David Mathieson, who supported her for years at Human Rights Watch, told me that Suu Kyi’s fall from grace offers a lesson about resting all of our hopes in one individual—the weight of a country is too heavy to place on one person’s shoulders, no matter how alluring her story. “Once we are in power,” she said Suu Kyi had told her father years ago, “these things will be solved.”. She kept walking toward the soldiers even after they had been given the order to fire, demanding that she be allowed to pass. Suu Kyi, too, is no longer viewed as a democracy icon in the West after her handling of the military crackdown on the Rohingya. February 1958: A Special Supplement on Burma. Yet Ms Suu Kyi remains popular. The ancient kingdoms of Burma had frontiers that for thousands of years ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of its neighbors. But she spoke to us as though she had no interest in being an icon. Some say that this backsliding on civil liberties can be attributed to the military reasserting itself and drawing Suu Kyi into protracted political jockeying in the capital city. President Thein Sein seemed exasperated by my entreaties on behalf of the Rohingya, but like the other ruling-party officials I met with, he committed to respecting the result of an election that was almost certain to go against him. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2021 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Before the results were even known, people celebrated in the streets. When I pressed him on the insecurity that awaited the rest, he spoke of the need for “social cohesion” and “economic development.” When I asked about the scale of the challenge—resettling hundreds of thousands of displaced people—he seemed overwhelmed, and broke from his talking points. But Thein Sein was liberalizing the country faster than expected—perhaps even faster than the military intended. She went on to attend school in India, then studied at Oxford, where she met her husband, Michael Aris. While there was progress in some areas, the military continued to hold a quarter of parliamentary seats and controlled key ministries including defence, home affairs and border affairs. And a large, large population of this country is traumatized from poverty … So all of us have this trauma, and we have not healed. Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in 2010 and is now once more the country's most visible and well-known politician. As the country approached independence, he was seen as the only figure with the stature to potentially unite its political factions and ethnic groups. Her stubbornness and her flashes of temper only reinforced this: Given what she’s been through, I would think, no wonder she’s angry and stubborn. She may have been consistent and we just didn't know the full complexity of who she is. It then declared a state of emergency, handing power to the military for a full year. Her son Kim was allowed to visit her for the first time in a decade. The chilling truth is that the moral stain of the ethnic cleansing may prompt international condemnation, but it hasn’t caused Suu Kyi to pay much of a price at home or to alter her approach to politics. She was not allowed to see her two sons or her husband, who died of cancer in March 1999. Standing in front of her father’s portrait, Suu Kyi called for multiparty democracy and spoke perhaps the most famous words in the history of Burmese politics: “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that is going on. I told her that, with her assent, the Obama administration would likely lift the sanctions. But why? Myanmar coup: Aung San Suu Kyi appears in court to face fresh charges. “The issue is a complex one and not a black-and-white case,” he said. It’s possible that the military wanted to embarrass and undermine Suu Kyi, who did not have the formal power to stop the attacks. If the current one does, she will no longer say so. As one of her advisers told me, Suu Kyi’s mind-set was: “People will judge us for what we do, not what we say.” She launched a peace process modeled on her father’s efforts to unite the ethnic groups—cease-fires that would lead to negotiations and, ultimately, a federal system in which each ethnic group had a formal degree of autonomy while still being part of a national union. They won 43 of the 45 seats contested in April 2012 by-elections, in an emphatic statement of support. Ms Suu Kyi's former international supporters accused her of doing nothing to stop rape, murder and possible genocide by refusing to condemn the still powerful military or acknowledge accounts of atrocities. Thousands of students, office workers and monks took to the streets demanding democratic reform. Meanwhile, Suu Kyi quickly took to her role as a principled opponent of the regime. Aung San Suu Kyi’s appearance in court via video link has happened at a critical juncture for Myanmar. The country also called for the release of ousted State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi who has been detained since the military junta first took control on February 1. “The only real prison is fear,” she famously wrote, “and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.”