Free Rohingya Coalition co-founder Maung
Zarni says time to reject false messiahs in Myanmar beginning with Aung San Suu
Kyi
By Dr. Maung Zarni
Watching YouTube Myanmar State Counsellor’s 43rd
Singapore lecture -- 1-hour lecture including the questions and answers –
entitled, “Democratic Transition in Myanmar: Challenges and the Way Forward,”
left me deeply disturbed, pained and outraged.
The degree of her delusions, distortions and concoctions
made me realize that my fellow Burmese dissident has become nothing more than
the most polished mouth piece for her former captors, namely the murderous
military regime.
Aung San Suu Kyi wasn’t simply one dissident leader among
several potential leaders of significance that I, like millions of other
Burmese Buddhists, supported in those long years of vibrant anti-dictatorship
opposition after the nationwide uprisings of 1988.
My sentimental ties to Aung San family are more personal
and go far deeper.
One late great uncle of mine was her father’s next-door
neighbor, class mate and a friend at Pegu Hall (dormitory) when both were young
undergraduates who hailed together from the Buddhist heartland of the then
Upper Burma to study Pali, literature, law, etc. at the colonial Rangoon
University in the early 1930’s.
Through my relative’s first-hand accounts of Aung San,
the anti-colonial revolutionary and founder of Burma Independence Army under
WWII Japan’s fascist patronage, as well as my own study of the slain national
hero’s voluminous speeches and writings, I have developed a lifelong admiration
for the man’s strength of character, integrity, Marxist-influenced
non-racialism and unwavering sense of service to the oppressed of colonial
Burma, not just Buddhists nor the majority Burmans or Bama, but all people who
considered Burma their home.
In fact, in my high school days in Mandalay of 1970’s I
learned the worthy English phrase “love of truth” from one of his writings
wherein he pointedly said as a father he wanted to instill the love of truth in
his three children.
So, when I watched Suu Kyi’s speech act performed at the
Grand Hyatt in Singapore, available on YouTube, I noted with deep pains and
rage that my hero’s world famous, or infamous, daughter packed lie after lie –
all verifiable – in her prepared lecture, which she proceeded to deliver with a
straight face.
Suu Kyi’s Singapore lecture August 22 was a speech her
own martyred father would most definitely feel so ashamed about.
Two years since Suu Kyi’s assumption of her self-declared
‘Above-the-President’ office as State Counsellor with her reportedly autocratic
control over all ministries save the security-related ministries such as Home
Affairs, Defense and Border Affairs, her leadership is noted only for serial
failures.
The commissions she has formed to address the country’s
defining problem -- crimes against Rohingyas -- have become a butt of
international jokes. As the country’s most revered politician since her
father’s murder in 1947, Suu Kyi has been unable to deliver on every one of the
party’s official major priorities: “rule of law, peace, development, amendments
to the Constitution”.
And yet in the lecture, the NLD leader served up the
typically democracy-indifferent and docile Singaporean audience a rose-tinted
view of her leadership and governmental performance, which the official hosts
on the panel dutifully, clapped and heaped praise on.
For someone who grew up under General Ne Win’s “Burmese
Way to Socialism” (1962-1988), Suu Kyi’s speech sounded more like a typical
party General Secretary’s report to the Socialist Polit Bureau presided over by
Chairman (despot) Ne Win in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
The State Counsellor in her own words: “In each of the
three Panglong (peace) meetings held over the last two years, we made valuable
progress. In the First Union Peace Conference, a seven-step roadmap for peace
and national reconciliation was achieved. In the Second Conference, 37
principles were adopted. Before the Third Conference, two more ethnic armed
groups signed the ceasefire agreement and during the Conference itself, 1``4
more principles were adopted.”
Not only her words are unpersuasive and uncorroborated by
the harsh realities of Myanmar ethnic minorities, particularly more than 100,000
Kachin war refugees in the Country’s eastern and northern border regions but
the world of Myanmar watchers who actually set their foot in these conflict
zones offers an assessment radically different from Ms. Suu Kyi’s. Virtually all
news reports and field studies about the Burmese military’s internal colonial
war of pacification note not only the regression of the country’s peace process
under Suu Kyi’s incompetent and failing leadership, typically rich in rhetoric
and empty of substance, but also the disappearance of the so-called democratic
space even for the ethnically dominant Burman Buddhist public.
