When Dou Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from years of house arrest a decade ago, never using a smartphone or Facebook, holding a court in her banned political party office, the smell of dampness from human rights reports lingered on the floor. .
Nothing but a collection of international awards, she wore fresh flowers in her hair, sat in a flawless posture and promised the world two things: she would ensure that Myanmar’s political prisoners would be released and the ethnic conflict she held would end. The country’s borders at war for seven decades.
But both of these promises have remained unfulfilled, and the world’s brightest symbol of democracy has lost its luster. Ms. Ung Ng San Suu Kyi,., Has apologized for the age-old, very generals who once denied her a murderous campaign against the rocking Muslim minority. His strong critics, as a member of the Bamar ethnic majority, accused him of racism and unwillingness to fight for the human rights of all people in Myanmar.
Even though Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi falsified the moral authority she received with her Nobel Peace Prize, her popularity at home has survived. This week, his political party, the National League for Democracy, won one more landslide in the general election, establishing a further five years in which it would share power with the military that has ruled Myanmar for nearly 50 years.
The former Stalwart of the National League for Democracy, who formed his party to run in Sunday’s election but failed to win any, said, “His leadership style is not moving towards democracy, it is moving towards dictatorship. Seats. “She doesn’t hear people’s voices.”
It’s hard to think of a human rights hero whose global reputation has been so quickly tarnished. With Nelson Mandela and Vallac Haveli, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi once demonstrated the victory of democracy over dictatorship. It helped, too, that it could turn the charm.
Last year, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi traveled to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to defend the military against allegations of genocide against rogue Muslims.
He insisted in court that “when that disproportionate force was used against the Rohingya, it could not be denied, however, that the motive for the genocide presented a picture of an” incomplete and misleading fact. ” Was, which was a sudden discount to systematic and well-documented sexual violence against the Rohingya.
Under Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s government, Myanmar’s border lands, where other ethnic minorities are in the group, are more conflicted than they were a decade ago. And poets, illustrators and students have been jailed for speaking their minds peacefully: There are 4,584 people in Myanmar today who are either political prisoners or are awaiting a hearing on such allegations, according to the Auxiliary Council of Political Prisoners.
“Now that he has tasted power, I don’t think he wants to share it with anyone,” said Seng Nu Pan, a politician from the Kachin ethnic group fighting for independence in the north of the country.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi grew up as a political nobility, the daughter of the country’s independence hero General Aung San, who was assassinated when she was 2 years old.
After 28 years abroad, he returned home in 1988 to support pro-democracy protests in the country. Within a few months, a one-time homebuilder emerged as the leader of the movement.
It was shut down by a military junta in 1989, after which its National League for Democracy won elections that were ignored by the dictatorship. In 1991, he received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.”
During a house arrest in her crumbling villa for a total of 15 years, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi had a strict schedule. She listened to the news on BBC radio. He practiced the piano. He said while overcoming the worries of the earth, and he meditates in a Buddhist way. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi missed her husband when her two sons grew up, and a British academic from cancer.
But Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s good service qualities during the domestic arrest – her directly supported pride and the mental bunker she built around herself – led to her failure, so far, to fight for true, representative democracy in Myanmar.
The line between determination and resurrection, conviction and certainty is short.
“Ironically, when the international community used its freedom to promote it, it was using some similar legal methods, such as the military, to undermine freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly,” said Bill Richardson. Former US ambassador to the United Nations and longtime ally of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.
Mr. Richardson broke up with her two years ago, while Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi became so angry that she thought she could slap two jailed Reuters journalists after she exposed the Rohingya massacre and slapped them.
“Myanmar is likely to become a less stable and more violent place if she is not able to lead a broader vision of the country, especially to her ethnic Balmar supporters, through her words and actions,” Mr Richardson added.
For all its democratic rhetoric, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi maintained respect for the army created by her father. The founders of the National League for Democracy were some former military officers who fought ethnic rebels in the hinterland of Myanmar.
The party is organized with a military hierarchy in which the commanding officer is Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. But the real army captures a large number of important ministries, parliaments and lucrative businesses.
Since taking office as the country’s state adviser in 2016, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly praised the military, while refusing to accept military action to liberate the country from Rohingya Muslims. In 2017, about three-quarters of the Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh.
Many of the rest of the country are in interment camps. The Rohingya were not allowed to vote in Sunday’s election, and voting was canceled in other ethnic-minority conflict zones, allowing more than 2.5 million non-Bamar voters. As a result, ethnic parties were once unable to hold elections as expected, although the National League for Democracy successfully fielded two Muslim candidates.
“It’s easier to make peace and reconciliation with ethnic groups, but she just tried with the military,” said Tu Ja Ja, president of the ethnic Kachin State People’s Party.
Proponents of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi say her refusal to speak out on behalf of Myanmar’s sensitive communities is not a congenital Chouinism, but a political pragmatism that seeks to deny the military a chance to regain full power. Military rule began in 1962 with the pretext that the civilian government was drowning in civil war.
But the national mood in Myanmar is animated by a xenophobia that limits Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s reluctance to protect the rights of ethnic minorities. Thousands of Buddhist monks protested against the West, seeking justice for the military for ethnic cleansing. Many others in the country’s Balmer Heartland have accused Islamic cable of trying to turn a peaceful Buddhist nation into a Muslim scatterbrain.
“People in the West thought that Dau Aung San Suu Kyi would be unpopular because of the crackdown on Bengalis,” said Yu Thu Sitta, an influential Buddhist monk, who wrongly said that the Rohingya were from Bangladesh, no. Myanmar. “But what she did was true.”
Since the election, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has resonated in a villa in Naypyidaw, built by generals to display her pride. He has repeatedly denied requests to speak to The New York Times. He is still told to meditate every day.
Coronavirus rages out. The military-affiliated party, led by the National League for Democracy, rejected the election results, vowed to do-over and threatened to bring in the military as an observer.
In Yangon, the former capital, abandoned by the military, trades tips on how to avoid capture by the government of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, the new paymaster of human rights officials.
“We have about 600 political prisoners, and a few months ago I was one of them,” said Ma Thinzer Shunle Yi, 28, who was convicted of violating the law of peaceful assembly while opposing the oppression of ethnic minorities. “She has not done enough to lay the foundations for democracy for fundamental freedoms for all.”
So Nang contributed to the report from Yangon, Myanmar.