. Despite accusations of genocide, Aung San Suu Kyi's party is … It was November 2012, and we were in her weathered house at 54 University Avenue, in Yangon, where she’d been held prisoner by the ruling Burmese junta for the better part of two decades. “The obstinacy that made her into an icon makes her dig in,” a Western diplomat who has worked with her told me. Forgotten was the Suu Kyi of 1988 - a cultural chauvinist representing one of many Burmese ethnicities, supported by the temples and the rich, and in was Suu Kyi, the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi. In response, Rakhine Buddhists attacked the Rohingya, burning their villages; ultimately more than 100,000 Rohingya were displaced into squalid camps. The NLD won more than 80 percent of the vote—enough for an outright majority in Parliament but, given the military’s entrenched position and prescribed 25 percent bloc of votes, not enough to reform the constitution. She was right. Down the street, in a coffee shop that wouldn’t be out of place in Brooklyn, I met Cheery Zahau, a human-rights activist and an ethnic Chin, a persecuted Christian minority in Myanmar. After stints of living and working in Japan and Bhutan, she settled in the UK to raise their two children, Alexander and Kim, but Myanmar was never far from her thoughts. He fought alongside the Japanese to rid Burma of British colonialism, then fought alongside the British to rid Burma of Japanese domination, then negotiated Burma’s freedom from the British. Aung Zaw cautioned me against reading too much into the dissatisfaction with Suu Kyi in urban areas, because she maintains deep support in the countryside. She was again put under house arrest in September 2000, when she tried to travel to the city of Mandalay in defiance of travel restrictions. “She listened. The U.S. decision to lift sanctions was controversial; some people have blamed it for the escalation of violence involving the Rohingya. The status of the Rohingya, who live in Rakhine State—which borders Bangladesh to the north and the Bay of Bengal to the west—has long been at issue. AILSA CHANG, HOST: The country of Myanmar is under military control again. But then he listed the obstacles he faced: Some of the Rakhine people don’t want the Muslims to come back, he said; relations with Bangladesh are strained; only two reception centers are in operation. Nearly everyone I spoke with said Myanmar had been traumatized by more than half a century of repression—trauma from which it would take a long time to heal. “She likes the adulation and the prizes—but in the end she thinks she’s right and they’re wrong.”. In this visual history, Reuters traces the journey of Suu Kyi and her troubled nation. This was codified into law in 1982, when legislation denied citizenship to anyone who had come to Myanmar during British rule; the junta used this law to deny citizenship to all Rohingya. ET on September 26, 2019. Within days, he said, the General Administration Department—a bureaucracy that helps run the country down to the village level—would be moved from military to civilian authority, a tangible albeit incremental achievement. The first time I met Aung San Suu Kyi, she embodied hope. But modern Myanmar has never known peace or controlled all of its borders. She took a particular interest in the communications role I had played in Obama’s 2008 campaign. Released from house arrest in November 2010, Suu Kyi had just been elected to the Myanmar Parliament in a by-election that her party had won in a rout. “Part of Suu Kyi’s anger with Thein Sein,” Richard Horsey, a Myanmar-based political analyst, told me recently, was that “he was doing all the things that she’d imagined she should be doing. With the help of the internet, pro-democracy activists used the template of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa to build what one Burmese intellectual calls an “organizational superstructure” around her. She wanted Western support, but she was adamant about national sovereignty. A convoy of army vehicles patrol the streets in Mandalay, Myanmar, Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021. I believed her commitment to human rights was sincere. “If we are rejected by our friends from the West,” Thaung Tun told me, “then we will have to look elsewhere.” China also offers an autocratic model for dealing with Muslim minorities, justifying poor treatment on counterterrorism grounds: Reportedly at least 1 million Uighurs—a Turkic, predominantly Muslim minority—are being held in what the Chinese government calls “counterextremism training centers” but one UN panel has called “something resembling a massive internment camp,” in Xinjiang province. Suu Kyi’s main concern was whether the United States would call the upcoming elections “free and fair.” From her perspective, the elections could not be free and fair, because the military still refused to reform the constitution. We sat in a large room featuring a mural that depicted a goddesslike figure in a gold helmet pulling a young girl from a stormy sea. She may not have changed. She seemed to straddle different worlds—East and West, inexperienced in government yet accomplished, imprisoned and free. Unlike most of the military officials I’d met, she never referred to the Rohingya as Bengalis. But the demonstrations were brutally suppressed by the army, which seized power in a coup on 18 September 1988. But Ms Suu Kyi, now 75, was widely seen as de facto leader. Many Burmese resent people of South Asian descent, in part because when Britain governed Myanmar (then Burma) as part of India, it put Indians in positions of authority. Ms Suu Kyi is the daughter of Myanmar's independence hero, General Aung San. “The EU did not do it. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Video, Celebrating the world's largest female afro, ‘Stop whining’ over Covid, Brazil’s president says, Operation finds 150 missing children in Tennessee, Tsunami alert lifted after quakes rock New Zealand, Pope visits Iraq despite virus and security risks, Meghan accuses palace of 'perpetuating falsehoods', Tesla partners with nickel mine amid shortage fears. Derek Mitchell, former US Ambassador to Myanmar told the BBC: "The story of Aung San Suu Kyi is as much about us as it is about her. “She was smart,” he told me recently. We regret the error. Later, he would address the Burmese people at the University of Yangon, which had been shuttered since shortly after students were gunned down in the pro-democracy protests that followed Suu Kyi’s 1988 entry into politics. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, while still under house arrest, and hailed as "an outstanding example of the power of the powerless". Tiger Woods: Car crashes and comebacks. Naypyidaw can be eerily quiet; the powerful are out of sight, tucked away in ministry buildings and mansions built by the generals. He was assassinated when she was only two years old, just before Myanmar gained independence from British colonial rule in 1948. “We cannot have human rights without democracy,” she insisted. In 2012, she was able to travel to … Since joining the country’s political resistance in 1988, she had survived detention, house arrest, and attacks on her life by the ruling junta; her bravery, eloquence, and persistence had won her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and made her the world’s most prominent dissident. But two days after the report was released, ARSA attacked more than 30 police posts, killing another 12 Burmese security personnel; in all, 71 people died. “If they want to come, it has to be an orderly process … In Texas they say, ‘We need this wall because we can’t have them all coming in, but we need some of them to come in and work.’ ”, This wasn’t the only creative interpretation I heard about what is happening in Rakhine State. In 1999, her husband died of cancer in Britain. Learning that the daughter of Burma’s national hero had returned to her homeland, the students—who would become known as “the 88 Generation”—recruited Suu Kyi to their cause. Video, Celebrating the world's largest female afro. People don’t have computers, so the internet is accessed almost entirely through the Facebook app on phones. The country of Myanmar is under military control again. When her father was killed, Aung San Suu Kyi was 2. "We have to be mindful that we shouldn't endow people with some iconic image beyond which is human. The ICC, he told me, “should not apply to the U.S., Israel, or Myanmar.”. And many Burmese Buddhists fear the fate of countries such as Afghanistan and Indonesia, where an intolerant strain of Islam—at times financed by Saudi Arabia—has supplanted Buddhism. Aung San Suu Kyi (/ aʊ ŋ ˌ s ɑː n s uː ˈ tʃ iː /; Burmese: အောင်ဆန်းစုကြည်; MLCTS: aung hcan: cu. Hillary Clinton, I assured her, would continue to be focused on Myanmar. One purpose of my visit was to reassure her that the Obama administration’s policy was still focused on bolstering democracy, whose successful future in Myanmar she—and most Burmese—believed was dependent on her. “The crisis began with the armed attacks by the terrorist group ARSA, and the response of the security forces which resulted in the mass movement into Bangladesh.”, The government official responsible for managing the repatriation of the Rohingya is Win Myat Aye, the minister of social welfare, relief, and resettlement. Aung San Suu Kyi at the ASEAN summit in Laos, September 2016 (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters) In 2015, Burma held open elections, for the first time since 1990. Aung Zaw, a student activist during the 1988 uprising, ended up fleeing the country and helped found The Irrawaddy, a prominent independent newspaper. When I pressed him on the Rohingya, he detailed the government’s steps to reduce tensions, permit humanitarian access for groups such as Doctors Without Borders, and allow individuals to apply for citizenship—but the government would issue citizenship cards only to those who stopped calling themselves Rohingya, and few would do that. She went on to lead the revolt against the then-dictator, General Ne Win. Acting on behalf of the Rohingya could imperil that goal by undermining her political standing. “The situation is very complicated,” U Soe Thein told me. I met with Thaung Tun, whom Suu Kyi had appointed as both national security adviser and minister for investment and foreign economic relations. What happens when a virus mutates? I have come to believe that sanctions are generally overused by Washington; the bad guys know how to evade them, so they hurt only the wrong people. Allies of Myanmar’s ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi will form an "interim government" that will rival the Min Aung Hlaing, who seized power in a military coup, the Financial Times reported, citing a local official. “So I think a lot of people came away