That “democratic space” was deliberately allowed by the
quasi-democratic regime former General Thein Sein in 2010 designed to tango
with the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton administration as the generals sought to
rebalance the military’s overreliance on the increasingly aggressive and
invasive China in the Burmese affairs.
The emerging, if belated wisdom in Washington is that the
Obama’s Myanmar embracement policy, once held up as one of his signature
achievements emboldened, sped up and facilitated the genocidal destruction of
Rohingya people.
Under Suu Kyi’s leadership, Myanmar now faces a growing
chorus of international calls for the Security Council for the International
Criminal Court referral for international crimes in Western Myanmar state of
Rakhine, irrespective of whether such calls will bear fruit. Suu Kyi stands
accused, with good reasons, of culpability and complicity in the military’s
crimes against humanity and even genocide against Rohingya people.
It is matters pertaining to Rohingya persecution -- which
my researcher colleague Natalie Brinham and I call “the slow burning genocide,”
because of its decades-long nature -- on which Suu Kyi’s speech act morphed
from detectable delusions into deliberate distortions.
With no basis in reality, Suu Kyi boasted of having
implemented most of the Kofi Annan Commission recommendations, thus: “(t)he
recommendations of Dr. Kofi Annan’s Commission, 88 in all, of which we have to
date implemented 81, aim at the establishment of lasting peace and stability in
Rakhine.”
Kofi Annan is no more to do the fact-checking. But former
ambassador Laetitia van den Assum, one of his fellow Rakhine Commission
members, is still alive to know the untruths, nah, outright lies of Ms. Suu
Kyi. Van den Assum tweeted “The underlying reasons for their (Rohingyas’)
flight remain unaddressed”.
As a researcher who has spent the last six years
concentrating on my own country’s decades-long, state-directed persecution of
Rohingyas, I find it morally repugnant and empirically false Suu Kyi’s
disingenuous framing of the largest refugee crisis her military partners in
power have created as initially “terror”-related.
She in effect added insult to the collective injury of
the nearly 2 million Rohingya survivors, internally displaced inside Myanmar,
internationally deported across the border to Bangladesh, or the diaspora, when
she said, “the danger of terrorist activities, which was the initial cause of
events leading to the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine, remains real and present
today. Unless this security challenge is addressed, the risk of inter-communal
violence will remain.”
Suu Kyi words echo how Myanmar military has long framed
the Rohingyas -- a threat to security -- and justified their institutionalized
killings of the latter.
For the first 15 years since the country’s popular
uprisings in 1988, I had been one of the most hard-working and effective foot
soldiers for Suu Kyi in her international campaigns to ostracize and punish
Myanmar military leaders.
I have studied closely Suu Kyi’s leadership and poured
over every speech of hers, over the last 30 years since she first parachuted
onto the Burmese political stage as “the daughter of General Aung San,” as she
put it.
Painfully, I have concluded that the daughter of my
nationalist hero is no longer part of Myanmar’s solution but all of her intents
and purposes morphed into the most polished mouthpiece of the military
perpetrators.
Suu Kyi even had the audacity to call three generals in
her Cabinet “rather sweet” amidst international calls to haul Myanmar generals
to the International Criminal Court.
On Aug. 25, 700,000-plus Rohingya survivors of Myanmar
genocide in 35 camps in Kutupalong meet to mourn, memorialize and honor loved
ones who were senselessly maimed, mass-raped, slaughtered and burned alive a
year ago. The least the world, both grassroots communities and governments,
could do is to drop the decades-old policy delusions, globally, that Suu Kyi
represents hope, liberty and liberalism.
As a Burmese, a dominant Bama, Buddhist from an extended
military family at that, I will say for the record Myanmar’s State Counsellor
no longer speaks for me.
Nor does she represent the humanistic values which I
learned to embrace through her father’s writings. I know for a fact that there
are fellow dissidents inside Myanmar, however small their numbers, who share my
categorical rejection of Suu Kyi and her military partners in crimes.
Let’s remember Rohingya victims today. And let’s reject
false messiahs of Myanmar, starting with Aung San Suu Kyi.