Aung San Suu Kyi: saint turned sinner?

A UN human rights chief recently condemned it as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. So when the Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi gave her long-anticipated speech this week on the mass exodus of Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine state, “you expected her to squirm”, said Richard Lloyd Parry in The Times. “You expected evasion and equivocation.” What you did not expect was for her to deny the truth staring her in the face. She insisted there had been “no clashes” in the region since 5 September – although refugees bearing tales of atrocities are still pouring across the border, and journalists have filmed the burning of houses. She implied that it was unclear why Rohingya were leaving, and claimed that the Burmese people only wanted “harmony” – although she knows that many, if not most, of them have a deep-seated fear and loathing of Rohingya. Even her rare flashes of honesty were alarmingly revealing: at one point, she declared that 50% of Muslim villages were still intact, as though that was an overlooked piece of positive news, and a “vindication of her own rectitude”.

The Nobel Laureate says she doesn’t fear scrutiny – which is just as well, said Alicia de la Cour Venning on The Conversation. The world’s eyes are now on the Rohingya, who are widely regarded as the world’s most persecuted minority. Though the vast majority have been resident in Myanmar for decades, the government insists they are not Burmese, but “illegal Bengalis”. Stripped of their citizenship in 1982, frequently attacked by the military and local fanatics, corralled into squalid camps, they are denied a host of rights, which has led to shocking levels of deprivation and illness. This is how modern genocides start: not with mass murders, but with a people being “weakened, dehumanised and isolated”.

Suu Kyi’s supporters in the West are appalled, said Tim Black on Spiked. How could she let this happen? The easy answer is that she can’t stop it. The generals freed her from house arrest, and allowed her political rise, to get the sanctions that were impoverishing Myanmar lifted. They retain control over the military and many key areas of government. The uncomfortable answer is that in pursuit of her broader aims, she is “willing to share her electorate’s antipathy to the Rohingya”. Beguiled by her stoicism in the face of tyranny and her elegant defence of democratic rights, we in the West mythologised her as a “Jesus-lite figure” – a symbol of all that is virtuous. But what she is is a politician, and politics is a dirty business.