feeling, How can we help her? She was later allowed to return home - but again under effective house arrest. She sat at a small, round table with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Derek Mitchell, who had recently been named the first U.S. ambassador to Myanmar in more than 20 years. Before my 2013 meeting with Suu Kyi, I had met with U Soe Thein, the president’s closest adviser. “We will take care of our own children, Senator,” she concluded, after a long lecture. Blow by blow: How a 'genocide' was investigated. Indeed, I could see her logic: proceed cautiously, court the old guard, get the military comfortable with civilians running the government, create a broader base for economic growth, don’t rock the boat. In August 2018, Ms Suu Kyi described the generals in her cabinet as "rather sweet" and Myanmar's democratic transition, analysts said, appeared to have stalled. Chinese influence in Myanmar is growing. Her official title was state counsellor. While she’d long been in favor of the U.S. maintaining some sanctions on Myanmar, she had come to recognize that they had a crimping effect on the investment the country needed to reform its economy. I returned to Myanmar in January. The UN did not do it. In 1948, after more than a century of British rule followed by years of brutal Japanese occupation, the country achieved independence; since then, it has endured continuous and overlapping civil wars—the longest-running in the world—between the military and the country’s various ethnic groups. The former student leader Aung Din, who had devoted much of his life since 1988 to bringing democracy and human rights to Myanmar’s people, told me civil-society organizations that had been key supporters of the NLD could no longer count on the support of Suu Kyi’s government. Still, Myanmar had its first peaceful transfer of power in more than half a century. 0. It felt as if a heavy shroud was being lifted off the country. She had every reason to fear that the military her father had founded would end her life. A former diplomat, he emphasized that a gradual shift from military to civilian control was happening. In her house in Yangon, Aung San Suu Kyi was energized, once again embracing the role of an outsider. Ms Suu Kyi was sworn in as an MP and leader of the opposition. Instead, she largely retreated into isolation in Naypyidaw. In cavernous government buildings, I sat opposite senior Burmese officials in rooms the size of football fields. I understand this argument, but I’m skeptical that sanctions are ever an effective deterrent. “The image only fades.”, At the time, that seemed unlikely: Suu Kyi’s reputation still put her at the celestial heights occupied by the likes of Václav Havel, Lech Wałęsa, and Nelson Mandela. Aung San Suu Kyi, 75, is the daughter of Myanmar's independence hero, Gen Aung San who was assassinated just before the country gained independence from British colonial rule in 1948. For the first time in their lives, people cast a consequential vote against the military. In a country where any unauthorized assembly had until recently been illegal, tens of thousands of people had greeted Obama’s motorcade. But I emphasized the importance of the ongoing peace process with the ethnic groups and told her that the U.S. was concerned about the plight of the Rohingya. He’s right. “You have the same issue in the southern United States,” he said. It's been a month since the military junta took over the government and arrested political leaders of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party. “How did you make sure all your people were communicating the same message?” she asked me. Now she was one of the officials occupying a cavernous government building, surrounded by the trappings of power. One key to understanding Aung San Suu Kyi and her appeal in Myanmar is familial: She is her father’s daughter. Derek Mitchell first met her in 1995, when he was working for the National Democratic Institute, an international nonprofit. Her lack of specificity—her idealism can be platitudinous—allowed others to project their own beliefs onto her, and made them feel that her cause was their own. Myanmar—formerly Burma (the junta changed the name in 1989)—is a complicated country with a complicated history. There she met her future husband, academic Michael Aris. The military authorities had offered to allow her to travel to the UK to see him when he was gravely ill, but she felt compelled to refuse for fear she would not be allowed back into the country. The minister told me the government of Myanmar is committed to taking back the refugees. “But first must come constitutional reform.” To her, progress on human rights was inseparable from her core agenda. “She made us feel like we were a part of her movement, and you got a sense of this incredibly strong person holding up an incredibly sad, broken country,” he recalls. Born in what was then known as Rangoon, Burma, in the final days of World War Two, Aung San Suu Kyi suffered early tragedies as her father was assassinated while her sister drowned in a lake. (BBC.com) – It comes amid tensions between the civilian government and the military, stoking fears of a coup. “That’s a tremendous psychological burden.” Another pro-democracy activist told me that after 1988, “people died inside”; they became, she said, “small mice in a laboratory.” We