Idealism is no reason to support a movement

A real desire for liberation or democracy is to be encouraged, but we should be aware of ulterior motives

It is not just Aung San Suu Kyi who has been humiliated by the UN’S damning report into the genocide committed by the Burmese military against the country’s Rohingya Muslims. The collapse in the former Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s global standing is, sadly, also embarrassing for her supporters in the West.

During the long period Ms Suu Kyi spent under house arrest in Myanmar, she was feted as a modern-day Gandhi, a politician determined to uphold the principles of non-violent protest in her untiring commitment to democracy.

In 2011, eight months after her release, she gave the BBC’S Reith Lectures, during which she delivered an eloquent defence of the need for political dissent and the universal desire to seek liberty. I was among those invited to the BBC’S Radio Theatre to hear the lectures, and remember being struck by how most of the audience listened to her with rapt attention.

Now she stands accused of turning a blind eye to one of the worst atrocities committed in the modern age. Under Ms Suu Kyi’s civilian leadership, the Burmese military has been accused of displaying “genocidal intent” in their violent crackdown on the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority, which involves gang rape, mass murder and the torching of homes, forcing at least 700,000 Rohingya people to flee into exile.

Those who still seek to defend Ms Suu Kyi say that it is unfair to blame her for the massacre of the Rohingyas, claiming that, under the constitutional arrangement that enabled her to become the country’s de facto prime minister (her official title is State Counsellor) in 2016, the military has total responsibility for national security issues. But given the Burmese military’s long history of repression, Ms Suu Kyi must have known that the generals were unlikely to mend their ways when she agreed the Faustian pact that allowed to her to fulfil her dream of leading her country.

The UN’S investigators have little sympathy. They are highly critical of Ms Suu Kyi for failing to use her “moral authority” to stop the terror, and claim her civilian government, “through their acts and omissions” have “contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes”.

There are important lessons for us all in Ms Suu Kyi’s dramatic fall from grace. This is, after all, not the first time the British public has been seduced by the charismatic appeal of a liberation movement. For most of the 1980s, the African National Congress (ANC) received almost universal acclamation for its campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. Much of this was due to the dignified and inspired leadership of Nelson Mandela, who succeeded in negotiating the end of the apartheid era from his prison cell. But after the ANC came to power in 1994 the result was corruption and venality, as the party’s quasi-marxist and anti-white elements won out.

This is not to say that we must never support democracy movements abroad. They are to be welcomed, and encouraged where prudent. But Britons trusted Ms Suu Kyi too quickly and too fully, without knowing much about Burmese politics or the movement she led. What was portrayed in the Western media as a stunning victory could equally, to seasoned observers, be seen as a risky compromise in which the military cut a deal with forces that threatened to end its rule. That this compromise would break down or bear rotten fruit was very much predictable.

In truth, Ms Suu Kyi was a beneficiary of our well-meaning intelligentsia’s tendency to seize on foreign freedom fighters to burnish their own liberal credentials. Too many are easily duped. Certainly there is a world of difference between those such as Ms Suu Kyi and Mr Mandela – who, for all their movements’ shortcomings, sought to achieve political change through the ballot box – and those championed by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who seek to achieve their objectives through terrorism. But his adulation of Hamas and Hizbollah and more sensible Britons’ idealisation of Ms Suu Kyi have the same blinkered idealism at their root.

Mr Corbyn genuinely believes, no doubt, that he is simply observing the long-established British tradition of supporting liberation movements every time he shares a platform with the likes of Khaled Mashal, the Qataribased head of Hamas (with whom Mr Corbyn attended a conference in Doha in 2012). Yet the only “liberation” that interests Hamas is the destruction of the state of Israel by force of arms, and the profound lack of judgment Mr Corbyn has displayed by attending such meetings is one of the reasons he now stands accused of pursuing an anti-semitic agenda.

At least, in Hamas’s defence, it makes no secret of its ultimate objectives, which is why it is rightly outlawed as a terrorist organisation by Britain, as well as many other countries. The bigger challenge arises when it comes to political campaigners who claim to support freedom and democracy but who, once in power, pursue a different and altogether less palatable, agenda. They require a little more hard-headed caution from those who truly want to aid good causes. follow Con Coughlin on Twitter @concoughlin; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion