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Aung San Suu Kyi: The downfall of a liberal darling

Aung San Suu Kyi in a stylized portrait

In early February, it was reported that the United Nations envoy to Myanmar had uncovered numerous mass graves filled with the chemically-charred corpses of an untold number of Rohingya Muslims, massacred by the state police last August. The UN has called the revelations the “hallmarks of a genocide.” This formerly hidden act of barbarity doesn’t stand alone, nor should it come as a surprise. Over the last year, the state military (as well as Buddhist civilians or “vigilantes”) has embarked on a mission of rape, murder, and the destruction of homes throughout the Muslim-majority Rakhine province of Myanmar, causing 700,000 Rohingya to flee.

Hundreds of thousands of the Myanmarese Muslim minority has been confined to camps and ghettos. A measure proposed by the Buddhist-run Association for the Protection of Race and Religion to put restrictions on Muslim procreation was enacted in 2015, which the UN has called “highly discriminatory” and “a violation of women’s human rights.” Amnesty International, which has documented numerous cases of “unlawful killings, random firing on civilians, rape and arbitrary arrests” being carried out by the state police, has described the situation as “a system of apartheid.”

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmarese head of state and darling of western human rights advocates, was expected to take up the mantle of the oppressed Muslim minority. After all, she spent fifteen years under house arrest for protesting the ruling military junta and demanding a democratic and inclusive form of government.

However, this Nobel Peace Prize laureate has turned out to be a failure and an antithesis of anything that might resemble peace. Despite mobs of Buddhist police and civilians being the perpetrators of this racist violence, Suu Kyi’s only comment on it was that there was “fear on both sides.” (Read: “Many sides, many sides.”) This is an allusion to the 2016 bombings by Rohingya of police border posts which killed nine, an act of terror which Suu Kyi feels is comparable to forced evacuation and systemic murder. She has never condemned the violence, has refused the entry of a UN investigative team into Myanmar to investigate the egregious human rights abuses, and has persisted with the former military government’s policy of refusing citizenship to Muslims.

Furthermore, in a BBC interview, she said: “I don’t think there’s ethnic cleansing going on, I think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what’s happening.” In the wake of the Yugoslavia disaster, the UN defined ethnic cleansing as a policy designed “to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” Considering the fact that 700,000 of Myanmar’s 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims have fled the country in response to a campaign of “killings, torture, rape and arson,” I’d say that ethnic cleansing is a damn good expression to use.

It takes a special kind of person to endure decades of political repression against a military junta, only to subsequently work with that same junta to inflict a kind of barbarism and despotism far worse than the country had seen prior. During her Nobel acceptance speech, Suu Kyi said that peace “does not mean just putting an end to violence or to war, but to all other factors that threaten peace, such as discrimination, such as inequality, poverty.” How quickly she forgot about peace once she became State Counselor (a government title given especially for her, considering she doesn’t have the powers of a prime minister or president).

Not only has she implicitly endorsed a campaign of racist carnage, she failed in her original goal of bringing democracy to the country. Under the Myanmarese constitution, the military must maintain at least 25% of all seats in parliament, as well as complete control over the ministries of Defense, Border, and Home Affairs. Tax collection, dispute resolution, and border control are all untouched by the small democratic portion of the government. According to the Asia Foundation, “No other government organisation has such a wide presence in the country” than the military. Thus, the evasive title of “State Counselor.”

Perhaps this charade explains why 60% of Myanmarese believe at least some of the population are afraid to “openly express their political views” despite having a democratically elected liberal as their supposed head of state.

This is all quite rich considering that the Nobel committee awarded her the Peace Prize in order to “show its support for the many people throughout the world who are striving to attain democracy, human rights and ethnic conciliation by peaceful means.” As of now, Suu Kyi embodies none of these qualities.

While it may seem unfair to blame her for the massacre considering her political power is limited, she still acts as an emblematic figure of human rights and democracy. Given this, it would be nice if she at least spoke up when those values were being trampled upon by her despotic co-workers.

The losers in this situation are, first and foremost, the Rohingya, who have no one to speak on their behalf as their extinction progresses. However, the Myanmarese as a whole are losers as well. After fighting the battles of Suu Kyi for over a decade with aspirations of Democracy as the guiding light, they’re now back to square one: living under military rule, with no heroes or leaders worth their salt to look up to.

Before the killings began, Suu Kyi was establishing herself as a champion of liberal democracy, a symbol of equality, and a noble stateswoman. Today, she’s a failed democrat, a hypocritical coward, and a practitioner of the fascism of apathy. In retrospect, her martyrdom now seems selfish more than anything else.

Four years before becoming State Counselor, Suu Kyi said in an interview with CBS: “I don’t think of myself as unbreakable. Perhaps I’m just rather flexible and adaptable.” How rather flexible she turned out to be.

Photo: Surian Soosay/Creative Commons

One thought on “Aung San Suu Kyi: The downfall of a liberal darling

  1. “It takes a special kind of person to endure decades of political repression against a military junta, only to subsequently work with that same junta to inflict a kind of barbarism and despotism far worse than the country had seen prior. ”

    What’s happening now is without a doubt a human tragedy of extremely large proportions, but in saying it is “far worse” than what has happened in the past degrades the human rights violations of numerous ethnic groups dating back to 1948.

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