The shame of Aung San Suu Kyi
Once a symbol of peace and principle, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi is fast losing face over her handling of the Rohingya crisis
SHE used to be the world’s darling, a moral giant right up there with the greats such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa. How could you not admire someone who was willing to spend 15 years under house arrest rather than compromise her principles?
Even our own Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu was a fan. He kept a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi on his desk for years – even though friends relentlessly teased him about having a crush on his fellow Nobel laureate.
But now, like many of her international admirers, the Arch (86) is having to face an uncomfortable truth: the Suu Kyi who sparked so much adoration when she was isolated in her lakeside villa is a completely different woman to the one who’s helping to lead Myanmar ( formerly Burma) today.
Where once the serene-looking and soft-spoken Suu Kyi (73) was regarded as a saint, now she’s fast becoming an international pariah. As the world witnesses the genocide unfolding in her Southeast Asian country there have even been calls for her to be stripped of her Nobel Peace Prize.
Homes being torched, women being gang raped, mass murders, hundreds of thousands being forced to flee the country, journalists being jailed – how is it possible that Suu Kyi could turn a blind eye to all these atrocities?
Since late last year her response has been muted as the army has conducted a relentless crackdown on the Muslim Rohingya minority. More than 7 000 have been killed and about 700 000 have risked death to escape to neighbouring Bangladesh by sea or on foot.
Although the United Nations (UN) has branded it “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, for the most part Suu Kyi has remained silent. And when she’s spoken she’s left commentators scratching their heads in bewilderment.
In a recent speech she described the generals in her cabinet as “rather sweet” and said the military’s action against the Rohingya was a response to terrorism.
While Suu Kyi insists she has little real power to rein in the military, some say it’s clear where her loyalties lie. The UN has pointed a finger of blame directly at her and her government, saying that through their acts and omissions they’ve contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes.
More alarm bells rang when news broke that two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone (32) and Kyaw Soe Oo (28), had been sentenced to seven years in jail for reporting on the Rohingya massacre.
Everyone expected Suu Kyi, once an outspoken advocate of media freedom, to move heaven and earth to get amnesty for the reporters. But when a US diplomat tried to intervene on their behalf she told him the journalists deserve to rot in jail because they’re “traitors”.
THE world cheered when Suu Kyi led her party, the National League for Democracy, to a landslide victory in the 2015 election, five years after she’d walked free from house arrest. Although a clause in the constitution prevents her from becoming president because her late husband, Michael Aris, was British and so are their sons, Alexander (45) and Kim (41), she was able to assume the newly created role of state counsellor.
Many assumed that after all she’d endured during her years of house arrest – being kept apart from her children and husband, a historian who died of cancer in Oxford in 1999 – she would’ve been even more determined to liberate her country from years of military rule and usher it towards democracy.
Yet over the past two years Suu Kyi has chosen to remain silent as cases of hate speech and prejudice have become a frequent occurrence in Myanmar, with “No Muslims” signs popping up across the largely Buddhist country.
Aaron Connelly, a Myanmar expert at Australia’s Lowy Institute, says her claim that she’s powerless to stop the military’s action against the Rohingya is a myth and points out that she uses her political leverage on issues she deems worthy.
“Unfortunately, she doesn’t consider the safety and dignity of Rohingya to be among them,” he says.
The Rohingya, who make up about a million of Myanmar’s population, are largely despised by the other groups and are regarded as illegal immigrants. Now many wonder whether Suu Kyi shares this view.
Is it possible that the revered activist could be a bigot? This is the question being asked as she and her government seem to be going out of their way to make life impossible for the Rohingya by denying UN human rights teams visas to get to Myanmar to investigate the crisis and deliver much-needed aid.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, says Suu Kyi’s refusal to speak out is a calculated political move. “She’s thinking, ‘It’s not worth it. These people are too unpopular for me to bother defending’,” he says.
Her friend the Arch has been so horrified by events that a while back he sent her a hard-hitting open letter, begging her to have a change of heart.
“It’s incongruous for a symbol of righteousness to lead such a country,” he wrote. “If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep.”
But there are those who think too much is being expected of Suu Kyi.
“She isn’t a monster,” Peter Coclanis, director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina in the USA, wrote on respected political analysis site foreignpolicy.com recently.
“She’s a political realist, attempting to do the best she can with limited power in an extremely volatile young democracy where the military still wields massive veto power. That’s caused her to make what may be considered callous decisions and to sacrifice the interests of a minority for those of the majority she believes she’s tasked with representing.”
Others point out that the world shouldn’t be surprised that Suu Kyi has such loyalty towards the military. After all it was her father, Aung San, a former premier of Burma, who founded the army. He did it in a bid to liberate the country from British rule but was assassinated in 1947 before this dream became a reality.
This is the same military that ruled the country with an iron fist from 1962 until 2011, arresting democracy advocates including Suu Kyi, imposing martial law and killing protesters. But it seems she doesn’t hold any grudges.
“I’m a friend of the army,” she said in an interview a few years back. “People criticise me now for being their poster girl but my father was the father of the army, and the soldiers were his sons. So they’re part of my family.”
Fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate American activist Jody Williams, who’s founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, says for years she’s had a suspicion Suu Kyi wasn’t all she seemed. She recalls being stunned when the icon stormed out of a 2012 meeting in New York in a rage after a young activist pressed her about human rights issues in her country.
Williams believes that while Suu Kyi was under house arrest she allowed herself to be misread. Now we’re seeing the real Suu Kyi, a ruthless politician who’s got what she’s wanted all along – power – and is willing to do anything to cling to it.
“That’s been her single ambition,” Williams says. “Other issues be damned.”