National Post (National Edition)
`Mother Suu' still has the love of her people
The virtues that once made Aung San Suu Kyi a figurehead of non-violent struggle led to a dramatic fall from grace — but she is still the most potent threat to Myanmar's would-be military dictators.
The daughter of Gen. Aung San, a national hero widely credited with winning Burmese independence from British rule, Suu Kyi always projected a sense of destiny — critics might call it entitlement — to lead her country.
She was only two years old when her father was assassinated in 1947, and she was largely raised overseas by her diplomat mother.
After a privileged upbringing in India and the U.K., she studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford before settling down in Britain with her husband, Michael Aris, a historian.
But when she returned to her homeland to care for her ailing mother in 1988, she soon became embroiled in the country's pro-democracy movement.
She quickly became the leader of the movement for free elections, and by 1989, when Burma became known as Myanmar, she had become so popular that the country's military authorities could no longer tolerate her.
She was arrested, and spent 15 of the next 21 years in detention. In 1991, while still under house arrest, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.”
In 2010, when she was released and allowed to resume her political career, it was heralded as a new dawn for democracy after 50 years of nearly unbroken military rule.
In 2015, she led her National League for Democracy to a landslide victory in the country's first free elections for a quarter of a century.
However, critics pointed out that many abuses continued under Suu Kyi's rule. Her international reputation took an irreparable blow in 2017, when she refused to speak out against a campaign of genocide against the Muslim Rohingya community.
But “Mother Suu” still has the admiration and respect of her people.
That will make it difficult for the generals to silence her — and difficult for Western governments to repudiate her, whatever her flaws.
On Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden threatened to reimpose sanctions on Myanmar following the coup by the country's military leaders, and called for a concerted international response to press them to relinquish power.
Biden condemned the military's takeover from the civilian-led government on Monday and its detention of Suu Kyi as “a direct assault on the country's transition to democracy and the rule of law.”
“The international community should come together in one voice to press the Burmese military to immediately relinquish the power they have seized, release the activists and officials they have detained,” Biden said in a statement.