Aung San Suu Kyi can surely do better than this

Her refusal to condemn the arrest of two journalists shows her in a poor light

Myanmar’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, facing criticism for her government’s handling of the Rohingya refugee crisis , has finally conceded that the situation in Rakhine state “could have been better handled”. This, however, will be cold comfort for the more than 700,000 Rohingya who fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh to escape a crackdown by the Myanmar Army — a campaign so brutal that United Nations rights officials described it as nothing short of ethnic cleansing. Report after report by rights activists and journalists has documented extrajudicial killings and rapes by Myanmarese troops and the destruction of complete villages in Rakhine, with most estimates putting the death toll in last year’s bloodshed at 10,000. In her latest remarks on the issue at an international forum in Hanoi, Ms Suu Kyi sought to imply that her civilian government wields “only 75% of the power” in a power-sharing arrangement with the military, but it is hard to square her remarks with her reputation as the person who almost single-handedly took on Myanmar’s junta and paved the way for democratic reforms that culminated with the 2015 elections, which was swept by her party.

Even more damning was Ms Suu Kyi’s defence of the jailing of two Reuters reporters — Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo — last week for, as she put it, breaking the Official Secrets Act. Most rights groups and journalists’ bodies believe the two reporters were given seven-year jail terms for their role in exposing the massacre of 10 Rohingya men at Inn Din village in Rakhine last year. In the speech delivered on Ms Suu Kyi’s behalf by her son when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, she had said she was accepting the award “in the name of all the people of Burma”. Clearly, as the de facto civilian leader of Myanmar today, Ms Suu Kyi no longer has the interests and rights of all the people of her country at heart.