Suu Kyi and the Rohingya genocide

The Myanmar leader’s fall from grace is partly because we made the mistake of putting her on such a high pedestal

The image of Myanmar’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was one of untrammelled moral rectitude, remote dignity and immense personal authority — until very recently. The United Nations report released this week on the violence against the Rohingya minority found that, while she had no power over the generals it named as responsible, she had “not used her de facto position as head of government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events in Rakhine”.

It said that her government — she is state counsellor, akin to prime minister — had contributed to what had happened by denying the generals’ culpability, spreading false narratives and preventing independent investigations. The UN findings — based on the testimony of refugees now in Bangladesh, because its mission was barred from Myanmar — echo the condemnation voiced by many at the time, to the effect that by saying nothing, by not using the admittedly limited room for manoeuvre she had, Suu Kyi had become complicit with the very generals she had spent so much of her life opposing. It goes so far as to argue that the generals concerned should be investigated for genocide.

The UN is due to publish a more detailed report next month. But whatever evidence it produces, it is considered unlikely that Myanmar’s generals will face an international court. Such action would require a UN Security Council vote, which China would be likely to veto. The judicial process is one thing. However, the moral opprobrium that now attaches to Suu Kyi — revered and idealised for so long, especially in the western world — constitutes a reversal of fortunes that verges on tragedy. There are those, such as the Italian senator and human rights campaigner, Emma Bonino, who argue that she should be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded while under house arrest in 1991. For others, the damage to her reputation is testimony — and punishment — enough.

But there are perhaps two more general points to be made. The first is the black-and-white way the western world in particular tends to treat those it has elevated to heroes. Suu Kyi — uncompromising, high-minded, yet demure, in her luxuriant garden — is how we used to see her. Now it is as an ethically compromised leader, either too weak or perhaps simply, deepdown, too much of a Myanmarese nationalist even to try to protect a persecuted minority. There was little recognition at the time she was under house arrest to regard her as anything less than the democratic leader that Myanmar was waiting for.

The second is that those who stand up for their cause can also be awkward and uncomfortable individuals. Their single-mindedness, a certain stubbornness, is what can set them apart. Suu Kyi had a cause, an immense sense of duty, inherited from her Myanmarese nationalist father, Aung San, who was assassinated in 1947. Her sense of responsibility to her nation transcended all else. It led her to return to her homeland — and likely imprisonment — from the safety of her United Kingdom exile. When confronted with the choice between nation and family, she chose nation.

Speaking the uncomfortable truth

One of the awards she won was the Sakharov prize — named in honour of the Soviet nuclear physicist-turned-human rights campaigner, who was forced into internal exile and freed only after Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader. In the few years that remained to him, he became something of a thorn in his liberator’s side. Admirable in so many ways, the Soviet-era dissidents could be awkward individuals who found it hard to fit in — or who saw it as their business not to fit in, and spoke uncomfortable truth to power. Take Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was repeatedly imprisoned and exiled in his native land, rejected materialism in his United States exile and lived in similar seclusion after returning, in short-lived triumph, to Russia.

Think too, just now, of John McCain — the admiral’s son shot down in Vietnam who refused to use his privilege to buy his freedom. Between the lines of some of the obituaries this week, you will find allusions to the fact that McCain could be stubborn; sometimes a difficult man to get along with.

Suu Kyi has disappointed because, in the end, for whatever reason, she appears to have compromised. But she has disappointed also because the pedestal that we — especially in the West — placed her on was just too high. Her sense of mission, her principles and her stubborn streak took her so far, but no further. That is our shortcoming, as much as hers.

■ Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster.