[Ten years after she left house arrest and vowed to fight for justice, Myanmar’s civilian leader has instead become a jailer of critics and an apologist for the slaughter of minorities.]
By Hannah Beech
Armed with nothing more than a collection
of international awards, she wore fresh flowers in her hair, sat with
impeccable posture and promised the world two things: she would ensure that
Myanmar’s political prisoners would go free and she would end the ethnic strife
that has kept the country’s borderlands at war for seven decades.
But the two pledges have gone
unfulfilled, and the world’s most shimmering icon of democracy has lost her
luster. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 75, has turned into an apologist for the very
generals who once locked her up, downplaying their murderous campaign against
the Rohingya Muslim minority. Her strongest critics accuse her, as a member of
the Bamar ethnic majority, of racism and an unwillingness to fight for the
human rights of all people in Myanmar.
Yet even as Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi
has squandered the moral authority that came with her Nobel Peace Prize, her
popularity at home has endured. This week, her political party, the National
League for Democracy, won yet another landslide in general
elections, setting up five more years in which she will share power with
the military that ruled Myanmar for nearly 50 years.
“Her leadership style is not going
toward a democratic system, it’s going toward dictatorship,” said Daw Thet Thet
Khine, a former stalwart of the National League for Democracy who formed her
own party to compete in the elections on Sunday but failed to win any seats.
“She does not listen to the voice of the people.”
It is hard to think of a human
rights hero whose global prestige has tarnished so quickly. Alongside Nelson
Mandela and Vaclav Havel, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi once represented the triumph of
democracy over dictatorship. It helped, too, that she could turn on the charm
Last year, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi
traveled to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to defend
the military against claims that it had committed genocide against
the Rohingya
Muslims.
She unapologetically insisted to
the court that while “it cannot be ruled out that disproportionate force” had
been used against the Rohingya, inferring genocidal intent presented an
“incomplete and misleading factual picture.” Her Facebook page once carried the
post “Fake rape,” abruptly discounting the systematic and well
documented sexual violence committed against the Rohingya.
Under Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s
government, Myanmar’s frontier lands, where other ethnic minorities are
clustered, are more conflict-ridden now than they were a decade ago. And poets,
painters and students have been jailed for peacefully speaking their minds: In
Myanmar today, 584 people are either political prisoners or are awaiting trial
on those kinds of charges, according to the Assistance Association for
Political Prisoners.
“Now that she has tasted power, I
don’t think she wants to share it with anyone,” said Seng Nu Pan, a politician
from the Kachin ethnic group that is fighting for autonomy in the country’s
north.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi grew up as
political nobility, the daughter of Gen. Aung San, the country’s independence
hero who was assassinated when she was 2 years old.
After 28 years abroad, she returned
home in 1988 as pro-democracy protests were coalescing across the country.
Within a few months, a onetime homemaker had emerged as the leader of the
movement.
A military junta locked her up in
1989, after which her National League for Democracy won elections that were
ignored by the dictatorship. In 1991, she won the Nobel Peace Prize “for her
nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.”
During house arrest in her
crumbling villa for a total of 15 years, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi kept to a strict
schedule. She listened to BBC radio news reports. She practiced the piano. And
she meditated in the Buddhist way, intent, she said, on transcending earthly
concerns. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi missed her two sons growing up, and the death of
her husband, a British academic, from cancer.
But the virtues that served Ms.
Aung San Suu Kyi so well during house arrest — her straight-backed dignity and
the psychological bunker she built around herself — may be what has led to her
failure, so far, to fight for true, representative democracy in Myanmar.
The line is thin between resolve
and recalcitrance, conviction and condescension.
“It is ironic that while the international
community used its liberty to promote hers, she is using some of the very same
legal mechanisms as the military to stifle freedom of speech, freedom of the
press, and freedom of assembly,” said Bill Richardson, the former American
ambassador to the United Nations and a longtime ally of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.
Mr. Richardson broke
with her two years ago, when Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi became so angry that he
thought she might slap him after he urged her to free two Reuters journalists
who had been imprisoned after uncovering a massacre of Rohingya, he said.
“If she fails to lead especially
her ethnic Bamar supporters to a more inclusive vision of the country through
her words and actions, Myanmar is likely to become a less stable and more
violent place,” Mr. Richardson added.
For all her democratic rhetoric,
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi retains respect for the army that her father formed. Some
of the founders of the National League for Democracy were former military
officers who fought ethnic rebels in Myanmar’s hinterlands.
The party is organized with a
soldierly hierarchy in which the commanding officer is Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.
But the actual army maintains a grip on important ministries, a chunk of
parliament and lucrative businesses.
Since taking power as the country’s
state counselor in 2016, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly praised the army,
while refusing to acknowledge the military’s drive to rid the country of
Rohingya Muslims. In 2017, roughly three-quarters of a million Rohingya fled to
neighboring Bangladesh.
Many of those left in the country
are in internment camps. The Rohingya were not allowed to vote in Sunday’s
elections, and the polls were canceled in other ethnic-minority conflict zones,
disenfranchising more than 2.5 million non-Bamar. As a result, ethnic parties
were unable to make the electoral gains they once expected, although the
National League for Democracy successfully fielded two Muslim candidates.
“Making peace and reconciliation is
much easier with ethnic groups, but she only tried with the military,” said Tu
Ja, chairman of the ethnic Kachin State People’s Party.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s supporters
say that her refusal to speak up on behalf of Myanmar’s vulnerable communities
is not innate chauvinism but rather a political pragmatism that comes from
wanting to deny the military an opportunity to once again seize full power.
Army rule began in 1962 with the excuse that a civilian government was being
overwhelmed by civil war.
But the national mood in Myanmar is
animated by a xenophobia that limns Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s unwillingness to
defend the rights of ethnic minorities. Thousands of Buddhist monks have held
protests against the West for wanting to bring the military to justice for
ethnic cleansing. Many others in the country’s Bamar heartland accuse
an Islamic cabal of trying to turn a peaceful Buddhist nation into a
Muslim enclave.
“People in the West thought that
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would be unpopular because of the crackdown on the
Bengalis,” said U Thu Citta, an influential Buddhist monk, using a term to
suggest, incorrectly, that the Rohingya are from Bangladesh, not Myanmar. “But
what she did was right.”
Since the election, Ms. Aung San
Suu Kyi has remained holed up in a villa in Naypyidaw, the fortress capital
that was built by the generals to showcase their might. She has repeatedly
refused requests to talk to The New York Times. She is still said to meditate
everyday.
The coronavirus rages outside. The
military-linked party, which was trounced by the National League for Democracy,
has rejected the election results, called for a do-over and threatened to bring
the army in as observers.
In Yangon, the former capital
abandoned by the military, a new generation of human rights activists trade
tips on how to avoid getting nabbed by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s government.
“We have nearly 600 political
prisoners, and I was one of them a few months ago,” said Ma Thinzar Shunlei Yi,
28, who was convicted of contravening a law on peaceful assembly when she
protested the persecution of ethnic minorities. “She has not done enough to lay
the democratic foundation for basic freedoms for all.”
