On June 1, Aung San Suu Kyi’s youngest son, Kim Aris, officially launched the campaign “Proof of Life”. His mother will turn 81 on June 19 and Kim is demanding that the military provide evidence regarding the health of the Burmese leader. He is calling on international institutions and governments to put pressure on Myanmar’s military junta. Kim Aris was not relieved by the April 30 announcement that his mother had been moved to a “designated residence.” In fact, he has had no contact with her for years and doubts she is alive. From experience, he has seen how the junta has been very skilled at deceiving international public opinion over the past thirty years.
Aung San Suu Kyi, imprisoned since February 1, 2021, with the coup that ended the brief democratic experiment, remains alive in the hearts of her people. “Even though the military has hidden her from the public eye,” says Kyang Zaw Moe, a columnist for the Burmese newspaper Irrawaddy “most Burmese continue to follow her example of unwavering resistance against the regime and continue to rebel. This includes young people from Generation Z who are calling for her release. Numerous testimonies, photographs, and videos are arriving on her birthday, on June 19th. Every year on this occasion, both young people in the cities and rebels in the jungle hold prayers and ceremonies for her health.
To this day, the junta’s worst enemy is her, the person they fear most, the one who manages to command the unconditional support of her people. “If Myanmar’s presidency were decided by popular vote,” the editorialist continues, “Aung San Suu Kyi would have been president since 1990. Her party won in 1990, and again in the 2015 and 2020 elections. But the generals conspired to ensure she never assumed the office of president.” To this end, in 2008 they drafted a constitution that permanently bans her from holding this office, with Article 59; a constitution that has been condemned by many international scholars as the least democratic in the world. Kyang Zaw Moe emphasizes: “To this day, there is only one person in the world who has won so many elections and has never been elected president of her country: her.”
The Burmese leader served as the military junta’s Trojan horse, legitimizing itself in the eyes of the international community and enabling it to enter into economic agreements. During Myanmar’s long decades of closure, few foreign companies were willing to work with a dictatorship. In 2010, the military junta decided to open the country to the outside world. After replacing military uniforms with civilian clothes, the generals willingly yielded to international pressure that had long been calling for Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest, and decided that it was far more expedient from then on to use her as a pawn to funnel capital into the country, and into their pockets.
With her entry into parliament in the 2012 elections, but especially with her appointment as State Counsellor in 2016, the Burmese leader pursued a difficult balancing act to keep her party in government and advance her democracy agenda. Some political analysts see the agreement she made with the military in 2016 as a trap she fell into. Indeed, Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, in parliament, were forced to govern in a position of constant complicity and complacency with the military. When the simmering crisis with the Muslim minority in Rakhine State erupted in 2017, she found herself with her hands tied, powerless to intervene because the agreement she had signed with the military prevented her from doing so.
For her nonviolent leadership and her commitment to sacrifice in the fight for democracy, the international community has awarded her many prizes and honors, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. But once the Rohingya crisis escalated in 2017, the international community criticized her for her silence, for not defending the persecuted Muslim minority. This was followed by the withdrawal of the prizes awarded to her and widespread condemnation. “This was her personal defeat on the international stage,” says Kyang Zaw Moe onl’Irrawaddy. “As for her country, even though she faced some criticism, most people understood her choice to prioritize national reconciliation, a peaceful transition, and the process of democracy. Although she faced criticism and humiliation on the international stage, her domestic support did not wane; in fact, in the 2020 elections, people gave her party more votes than in previous elections.”
Her leadership style has always been very clear to the Burmese: not to destabilize the peace and reconciliation process by engaging in conflict with the generals. A difficult decision that undermined some people’s trust in her. The political difficulty of governing in a context dominated by the generals was clear to all.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s motto has always been “people first,” a fundamental difference with the military. Since February 1, 2021, the process of national reconciliation with the military has stalled and given way to armed revolution. “Today, negotiating with murderers and criminals is impossible,” confesses the editorialist. “Not only would it not lead to peace and security, but it would simply mean surrendering to them.”
The crisis in Rakhine
In this region bordering Bangladesh, for 200 years there has been a community of Indian Muslims, the Rohingya, whom the Burmese callbengaliBrought by the British when they colonized the country from neighboring India, then not yet Bangladesh. Indians settled in the Rakhine region but were never recognized as an ethnic minority and thus never enjoyed civil or political rights. There have been riots over the years, but the situation escalated in 2016 and became explosive: the Muslim community organized an armed militia to respond to the hostile climate created by nationalist Buddhist monks who were inciting the Burmese against them. This “degeneration” of Buddhist monks from the spirit of Buddhism itself is the result of the calculated policies of the military junta, which, after the large demonstrations of 1988, favored monasteries that demonstrated deference to the military and marginalized and punished those that supported the democratic movement.
