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When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi emerged from years of house arrest a decade ago, never having used a smartphone or Facebook, held court in the office of her banned political party, the musty smell emanated from the stacked human rights reports. on the floor. .
Armed with nothing but a collection of international awards, she sported fresh flowers in her hair, sat with impeccable posture, and promised the world two things: she would ensure that Myanmar’s political prisoners were free, and she would end the ethnic strife that It has kept the country’s borders at war for seven decades.
But the two promises have not been kept and the world’s most glittering icon of democracy has lost its shine. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 75, has become an apologist for the same generals who once locked her up, downplaying their murderous campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Her strongest critics accuse her, as a member of Bamar’s ethnic majority, of racism and 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, his political party, the National League for Democracy, won another landslide victory in the general election, setting up five more years in which he will share power with the military that ruled Myanmar for nearly 50 years.
“His leadership style is not going towards a democratic system, it is going towards dictatorship,” said Daw Thet Thet Khine, a former National League for Democracy stalwart who formed her own party to compete in Sunday’s election but failed. win none. seating. “She does not listen to the voice of the people.”
It’s hard to think of a human rights hero whose global standing has been so quickly tarnished. Along with Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi once represented the triumph of democracy over dictatorship. It also helped that he was able to activate the spell.
Last year, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi traveled to the International Court of Justice in The Hague to defend the army against allegations that she had committed genocide against Rohingya Muslims.
Unapologetically, he insisted to the court that while “disproportionate force cannot be ruled out” against the Rohingya, inferring genocidal intent presented an “incomplete and misleading factual picture”. His Facebook page once published the post “False Rape”, abruptly dismissing the systematic and well-documented sexual violence committed against the Rohingya.
Under Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s borderlands, where other ethnic minorities are clustered, are more fraught with conflict now than a decade ago. And poets, painters and students have been jailed for peacefully speaking their minds: Today in Myanmar, 584 people are political prisoners or awaiting trial on such charges, according to the Political Prisoner Assistance Association.
“Now that he has tasted power, I don’t think he wants to share it with anyone,” said Seng Nu Pan, a Kachin politician fighting for autonomy in the north of the country.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi grew up as a political nobility, the daughter of General Aung San, the country’s independence hero who was assassinated when she was 2 years old.
After 28 years abroad, he returned home in 1988 when pro-democracy protests were merging across the country. Within a few months, a former housewife 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, he won the Nobel Peace Prize “for his non-violent fight for democracy and human rights.”
During house arrest in her ruined villa for a total of 15 years, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi kept a strict schedule. He listened to the news reports on BBC radio. He practiced the piano. And he meditated in the Buddhist style, with the intention, he said, of transcending earthly concerns. Ms Aung San Suu Kyi missed her two children 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 righteous dignity and the psychological bunker she built around her – may be what has led to her failure, thus far, in the fight for a true representative democracy in Myanmar.
The line is fine between resolve and stubbornness, conviction and condescension.
“It is ironic that while the international community used its freedom to promote its own, it is using some of the same legal mechanisms as the military to stifle freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly,” said Bill. Richardson. the former US Ambassador to the United Nations and a longtime ally of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.
Richardson broke up with her two years ago, when Ms Aung San Suu Kyi got so angry she thought she might slap him after he urged her to release two Reuters journalists who had been jailed after discovering a Rohingya massacre, she said .
“If he fails to especially lead his ethnic Bamar supporters to a more inclusive view of the country through his words and actions, Myanmar is likely to become a less stable and more violent place,” Richardson added.
Despite all her democratic rhetoric, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi retains respect for the army her father formed. Some of the founders of the National League for Democracy were former military officers who fought against ethnic rebels inside Myanmar.
The party is organized with a military hierarchy in which the commanding officer is Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. But the royal army maintains control over important ministries, a part of parliament and lucrative businesses.
Since taking power as the country’s state councilor in 2016, Ms Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly praised the army, while refusing to acknowledge the military initiative to rid the country of Rohingya Muslims. In 2017, approximately three-quarters of a million Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh.
Many of those who remain 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 people. As a result, ethnic parties were unable to achieve the electoral gains they once hoped for, although the National League for Democracy successfully put forward 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 Kachin State People’s Party.
Ms Aung San Suu Kyi’s supporters say her refusal to speak on behalf of Myanmar’s vulnerable communities is not innate chauvinism, but rather political pragmatism that comes from wanting to deny the military a chance to retake all power. The 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 buoyed by xenophobia that limits 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 heart of Bamar country accuse an Islamic clique 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 repression of Bengalis,” said U Thu Citta, an influential Buddhist monk, who uses a term to incorrectly suggest that the Rohingya are from Bangladesh, not Myanmar. “But what he did was fine.”
Since the elections, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has been locked up in a village in Naypyidaw, the capital of the fortress that was built by the generals to show their power. He has repeatedly turned down requests to speak to The New York Times. It is still said that he meditates every day.
The coronavirus is raging outside. The army-linked party, which was defeated by the National League for Democracy, has rejected the election results, called for a replay and threatened to bring in the army as observers.
In Yangon, the former capital abandoned by the military, a new generation of human rights activists exchange advice on how to avoid being caught by the government of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi.
“We have about 600 political prisoners, and I was one of them a few months ago,” said Ma Thinzar Shunlei Yi, 28, who was convicted of violating a law of peaceful assembly when she protested the persecution of ethnic minorities. “She has not done enough to lay the democratic foundations of basic freedoms for all.”
Saw Nang contributed reporting from Yangon, Myanmar.
