Opinion | Aung San Suu Kyi: from Myanmar’s icon of democracy to collaborator in the Rohingya Muslim genocide

David I. Steinberg says Aung San Suu Kyi may care more about her country than her international reputation, but her dismissal of atrocities against the Rohingya may haunt Myanmar in the future

Reading Time:3 minutes

Myanmar's State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi waits for a meeting with Vietnam's President Tran Dai Quang in Hanoi on September 13. Photo: Reuters

Published: 2:00pm, 26 Sep 2018Updated: 6:39pm, 26 Sep 2018

It “could have been handled better” must be the most anaemic, dismissive public comment by a national leader concerning one of the world’s most disastrous contemporary tragedies. Aung San Suu Kyi, state counsellor (virtual prime minister) of Myanmar and the civilian leader of that state, on an official visit to Vietnam, publicly dismissed the atrocities committed by Myanmese troops on this hapless, stateless Rohingya Muslim minority, some 700,000 of whom fled into Bangladesh and an estimated 10,000 died in what may be described as a pogrom. Mass rape and the execution of children have been documented.

This from the Nobel laureate who has been held up in the Western world as the icon of democracy as she struggled against a military regime while under house arrest for some 15 years.

It is true, as she has said, that she did not want to be regarded as a democratic icon, but rather as a politician trying to move her country along an unknown path to a form of democratic state. But she has basked in this positive international spotlight and received numerous international awards for her courage and commitment to democracy.

But she has, thus far, dismissed what the United States and the United Nations have called ethnic cleansing, and what some have regarded as a form of genocide. Her inattention and even misleading public statements concerning the plight of the Rohingya have destroyed her international reputation, diminished foreign Western investment and tourism, and cast the reputation of her country into a deep morass from which escape may be long and arduous.

Compounding this horrific flight from democratic norms has been her insistence that two Burmese Reuters journalists have been properly tried and convicted for seven years in jail for reporting on one terrible incident involving military actions against the Rohingya.

Claiming they were properly convicted under a colonial-era official secrets act, she has showed that all her previous hortatory exhortations to adhere to the “rule of law” were essentially meaningless. One official indicated that the two reporters were set up by the military through planted material. The courts are not independent.