The Economist 14Dec2019

The EconomistDecember 14th 2019 Asia 47

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Banyan The lady has two faces

T

he committeethat awarded the

Nobel peace prize to Aung San Suu Kyi

in 1991 described her as “an important

symbol in the struggle against oppres-

sion” and an inspiration to those “striv-

ing to attain democracy, human rights

and ethnic conciliation by peaceful

means”. But to the crowd of protesters

who gathered outside the International

Court of Justice (icj) in The Hague this

week, she is just the opposite: an apol-

ogist for military brutality, an oppressor

of ethnic minorities and an abettor of

genocide. “Aung San Suu Kyi, shame on

you!” they chanted. As her motorcade

glided past, windows tinted, the jeers

and boos rose in a crescendo.

Ms Suu Kyi, who since 2016 has been

Myanmar’s president in all but name,

was at the icjto defend her country

against charges of genocide in a com-

plaint brought by Gambia on behalf of

the Organisation of Islamic Co-oper-

ation, a group of Muslim countries. The

case concerns the Rohingyas, a Muslim

minority group that has suffered varying

degrees of persecution since Myanmar’s

independence in 1948. In 2017 the Bur-

mese army went on the rampage in

Rohingya areas in the far west of the

country, in response to attacks on mil-

itary outposts by a small Rohingya guer-

rilla group. The court heard horrifying

descriptions of mass shootings and

throat-slittings, with babies tossed into

burning houses and women gang-raped

or stabbed in the vagina. Listening to the

accounts, Ms Suu Kyi sat, poised and

calm, with fresh flowers in her hair, just

as there always had been during her

decades doggedly opposing military rule.

That a woman who was herself locked

up by the Burmese army for 15 years

would travel halfway around the world to

defend it has astonished many. In a

certain sense, her battle with the generals

continues. Despite heading the civilian

government, she is not in charge of them.

The constitution they put in place before

allowing democratic elections to be held

in 2015 makes the army a law unto itself,

and awards it a quarter of the seats in

parliament—enough to veto any constitu-

tional amendments. Many of Ms Suu Kyi’s

admirers had attempted to exonerate her

of the pogrom against the Rohingyas,

saying she was powerless to prevent it and

would only have made herself look weak

by railing helplessly against it.

Ms Suu Kyi’s trip to The Hague has put

paid to that argument. It is one thing to

maintain a pragmatic, if reprehensible,

silence, quite another to come showily to

the army’s defence. Ms Suu Kyi could, after

all, have sent a drab functionary to present

Myanmar’s case. Instead, she loudly ad-

vertised her trip, knowing full well that

few Burmese have any sympathy for Ro-

hingyas, whom they see, wrongly, as illegal

immigrants from Bangladesh who threat-

en the Buddhist character of the nation.

Rallies have been held across Myanmar,

hailing her as a dauntless defender of

national pride. It is hard to escape the

conclusion that she is exploiting the

Rohingyas’ misery to boost her party’s

prospects in elections due in 2020.

When the moment came for Ms Suu

Kyi to make her case, she was oddly

muted. She disappointed those who had

hoped she would reveal herself, once and

for all, to be an unapologetic villain by

denying that the Rohingyas had suffered

any abuses, as some in her government

have claimed. But she also failed to admit

the scale of the atrocities or the army’s

leading role in them. Instead, she argued

that the burning of villages and the flight

of almost 1m Rohingyas to neighbouring

Bangladesh should be seen as unfortu-

nate side-effects of the army’s ongoing

war with various guerrilla groups. Where

there was clear evidence of wrongdoing

by soldiers, she claimed, the authorities

were attempting to bring those responsi-

ble to book—although she also hinted at

her government’s lack of influence over

military justice. Nonetheless, the fact

that any courts martial were being held

at all, she argued, proved that her govern-

ment did not intend to commit genocide.

It was neither a ringing defence of the

army, nor any sort of admission of guilt.

This ambiguity probably reflects the true

Ms Suu Kyi. She is clearly a nationalist,

unhappy to see her country excoriated.

She obviously wishes its institutions

worked better, but is not ready to counte-

nance outside interference to compen-

sate for their deficiencies. She is not a

full-throated apologist for the army, but

does not trust anyone else to take on the

top brass. The same stubborn self-belief

that helped deliver Myanmar from mil-

itary rule, in other words, is now stand-

ing in the way of justice for some of its

most vulnerable inhabitants.

Aung San Suu Kyi has gone from heroine to villain without changing much

foreign families are often left to fend for

themselves. Almost 40% of local govern-

ments do not tell foreigners how to enroll

their children in school. Even those mu-

nicipalities that do usually send notices

only in Japanese. Pupils sit at their desks

without language support and watch the

day go by, “as if an electrical circuit to their

brain was cut off”, Ms Tsukihi says.

Many pupils in municipalities without

academic support end up dropping out of

school. “When they go to these public

schools, they struggle to learn. And they

lose confidence,” says Yoshimi Kojima of

Aichi Shukutoku University. Nearly a fifth

of immigrant children may not be attend-

ing school at all. Under Japanese law, the

children of foreign residents can attend

state schools free of charge, but are not ob-

liged to go to school, unlike their Japanese

counterparts.

The government has been slow to tackle

the problem, leaving it to municipalities to

make their own arrangements for foreign

children. But in June it passed a bill laying

out the responsibilities of the national and

local governments in promoting language

education. Companies are also required to

provide foreign employees and their fam-

ilies with Japanese lessons.

Ms Kojima doubts this will change

much. “Japan only sees foreigners as a

source of labour” and not as valued mem-

bers of society, she says. Shinzo Abe, the

prime minister, has repeatedly insisted

that the new visa programme bringing

more foreigners to the country should not

be seen as a source of permanent immi-

grants, but simply as a means of attracting

transient workers. That will come as news

to the children in Toyohashi, labouring

over their kanji. 7