Global icon of human rights risks world’s ire over ethnic cleansing
Today it is hard to imagine Bono or Amnesty organising a welcome concert in Dublin for Aung San Suu Kyi, writes Fergal Keane
IREMEMBER the day she came to Dublin. Although I was considered a friend and had known her for nearly 20 years, I made a point of watching from a distance. That was June 19, 2012 and Aung San Suu Kyi was the toast of the liberal world.
Bono spoke of how her Irish supporters were “humbled, grateful at the fact one of your first trips overseas, you have chosen a small rock in the north Atlantic”.
I knew then that she had metamorphosed from being an international icon of human rights to a political leader. Free from house arrest and at the head of the National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi was contesting for power. Hence the distance. As a journalist it was my job to stand back and subject her words and deeds to scrutiny.
For the next year or so, Aung San Suu Kyi was feted from capital to capital, much as Nelson Mandela had been when he was released from prison over two decades before. In an age of cynicism the world clamoured for the vivid light of idealism. Until it all went spectacularly wrong.
Let me first go back to a beginning. I was newly arrived in Asia when she was released from her first period of house arrest in July, 1995. My previous job had been in South Africa where I reported on the transition from apartheid to multi-racial democracy. It was this privileged posting that would create the bond with Aung San Suu Kyi.
On the day she was freed I was at home in Hong Kong. I quickly applied for and was given a tourist visa to Burma. In those days BBC journalists were banned.
Arriving in mildewed and dilapidated Rangoon, I went straight to the gate of her residence on University Avenue and walked among the joyful crowds and the military intelligence goons who photographed all who came and went. I scribbled a note asking for an interview and inserted my business card, pushing it through the gate to one of her minders.
Late that night, asleep in the colonial grandeur of the Strand Hotel — I was after all posing as a tourist — my phone rang. A voice said simply: “The Lady will see you.”
The following morning we had our first meeting. She was bright eyed, bubbling with energy and immersed in happiness. There was a rush of questions — mostly from her. I discovered that she had followed my reporting from South Africa and was keen to know how Mandela and the ANC had managed the peaceful transition from white rule. I spoke of the compromises that were necessary, about the generosity of vision of Mandela and the pragmatism of FW de Klerk.
In her sitting room she showed me the large portrait of her father, the assassinated founding father of Burma, General Aung San, whose image dominated the space just as he defined her sense of destiny.
In her lost father, Aung San Suu Kyi, saw the stolen hopes of the Burmese, and she was determined to fulfil his legacy. Hers would be a country based on the rule of law and social justice.
Whenever we met in the years that followed she would constantly stress to me the need for patience in politics and her determination to reach out to the army. Her father had, after all, founded the Burmese army.
Aung San Suu Kyi was the most intellectually curious public figure I had ever met. She read widely — novels, poetry, non-fiction works on economics and social change — and always had a list of questions to ask about the world outside Rangoon.
Looking back, I see the period after her first release from house arrest as a brief shining moment. It seemed as if anything might be possible. But the more she asserted herself in the years that followed, the more nervous the military became. Not that she was radical or provocative. It was just the mounting evidence of her popularity, her connection with the multitudes in the cities and beyond that terrified the thuggish military overlords.
They switched out the lights again. Back she went into house arrest and there she stayed until 2010. With a small number of colleagues, I would go back to Burma undercover while she was locked away in her house by the lake on University Avenue. They were fearful times. We never dared to show the faces of those we interviewed. It would have meant instant retaliation against them and their families. Out in the countryside, and especially in ethnic minority areas, the army raped and pillaged as it pleased. This was a regime which locked up comedians and silenced writers.
In 2007 Buddhist monks staged protests which almost became a revolution, and the regime cracked down with killings, torture and jailing. Through it all there were dedicated human rights activists in the West who kept the story of Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi before the world. In this process the legend was forged. There was an admiring movie and her books became best sellers. I wrote the foreword for one of them. The three defining words of her ambition for Burma were “freedom from fear”.
Back in 1990 she wrote that “concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power”.
I thought of those words when I met her last week. I thought too of my first visit to Rakhine state and the Rohingya ghetto in the capital Sittwe. It was late evening and we had gone to speak with victims of ethnic cleansing, driven from their villages in the rural hinterland. The ghetto was ringed by police and there were barbed-wire blockades. I entered a mosque where evening prayers were taking place. A man detached himself from the group and scribbled something on a small piece of paper. He came over and handed it to me.
