How Aung San Suu Kyi Turned From The Beloved Laureate Into The Detested Politician
By: Pedro Paulo Batista Brandstetter
Tags: Persecution, Aung San Suu Kyi, Rohingya, Myanmar, Nobel Prize

Pacifist leaders have been symbols of resilience and resistance throughout history. Mahatma Ghandi pursued India independence by political means and peaceful demonstrations, as illustrated by the Salt March (Satyagraha) in March 1930. His imprisonment made him a martir against the British Raj, whose domain at Southern Asia started to crumble towards public rebellion. His efforts awarded him many accolades, and his omission for the Nobel Peace Prize was regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee. Despite controversies regardind its personal life, Ghandi remains as one of the most known and iconic leaders in history.

Nelson Mandela awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with Frederik Willem de Klerk in 1993 for their struggle for a peace termination of the apartheid, as well for “laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa". Mandela fought with the early armed movement ANC (African National Congress), but turned to a more peaceful and organized activism until his arrest and consequent freedom to become the most popular president in the world. He sought reconciliation between white and black South Africans without any punishment or revenge directed to the opressor groups. Even 5 years after his death and hated by some alt-right movements, he still remains as one of the most respectable politicians in the world and surely will be regarded as an important and well-known image in the decades to come.

These are not the case for Aung San Suu Kyi.

Two years before Mandela was laureated, Aung San Suu Kyi appeared as a hope for many burmese against the military dictatorship, being awarded with the same prize "for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights” in Burma. She led many demonstrations during the 1988 uprisings that occurred in the country until the military junta called for general elections in 1990. She won the ballots with 58.7% with her party National League for Democracy (NLD), although the results of the pledged elections were turned down by the military and Suu Kyi was put under house arrest. For 15 years during a 21-years period she was unable to leave her home in Rangoon, while negotiations between the government and the United Nations occurred to free her.

She spent most of her time meditating and studying Buddhism while under arrest, and started to believe that democracy could be achieved through the buddhist philosophy. At the early 90’s she was one of the most proeminent political prisoners in the world, which made the Nobel Committee laureate her with the Peace Prize in 1991. Her undoubtful and lasting resistance, even in times she was with health weakened during her period of imprisonment, collaborated to create an image of a martir for the burmese. Suu Kyi was the biggest exponent of the national struggle for democracy, and the fact she’s the youngest daughter of Gen. Aung San, Father of the Nation of modern-day Myanmar, helped to flourish the people’s ideal. She left prison in 2010, during the democratization period of Myanmar. President of NLD, leader of the opposition, minister for the incumbent president and then State Counsellor of Myanmar, she could have been one of the most appreciated politicians in the world and followed the paths of Ghandi and Mandela. However, she went in the contrary direction in recent years.

Myanmar is the place of the Bamar people, a Sino-Tibetan people who first migrated from current Yunnan, China to the Irrawaddy valley in the 7th century. Metonymically known as the “burmese”, Bamar people comprises 68% of Myanmar’s population, followed by Shan, Karen, Rakhine and Mon people, all of them with vast majority associated with the biggest religion in the country, the Theravada branch of Buddhism. But a minority amount of Muslims in the country consists of Rohingya people — who the world keeps up with huge attention their mass flee from the country. In the last years, Rohingya have been the central matter for Southeast Asia affairs, with huge discussion towards the minority persecution, mass migration, possible genocide and ethnic cleansing and the responses from the government before mass murder and torture committed by the Tatmadaw (the Myanmar Armed Forces), there is to say, under Aung San Suu Kyi rule.

But why Rohingya people have been fleeing the country is the critical matter of the fight to prevent a further genocide. During the British colonial rule over Burma, the crown’s policy encouraged Bengali inhabitants to migrate to the state division of Arakan, a little populated province covering modern-day Rakhine state. Its fertile valleys were conducive for them to work as farm labourers for the East India Company. But the migration began to increase to numbers never seen before in the 19th century. The British census of 1872 stated 58,255 Muslims were living in Akyab (the nowadays Sittwe, capital of the Rakhine state). In 1911, this population increased to 178,647. Tensions came afloat between the native Buddhists and the Muslim newcomers, but specially during the Japanese invasion of Burma in the II World War. It is believed around 22,000 Muslims have crossed the border into Bengal (the current Bangladesh part of the British Raj) to escape the violence of the Imperial Japanese Army. By the post-war, most of the fled displaced Muslims returned to Burma after its independence in 1948, creating an ideal of scorn, contempt and disregard in most extremist Buddhists.

These muslims, now known as the Rohingya, were recognized as an indigenous ethnic nationality in Burma, with political rights and representatives in the Burmese parliament. But this status soon changed with the socialist coup d’état in 1962 by the military junta who took the power over the country, depriving Rohingya from its political rights and even from their nationality, turning against the UN Human Rights Convention. The Muslims were then known as just illegal Bengali immigrants with no civil rights, and the military junta helped to build the imagery of a foreign violent and frightful ethnicity prowling the Rohingya.

Aung San Suu Kyi was no exception from the majority of Buddhists who turned a blind eye to the atrocities against the Rohingya. Myanmar government declared the return to presidency and the end of the military dictatorship in 2011, following Aung San Suu Kyi freedom from prision, but still the Rohingya were denied nationality and the recognizition of minor ethnicity. Tensions again escalated in 2015 when 25,000 people fled from Myanmar to Southeast Asia countries by boats from migrant smugglers, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In late 2016, a major crackdown by the Tatmadaw and the police occurred on Rohingya people after an attack on several border police posts in Rakhine State, where nine police personnel were killed and weapons and ammunitions were looted. The Harakah al-Yaqin (or the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army) took responsibility for the attack. In response, the Tatmadaw started wide-scale extrajudicial killings, including gang rapes, arson and infanticides. A government appointed commission dismissed UN allegations of the crackdown, calling some incidents “appeared to be fabricated … others had little evidence”. Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi diminished the accusations of human rights abuses, claiming “show me a country without human rights issues”.

In August 2017, again a crackdown was made by the Armed Forces and the police, with collaboration from extremist buddhists, to exterminate and torture Rohingya, burning villages down after a similar attack by the ARSA on police posts. Over 10,000 people were killed during the crackdown that it lasts until today. Mrs. Suu Kyi refuses to recognize the massacres and to use the word “Rohingya”, referring to the persecuted muslims instead as “illegal immigrants”. “I don’t think there is ethnic cleansing going on. I think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening”, she said in an interview with BBC, although there are a lot of spread videos on the internet of mass torture and executions by the Tatmadaw against the muslims.

“We make sure that all the people in our country are entitled to protection of their rights as well as, the right to, and not just political but social and humanitarian defence”. Her comments were made at the same time the refugee population — almost 1 million people — seeks for food aid, BBC says. It is clear Myanmar drives through a new era of democracy, but a very limited and specific one. NGOs and activists claim to withdraw her Nobel Peace Prize, what is certainly unlikely due to Nobel rules, but if she wants to keep up with it, she must hurry up and ensure the properly protection for the reminiscent Rohingya, before it is too late to recognize the ethnic cleansing.