Military coup ends with Myanmar’s elected leader back on house arrest
SINGAPORE — With her arrest Monday in a military coup in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi’s dizzying journey on the world stage — from democracy icon to leader of an elected government and then, astonishingly, a stalwart defender of the slaughter of Rohingya Muslims — returned to a familiar place.
The 75-year-old is a political prisoner again, detained along with dozens of allies and political leaders as the army retook power barely five years after elections that ended a half-century of military rule.
The former junta held Suu Kyi under house arrest for nearly 15 years at her family’s lakeside villa in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, starting in 1989. She gained international prominence as the serene, smiling face of the struggle for democracy, winning the Nobel Peace Prize and basking in comparisons to Mahatma Gandhi for her promotion of nonviolence.
After the junta agreed to some reforms, she became Myanmar’s nominal leader in 2015 and heads a political party that has won two consecutive landslide victories in parliamentary elections, most recently in November. But she shared power in a delicate and not always discernible dance with her former jailers in the army, which kept control over security affairs and veto power over constitutional changes.
The arrangement boosted Suu Kyi’s popularity at home as one of Asia’s poorest economies began to open up. But her refusal to criticize the army made her a global disgrace when she defended the 2017 militaryled offensive that drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from their homes.
To her detractors, the coup is the inevitable result of the Faustian bargain she struck with the army for political gain, a deal whose limits are now crushingly clear: The generals were never more than one step away from seizing power again.
“She’s in a bad situation right now, so I don’t want to criticize her too much,” said Thet Swe Win, an interfaith activist in Yangon. “But they could have predicted this would happen.”
Rumors of a coup had swirled for weeks as army leaders made unsubstantiated claims of fraud in November’s elections, in which Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won more than 80% of elected seats while the main military-backed party saw its paltry numbers dwindle even further.
The army commander in chief, senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, said last week that it might be “necessary” to revoke the constitution that the army imposed in 2008, which provides for a civilian government but allows the military to operate without oversight. Most analysts played down the threat, reasoning that he and his top lieutenants — already the target of U.S. sanctions and international criminal cases — wouldn’t risk further global scorn.
The quick, bloodless takeover Monday, hours before the opening parliamentary session, took even close observers by surprise. Some speculated that the NLD’s plans to form a national unity government, including members of smaller ethnic parties, troubled the army, known locally as the Tatmadaw, which has been fighting with ethnic militias for decades.
“The coup will boost Aung San Suu Kyi’s international image,” said Melissa Crouch, an expert on Myanmar at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. “This is the proof she needs that the military does not play by the rules it created.”
Within hours of the arrests, many residents of Yangon had already removed the bright red flags of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy from their homes and businesses. The party issued a statement on one of its Facebook pages urging people to oppose the coup and any return to “military dictatorship.”
But by Monday evening there was no sign of a popular uprising to defend either the election outcome or a party that just three months ago won a resounding majority.
To many experts, that signaled one of Suu Kyi’s main failings as a politician: As the daughter of Myanmar’s slain independence leader, Aung San, she has hoarded power inside the party and failed to groom the next generation of leaders.