“Dear Sir,” he had written, “please save us from the tyranny of the government and the Rakhine.” The place was crammed with the frightened and dispossessed. There were thousands more on the floodplain outside Sittwe, languishing in camps where malaria flourished and the very young and old succumbed to disease in the monsoon rains. I saw the burned villages, heard the accounts of murder at the hands of sectarian mobs, and listened to monks spout the toxic rhetoric of Buddhist chauvinism. I saw ethnic cleansing in Rakhine. I know it when I see it.
As it happens I am writing this article on the 23rd anniversary of the Rwandan genocide when good men and women did nothing to prevent the destruction of a targeted minority. I was there. I will never forget it. And when I see this monster stir anywhere in the world I get a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. After Rwanda I wanted to believe we had learned a lesson and that the good would not stand by. But I was wrong. We would not see the same scale of slaughter, or the vast conspiracy that killed up to 800,000 people, but the abdication of moral responsibility was widespread when the butchers rode out again in Darfur and Syria and many other places in the two decades since Rwanda.
Aung San Suu Kyi refuses to accept that what is happening in Rakhine state amounts to ethnic cleansing. This is despite the evidence of numerous witnesses, human rights organisations and journalists. Not surprisingly the question of the Rohingya dominated our interview this week. I have seen what happens when she is confronted by an aggressive interviewer. The shutters come down. The answers are short. Nothing is revealed. I am an advocate of a different style of encounter. With her especially, a quiet, patient questioning is always a wiser course.
Certainly as a journalist it is not my job to campaign or lead the charge for any group. But it is my responsibility to call things by their proper name. We have now the situation where journalists are banned from visiting the affected populations in Rakhine unless they are invited on a government-organised trip, and invitations and trips are very rare. Another reminder of the bad old days is the ban on the proposed United Nations human rights mission to Rakhine. This is the same United Nations whose special envoy worked to have Aung San Suu Kyi released from house arrest. The report by Amnesty International asserting ethnic cleansing has been dismissed by the Suu Kyi government. Yes, that is the same Amnesty International which presented her with the ‘Ambassador Of Conscience’ award in Dublin.
I told Aung San Suu Kyi that I believed what I had seen in Rakhine was ethnic cleansing. I asked her if she worried that she would be remembered not as a global icon of human rights but as the Nobel Laureate who failed to stand up to ethnic cleansing in her own country. “It is not ethnic cleansing,” she said. It was more complicated, a narrative of two communities pitched against each other, Muslims killing other Mus- lims who cooperated with the authorities, a violence caused by poverty. Condemning one side or the other would only inflame matters. Poverty is, I agree, a big part of the issue but that can be managed. Extremist local politicians and monks need not be allowed manipulate that poverty when wiser voices could challenge them. I had thought that after such a robust interview she might have been hostile. But no, we chatted about Rakhine and the world at large for 20 minutes or so before she went back to work in her office.
I believe that nothing will change her mind on the Rohingya. For somebody so intellectually curious she is proving remarkably inflexible when faced with facts that challenge her world view. Despite the atrocious condi- tions being experienced in Rakhine state, she refuses to visit. I cannot think of another democracy where the most powerful leader would not lend their personal stature to help bring peace on the ground. This is not because the army refuses to allow her. Her public explanation is that she trusts the responsible people in Rakhine to manage the situation. Perhaps. But a refusal to be seen to do what the UN and human rights groups ask is certainly key to her decision.
Aung San Suu Kyi understands well that her international support has drained away. It is hard to imagine Bono or Amnesty organising a welcome concert for her in Dublin now. This is a price she is willing to pay for doing what she believes is right. But it is also very risky. What happens if the military turns against her once more as she tries to edge them out of politics? Her strength is among the ethnic Burmans who make up nearly 70pc of the population. They will not worry what she does or doesn’t do or say about the Rohingya. To the people of the slums and rural villages she is still ‘The Lady’.
There are many things we shed with the passing of years. Hopes, illusions and certainties can all get blown away in the fire of experience. Politics demands all sorts of compromises, as Nelson Mandela knew well. But he also knew the virtue of speaking out when it was hardest to do so, when facing down the rage of his own people and placing his own moral stature between them and vengeance. I saw this when he publicly came out to plead for peace and tolerance after his friend, the ANC military leader, Chris Hani, was murdered by white racists in 1993.
It was there too in the courage of the Hutu Prime Minister of Rwanda, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, murdered by extremists in the early days of the genocide because she dared to stand up for a hated minority. That was leadership. That was greatness. It is what is desperately needed in the hell of Rakhine state.
‘There was an admiring movie and her books became bestsellers’ ‘In no other democracy would the leader refuse to bring peace’