Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader, now
stands accused of betraying the ideals for which she was once lionised around
the globe
The world is a mess. Wars are devouring civilian lives.
In the United States and elsewhere, populist leaders are eroding eroded
democratic norms and coarsening public discourse. In some ways, though, the
events in Myanmar, also called Myanmar, over the past year have been uniquely
horrific.
In August, in what it depicted as retaliation for a few
minor attacks launched by insurgents acting in the name of the Muslim minority
known as the Rohingya, the Myanmarese military launched a wave of attacks on
Rohingya communities, burning and killing in a calculated effort to drive them
out of the country and across the border into Bangladesh.
Since then, almost 700,000 people have made the journey,
bringing them with a few scant possessions and countless tales of atrocities,
including gang rapes, the murder of children and the destruction of entire
villages. What makes the survivors’ accounts even more disturbing is the
realisation that many of the horrors they describe were coolly planned and
premeditated, as documented in a recent report by Human Rights Watch.
Think about that: In the early 21st century, a government
institution has consciously set about to eliminate an entire ethnic group’s
presence within its country.
And fatefully implicated in this nightmare is a woman
who, not that long ago, exemplified heroic endurance and courage in the pursuit
of democratic ideals. Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader, now stands
accused of betraying the ideals for which she was once lionised by the world.
There is something uniquely awful about a Nobel Peace
Prize laureate acting as an enabler of the murder and displacement of an entire
community. Commentators have faulted her for her silence on what many are
calling a deliberate act of genocide. But that’s not quite right. Far from
being silent, she has actively defended the military’s actions, writing off
eyewitness accounts of its crimes — in a chillingly Trumpian flourish — as
“fake news.” (In 2016, when the military embarked on a smaller version of this
year’s “clearance operations”, Suu Kyi’s own office contemptuously dismissed
the stories of Rohingya women who said they’d been sexually assaulted by
soldiers with the words “fake rape”.) Last month, she rejected foreign
criticism of the army’s actions by saying that “no one can fully understand the
situation of our country the way we do”.
Her defenders rightly note that Myanmar’s current
Constitution does not grant her control over the army. Yet, this argument
ignores the powers she does have. When the United Nations tried to send
investigators to Myanmar to look into allegations of mistreatment of the
Rohingya this summer, in the run-up to the ethnic-cleansing campaign, Suu Kyi —
who is also Myanmar’s Foreign Minister and thus in charge of controlling
foreigners’ access to the country — refused to give them visas.
Her long struggle for freedom has given her unchallenged moral
authority. Yet, this power, too, she has conspicuously failed to use. In
September, when the cleansing campaign was in full gear, she delivered a speech
in which she claimed that “more than 50 per cent of the villages of Muslims are
intact”. (She didn’t say what had happened to the other 50 per cent, many of
which have since been destroyed as well.) She also claimed that the “clearance
operations” were winding down. Hundreds of thousands more Rohingya have fled
since her words.
Small wonder that the leader of one of Britain’s top
pro-Myanmar campaigns recently declared publicly that the one-time idol of
human rights is “complicit” in crimes against humanity. Small wonder that
Dublin and Oxford have both withdrawn their awards to her. Small wonder that
prominent figures — including some of her fellow laureates — are calling upon
the Nobel Prize Committee to take back the 1991 Peace Prize she won for her
work as a dissident.
So what does this say about us, her supporters in the
international community? Were we too naive in embracing her as a dissident
star? Did we miss the telltale signs of a Burmese Buddhist nationalist who
quietly views some of her compatriots as alien and inferior?
Or did we fail to realise that, once in power, she would
have to accommodate herself to the strength of a strain of lethal racism
embedded in mainstream Myanmarese culture? (During the 2015 election campaign —
which ended with the landslide victory that gave her the power she enjoys today
— she revealingly refused to include any Muslim in her party’s candidate list.
Was this cynical realism or a genuine expression of her deeper impulses?)
The world has lost a hero. Were we wrong to put her on a
pedestal in the first place? Should we stop viewing international politics
through the prism of heroism? Or should we refocus our efforts on the ideals
that she once seemed to embody?
The international community should now confront its own
complicity in this disaster. We must work to understand how we allowed this to
happen, and we must urgently establish accountability — legal and moral — for
those behind these crimes. Viewed against this daunting background, the
questions I’ve posed above seem minor by comparison.
Yet, I still can’t help asking them.
— Washington Post
Christian Caryl is a senior editor with the Post’s Global
Opinions section.