical resources.” There was, of course, another way for the couple to take their leave of each other. Suu Kyi could go back to England. She turned the offer down.

Michael died on March 27, 1999, his 53rd birthday. Suu Kyi sent a message from 8000km away.

“I am so fortunate to have had a wonderful husband who has always given me the understanding I needed,” she wrote. “Nothing can take that away from me.”

She remained in detention, under ever-worsening conditions, for another 10 years. When she finally emerged she was no longer the serene, lotus garland-wearing idealist who dreamed all things were possible, but a tough pragmatist ready to horse-trade.

Those who have observed Suu Kyi since then express shock at what power appears to have done to her. Bill Richardson recalls asking her about two journalists arrested by the military: “Her face was quivering with anger,” he said. “If I had been a bit closer, I think she might have hit me.” Others speak of her growing contempt for “woolly-minded Western liberals” – the very kind who idolised her for decades – who she believes fail to grasp the realities of life in a small, poor Asian country.

The few accounts of her life as a national figurehead which leak out tell of a woman living a life of “morbid loneliness” in a guarded residence in Myanmar’s vast but eerily empty administrative capital, Naypyidaw. She rarely sees her sons, has grown to dislike giving interviews, and stays up late at night reading endless official documents.

Yet even under siege she is not without sympathisers. “I think many of the accusations against her are unfair,” says Sir John Jenkins, a senior fellow at London’s Policy Exchange, one of Britain’s leading experts on Asia. “They reflect either ignorance or a misreading of Myanmar’s history, and a misunderstanding of the powers Suu Kyi has in the face of an entrenched military establishment. I believe she’s doing what she can, but she faces immense difficulties.”

More than anything, Suu Kyi remains her father’s daughter. General Aung Sang was a fervent believer in a unified, independent Burma, and made little pretence of his doubts about minorities – especially those, like the Rohingya, who have sought to maintain a distinct identity. Suu Kyi, according to her most vehement critics, not only shares that distaste but has thrown in her lot with a hardline military faction that – to put it bluntly – wants the Muslims out.

In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2012 – 21 years after she won the award – Suu Kyi spoke of how, during her time under house arrest, she felt she was losing touch with reality. Being given the prize, she said, told her that the world supported her, and “had helped make me real again, and drawn me back into the human community”. Now she is back in isolation, and no one knows quite what her reality is.