Burma needs Aung San Suu Kyi yet again to be its Mother Courage
Photo by Xinhua/Sipa USA
In normal times, the news would be dominated by dramatic events in Burma, where the army staged a putsch a week ago and peaceful protestors are risking their lives to defy the generals. But these are not normal times. The world is otherwise engaged, above all with the Covid pandemic and its consequences. Burma (as most of the population still call their country, despite its renaming by the junta as “Myanmar” in 1989) is a faraway country of which the West knows little. Hence the Burmese ordeal has already become a diplomatic afterthought, with China and Russia backing the coup. It is time the West paid attention again to a land that may otherwise become a Chinese satellite.
It does not help that the once-stellar reputation of Burma’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been irreparably tarnished by her complicity in the army’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. Some 740,000 out of more than a million members of this Muslim minority were driven out of Burma in 2017. Many are still living in refugee camps on the Bangladeshi side of the border — a standing rebuke to the Nobel Peace laureate, known to the world as “the Lady” and to the Buddhist majority of Burmese as “Mother Suu”.
Yet the global celebrity of Aung San Suu Kyi remains her country’s greatest asset in its struggle for freedom and democracy. She emerged as the champion of insurgent democracy as long ago as 1988; in 2007 she was the symbol of the “Saffron Uprising”, led by Buddhist monks. Even at the age of 75, she will be undaunted by life as a political prisoner. Having lived under house arrest for a total of 15 years until her release in 2010, and been prohibited from being elected President by a constitution drafted to exclude her, she is as accustomed to adversity as she is to the arbitrary brutality of the military.
Though she has governed on sufferance since 2015 after her National League for Democracy (NLD) won the first free election by a landslide, the State Counsellor (Prime Minister) and Foreign Minister always knew that the Tatmadaw, as the army calls itself, might seize power again at any moment. Now that it has done so, she can revert to her role as opposition leader and, perhaps, national saviour. Unlike the world, her people do not hold her co-operation with the regime against her. Burma has, after all, been a dictatorship for most of its post-independence history. Even semi-democracy is better than none.
Why did the Tatmadaw decide to arrest Suu Kyi and President Win Myint? The charges against them are laughable: the Lady is accused of possessing unauthorised walkie-talkies for her security detail. More serious is the claim that last November’s election, easily won by the NLD, was rigged. It seems that the head of the junta, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, was affronted by the failure of his pro-military party and has been plotting to annul the result ever since. He has promised new elections in a year, but few believe that they will be free. For now, the state of emergency means that Burma is largely cut off from the world — although the authorities’ attempt to close down social media has not been entirely successful.
General Hlaing played a leading part in the crimes against the Rohingya, which have led to personal sanctions against him from, among others, the United States. Were these crimes to be classified as genocide under international law, as seems likely, Min Aung Hlaing could face trial at The Hague. The fear of having to answer for his actions before an international court may have motivated the general to seek immunity as head of state. Having failed to achieve this by election, he has now done so by force.
Yet the army leadership is deeply unpopular. Nobody has forgotten the decades that made Burma a byword for despotism. In an impoverished land, Min Aung Hlaing is notoriously corrupt and he is not the only officer to be accused of lining his own and his family’s pockets. Despite their boldness, the demonstrations in Rangoon, Mandalay and other cities have been tolerated so far. But nobody should be in any doubt that the men behind the coup are utterly ruthless. The bespectacled Hlaing may look more like a professor than a dictator, but this cold-blooded perpetrator of crimes against humanity is quite capable of ordering his troops to shoot. “I am in blood/Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’oer.”
Like Macbeth, Min Aung Hlaing has nothing to lose. The intrepid masses are no match for unbridled military might. They know that the Tatmadaw will crush any attempt to use people power to defeat the coup. So their leaders will tread carefully. The septuagenarian Suu Kyi faces her worst ordeal so far. She should shake off the taint of collaboration, apologise to the Rohingya and become once again the Mother Courage of Burma.
