Portrait of a damned politician
Her failure to condemn the persecution of Rohingya Muslims has led to Burmese politician’s Aung San Suu Kyi’s dramatic fall from grace, writes Emma GrahamHarrison.
PERHAPS no one in the modern world has been so admired as a moral icon, then fallen so far in global estimation, as Aung San Suu Kyi. The Burmese democracy champion turned politician made her name as an implacable fighter for human rights. She sacrificed her family life, her freedom and, for stretches, her health, in a battle for the soul of her country and the future of her people. Then, after emerging triumphant and untarnished from more than two decades of struggle, she has stood by as hundreds of thousands of her fellow Burmese are persecuted, massacred and driven from their homes because of their religion.
Aung San Suu Kyi has broken her silence on spiralling abuses against the Rohingya Muslim minority, described as ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’ by UN officials, only to defend the Government she is part of, sparking fierce criticism from former friends, allies and supporters.
‘‘It is incongruous for a symbol of righteousness to lead such a country,’’Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in a recent letter to his ‘‘dearly beloved younger sister’’. He’s the latest of several Nobel peace prize winners to publicly rebuke their fellow laureate. ‘‘If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep,’’ he said.
Like so many others who knew 72yearold Aung San Suu Kyi during her struggle, and millions more who admired her, Tutu seems almost as baffled as he is disturbed by her stance. Her powerful intellect and capacity for empathy, her willingness to put others’ rights ahead of her family life and freedom, all make the apparent ease with which she is now turning her back on human suffering and extreme injustice almost incomprehensible.
Terrible personal loss is not an abstract ideal for Aung San Suu Kyi. Her father, a general and hero of the struggle for independence against Britain, was assassinated when she was 2 and her beloved older brother died in a drowning accident five years later. As an adult, she experienced first hand the brutal power of an oppressive state, when she spent 15 years under house arrest, prevented from saying goodbye to her dying husband or seeing her two sons for years at a time.
When she delivered her Nobel lecture, two decades after being awarded the prize, she mentioned the ‘‘great sufferings’’ addressed in Buddhist theology and dwelt on two she had come to know intimately: ‘‘To be parted from those one loves and to be forced to live in propinquity with those one does not love.’’ She continued: ‘‘I thought of prisoners and refugees, of migrant workers and victims of human trafficking, of that great mass of the uprooted of the Earth who have been torn away from their homes, parted from families and friends, forced to live out their lives among strangers who are not always welcoming.’’
Her decision to separate the suffering of the Rohingya from that of other peoples, after years of insisting human rights are a universal birthright and fighting ‘‘to make our human community safer and kinder’’, appears to mark the start of a disturbing new chapter in an extraordinary life.
Born in Rangoon in 1945, she was educated at international schools in the city until the age of 15, when her mother was appointed ambassador to India and the family moved to Delhi. She won a place to study PPE at Oxford in 1964, where she met Michael Aris, the British academic who would become her husband.
Once married, the couple worked for several years in Bhutan, then returned to Oxford to start a family. In 1988 Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma, to the bedside of her mother who was seriously ill after a stroke.
Her mother’s illness coincided with a period of national convulsions as protests against the military dictatorship gathered force. Aung San Suu Kyi was persuaded to join the opposition by activists keen to harness the power of her family name. She made her first speech to a rapturous reception in August, cofounded the National League for Democracy within months, was jailed by the summer of 1989 and awarded the Nobel peace prize barely two years later.
In 1988, her husband and sons, then 11 and 15, had come to Rangoon to discuss whether she should enter politics, braced for her decision to stay in Burma.
Initially, both Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese authorities appear to have underestimated each other.
Privations in the early days of detention included malnutrition so severe her hair began to fall out. The authorities reminded her she was free to leave Burma, while restricting visas for her family, calculating the pain of separation would force her into an impotent exile. She put family second, even as Aris battled cancer alone in 1999, and her sons struggled after his death.
She believed the regime would soon succumb to the powerful protest movement and her political career might be measured at most in years. Instead, the decadeslong standoff would make her perhaps the most famous political prisoner in the world and define the regime jailing her as international pariahs.
In 2010, she was released from house arrest and in 2012 allowed to contest a byelection, which she won easily. Finally, certain that she would be able to return, Aung San Suu Kyi left Burma again to collect the awards that had stacked up during her detention. Everywhere, she was greeted with adulation. But, as the violence against the
Rohingya mounts, so has criticism of
Aung San Suu
Kyi for her inaction and silence.
The universally acclaimed champion of human rights has shuffled down a uniquely disturbing path, the only Nobel peace laureate to turn apologist for the most grotesque abuses of basic rights inside her own country. Her motivations remain opaque but the only thing she obviously stands to lose by speaking out is the support of the military power brokers who ultimately control Burma and the only thing she could obviously hope to gain by her silence is more power and influence.
Aung San Suu Kyi might do well to look back over her own previous advice to politicians and despots: ‘‘It is not power that corrupts but fear,’’ she wrote in
Freedom From Fear, perhaps her most famous work. ‘‘Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it.’’ — Guardian News and
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