established 1828F
ew world leaders have fallen from
grace as quickly as Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Nobel prize-winner, who also
holds the US Congressional Gold Medal
for her bravery and peaceful resistance to
Burma’s military junta, now stands accused
of aiding and excusing the suppression —
even the genocide — of the Rohingya Mus-
lims, more than 400,000 of whom in recent
weeks have fled from Burma, which elected
her leader nearly two years ago.
There have been calls from her fel-
low Nobel laureates for her peace prize to
be annulled. The UN has described action
against the Rohingya as a ‘textbook exam-
ple of ethnic cleansing’ and complained
that its observers have been denied access
to Burma to judge the situation for them-
selves. Our Foreign Secretary, Boris John-
son, himself under fire, has weighed in this
week, also using the term ‘ethnic cleansing’.
The plight of the Rohingya in Burma
has been a cause for international concern
for decades. Yet their recent treatment at
the hands of Buddhist mobs and the mili-
tary takes their persecution to a new level.
What seems baffling to so many is the fact
that this horror is happening under Suu Kyi,
a human rights campaigner who was herself
kept under house arrest for 15 years by the
military. How, it’s asked, can she now be col-
luding with her former captors, looking the
other way as they use the tactics — mob vio-
lence and murder — once deployed against
her supporters?
The answer is that she is an extreme case
of a much-repeated phenomenon — a cam-
paigner fêted in opposition for admirable
principles, but who then takes power and is
found wanting.
Suu Kyi said this week that she intends
to find out why half of the Rohingya pop-
ulation in Burma have fled. But the satel-
lite images of about 80 burning villages are
clear enough. Her spokesmen claim that the
Rohingya are burning down their own vil-
lages to draw attention to themselves, even
planting landmines to draw condemna-
tion against the Burmese army. Her efforts
to deny their sudden desperation to leave
Burma as ‘fake news’ fools no one. About
half of Burma’s Rohingyas have now fled
to Bangladesh, most arriving in the past few
weeks. Such an exodus does not take place
without good reason.
But even if Suu Kyi did want to take onthe military, she would probably fail. While
she won a mandate in the 2015 election,
Burma cannot be said to be democratic
in a genuine sense. Her post, that of ‘state
counsellor’, cannot be compared to that of a
western president or prime minister. Burma
has not undergone a democratic revolution
but remains under the ultimate power of
the military, over which she has little con-
trol or even influence. Having been placed
under house arrest for much of the two dec-
ades between 1990 and 2010, Suu Kyi is now
under a more metaphorical form of impris-
onment.
Ought she to rediscover the bravery that
led her through two decades of peaceful
opposition to the military junta and make a
stand against the army? That is what a true
martyr would do, even if it led her to prison.
Suu Kyi might, of course, have refused the
position of state counsellor altogether onthe grounds that it wasn’t a truly democratic
position. But where would that have got her
— and Burma? She would have been con-
demned for turning down an invitation to
effect change from within.
Moreover, if she condemned — or even
acknowledged — the treatment of the
Rohingya then she’d be in trouble, not just
with the military but the public that elect-
ed her. The Buddhist-majority Burmese
population has never seen the Rohingyas
as fellow citizens. The partial relaxation of
the dictatorship has exposed the sectar-
ian problems which have always bubbled
beneath the surface.
All along, Suu Kyi has been a woman of
the people. It is just that now the people of
Burma begin to emerge in a different light
— less an oppressed, homogenous group
and more a mass of religious rivalries, with
a Buddhist majority at odds with a Muslim
minority. Add to this the incident that began
the most recent spell of violence — a ter-
ror attack on an army post, committed by
a group of Rohingya militants and which
killed about a dozen — and the conditions
for sectarian violence are ideal.
The lesson of Suu Kyi is it is far easier to
be admired when you are a rebellious outsid-
er than when you eventually win some kind
of power. The reputations of Nelson Man-
dela, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and many
others also suffered from the same transition,
though to a lesser extent than Suu Kyi. One
day, perhaps, Burma will settle into peace
and democracy. Whatever happens, Suu Kyi
will not be winning any further tributes from
western liberals. But we should reflect that it
is not really her who has changed, so much as
the circumstances in which she finds herself
and our perception of her.A fallen idol
Aung San Suu Kyi has been a woman
of the people. But now the people of
Burma emerge in a different light