In 2016, in this context, the Burmese leader, in her new role as State Counsellor, sought to pacify the region by appealing for international aid. She established the Commission headed by former UN President Kofi Annan to assess the roots of the problem and find a solution, Aung San Suu Kyi intended this to lead to the recognition of citizenship for the Muslim minority. What happened instead was that not only did the military junta that governed with her deny the Commission any legitimacy, but the Burmese themselves turned against it, claiming that foreigners could not understand the Burmese’s problems. On the other side, not even the Rohingya had any faith in the Commission. The newly formed Rohingya armed front decided to draw the international community’s attention with weapons and sparked a revolt: just hours before Kofi Annan’s announcement of the Commission’s findings, it launched an attack. The military, with Aung Min Hlaing, then head of the army and now self-proclaimed president of the country, took advantage of the situation not only to respond to the attacks but also to launch a full-blown ethnic cleansing, forcing Aung San Suu Kyi into a corner. Indeed, according to their constitution, the State Counsellor has no power to interfere in military decisions.
Now the region is completely ablaze and at the mercy of the armies. This is exactly what Aung San Suu Kyi had tried so hard to avoid. A grave defeat for everyone, not just her. Her relying on the international community to find a solution had not only been in vain, it had also backfired: now she was being asked to account for what was happening, condemning the military, something she could not do. She, who more than anyone else, if not the only one, had actively sought a solution for these people, was being put in the dock.
The Rohingya genocide accusation and the relationship with the military
The director of the Burmese newspaper Irrawaddy thinks, but he is not alone in this, that Aung San Suu Kyi‘s attempts to tame the generals actually led to her defeat, on the international level rather than on the domestic one.
In December 2019, at the hearing in The Hague before the International Court of Justice, the State Counsellor defended her country against charges of genocide, admitting that persecution and crimes against humanity had occurred. A campaign against her was unleashed in Europe and elsewhere, a propaganda campaign given that the aforementioned facts were conveniently overlooked.
After the hearing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the military realizes that the long-awaited moment has finally arrived: to rid themselves once and for all of their thorn in their side. Aung San Suu Kyi no longer has the support of the international community, she is no longer their champion of human rights; they have removed her from the pedestal on which they had placed her thirty years earlier. After just fourteen months, she is arrested along with the newly elected president and other elected officials.
The leader who tried to unite opposites
Aung San Suu Kyi embodies a series of opposites: being the daughter of a national hero gave her the awareness of a predestined destiny, inextricably linked to her country. Being the daughter of a soldier, and the founder of the Myanmar army at that, and growing up surrounded by soldiers, gave her the confidence to negotiate with the cynical junta generals who opposed the plan for a democratic Burma, in the hope that in the end she would prevail.
Her long practice of Buddhist meditation during the difficult decades of house arrest gave her the moral fiber necessary to maintain her balance in the difficult exercise of remaining intact in the storms of Burmese politics.
This woman, Burmese by birth and Western by education, has a vision and experience of the world far more sophisticated and profound than those who here have cried betrayal. Her leadership style, committed to nonviolence, doggedly seeking dialogue with cynical and cruel interlocutors in the belief that in the long run she would prevail, is unique in the international political landscape. Unique and misunderstood.
The major international humanitarian agencies, those who withdraw their awards, and Europe in general, have proven inadequate. Ultimately, it was easier to fall back on simplifications: black or white, either you stand for human rights or you don’t. There was no will or capacity for in-depth political, historical, and cultural analysis. The entrenched arrogance of viewing a “different culture” through our own eyes and with our own standards has once again prevailed. Europe has never been good at this. But it hasn’t even been interested in doing so. And after everything that happened in Gaza, can Europe, complicit in a genocide that lasted nearly three years, still point the finger and judge Aung San Suu Kyi?
She had all the credentials to advance her ambitious project of nonviolent national reconciliation; she was the only one who could do it for the reasons described above. Her leadership, from the beginning, was a constant search for alliances within and beyond the country. Thanks to her charisma and commitment, she succeeded in bringing together activists, politicians, artists, and ordinary citizens, creating conversations that inspired collective action. After her arrest on February 1, 2021, during the days when Burmese protested peacefully in the streets, signs apologizing to the Rohingya appeared, and this new awareness is undoubtedly thanks to her. A Rohingya representative was also elected to the Revolutionary Government (NUG), established a few months after the coup.
The human and political journey of this singular woman—in her temperament, in her destiny, in her political design—is, among other things, an unequivocal testimony to the power of solidarity, when it extends from your own country to the world, and lifts you out of adversity.