should not underestimate the damage that such enduring oppression might have done to Suu Kyi herself, as many people I spoke with in Myanmar suggested sotto voce. “She has not only failed to protect this population, but she supported the military agenda,” Wai Wai Nu told me. Reserved. A peace process with more than a dozen separate ethnic insurgencies was on the cusp of yielding cease-fires. * Due to an editing error, this article originally indicated that Wai Wai Nu is a man. The junta denied his dying wish to visit her, and she refused to leave her country to be with him. © 2021 BBC. In 2015, she led her National League for Democracy (NLD) to victory in Myanmar's first openly contested election in 25 years. This rings true to me, and speaks to a failure by many of us in the West, who are guilty of sometimes viewing political dilemmas in complicated countries as simple morality plays with a single star at the center. The government Suu Kyi is now a part of—in April 2016 she became state counselor, a role similar to prime minister, after her party won a national election—has curtailed civil liberties and press freedoms, and carried out what the United Nations high commissioner for human rights has called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Others have called it a genocide. She told me about how deeply rooted the pain is, how it could even lead the Chin Christian minority she is a part of to turn on a Muslim minority. *, One of those leaders is Wai Wai Nu’s father. Updated at 2:50 p.m. We ethnic people did not do it. The soldiers stood down. In November 2010, as the junta took the first tentative steps toward enhancing its popular standing at home and improving relations with the United States and the West, Suu Kyi was once again released from house arrest. Many people close to Suu Kyi speculate that she is quietly negotiating constitutional changes with Than Shwe. “As a society, we really need to heal ourselves … We are so traumatized” by ethnic division, “or just because we have different political aspirations, or just because we have a different faith, or language, or culture … For Burman people like Aung San Suu Kyi or 88 people, they have been oppressed; they’ve been traumatized because they want a different political system. Feral dogs roamed the sidewalk. But even those powers were limited: The constitution also prevents civilian control of the military, and leaves the military responsible for the three ministries—Defense, Border, and Home Affairs—that subsequently carried out the attacks on the Rohingya. When I said the administration was concerned that the Burmese government’s treatment of the Rohingya was both a humanitarian crisis and a threat to the country’s broader transition to democracy, she told me she was appointing a commission, led by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to study the issue and make recommendations. But she ran anyway, and won. VideoCelebrating the world's largest female afro, Why Olivia Colman's new film will leave you disoriented, ‘Stop whining’ over Covid, Brazil’s president says1, China set to overhaul Hong Kong electoral system2, Italy blocks AstraZeneca shipment to Australia3, Operation finds 150 missing children in Tennessee4, Tsunami alert lifted after quakes rock New Zealand5, Why Olivia Colman's new film will leave you disoriented6, Pope visits Iraq despite virus and security risks7, Meghan accuses palace of 'perpetuating falsehoods'8, Tesla partners with nickel mine amid shortage fears9, Why are QAnon believers obsessed with 4 March?10. Sa Sa, who was appointed earlier this week as the envoy of Myanmar’s disbanded parliament, told the newspaper about the plans during a video interview. (Suu Kyi has spoken with me of those fears herself.) “Every generation since independence is worse off than the one before,” the historian Thant Myint-U told me. apnews-gallery. Yet she spoke icily to Senator Bob Corker, from Tennessee, about a U.S. decision to publicly chide Myanmar for its poor handling of child trafficking. As an ethnic minority, as Muslims, and as people who came from the Indian subcontinent, the Rohingya are thrice vulnerable. The 2021 military coup came as the country was facing one of South East Asia's worst Covid-19 outbreaks, putting new strains on an already impoverished healthcare system as lockdown measures devastate livelihoods. She was happy that Ambassador Mitchell and I had brought along a DVD she had requested: Glory, the underdog story of an all-black regiment during the United States’ Civil War. She instead calls them “Muslims in Rakhine State.”), As she walked me out of the building, she talked about her workload and how she’d looked to the example of Margaret Thatcher, who worked notoriously long hours at the center of a male-dominated system. My first trip to Myanmar had come soon after the Arab Spring, when countries seemed to be shaking off the yoke of autocracy; this time, the Burmese inquired about U.S. relations with Egypt and Thailand—two countries that had recently experienced military coups. Ms Suu Kyi was later charged with illegally importing communications equipment. Her personal struggle to bring democracy to then military-ruled Myanmar (also known as Burma) - made her an international symbol of peaceful resistance in the face of oppression. Two new charges were announced against Ms Suu …