Candace Rondeaux
One of the enduring mysteries in recent years is what happened to Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi. Somehow, some way, the woman known as “the Lady of Burma”—who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 after she spent 15 years under house arrest in Myanmar for her democratic activism—seems to have lost her soul. Her drive to the top of Myanmar’s political hierarchy and quest to burnish her political legacy have been relentless, but also devastating for all those who once hailed her commitment to democracy and nonviolence.
Since she became the de facto civilian head of Myanmar’s government following landmark elections in 2015, assuming the newly created position of state counselor, equivalent to prime minister, Aung San Suu Kyi has emerged as one of the most virulent defenders of the military junta that separated her from her family for years and ruled Myanmar for decades—and whose generals still wield most of the power in the country. This week, however, the Nobel laureate showed just how much she will compromise for the sake of power when she announced that she will personally lead the legal team defending Myanmar against charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Next month, she will travel to The Hague to fight tooth and nail in a case brought to the ICJ recently by Gambia, with the support of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, alleging that Myanmar’s military committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in its campaign to drive minority Rohingya Muslims out of western Myanmar.
The announcement comes at an inauspicious time for Myanmar, since this is not the only case seeking justice for the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who have been displaced from their homes since the military onslaught began in August 2017. As noted by Andrew Boyle at Just Security, in addition to the war crimes charges at the ICJ, government officials in the majority-Buddhist country are also facing additional charges of genocide and crimes against humanity brought on behalf of the Rohingya under a universal jurisdiction claim in Argentina. Meanwhile, judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague have also authorized the court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, to move forward with a formal investigation into charges that Myanmar’s leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi and her military compatriots, were complicit in genocide.
The international human rights community has been inert and far too reluctant to admit that it failed in its judgment of Aung San Suu Kyi’s moral character.
News of Aung San Suu Kyi’s plans to defend her government and the Burmese military against well-documented charges of a systematic campaign of rape, pillage, torture and extrajudicial killings against the Rohingya, along with violence against other religious minorities in different parts of Myanmar, might shock the conscience—if her precipitous fall from grace hadn’t been so public. After all, it was a little more than nine years ago to the day that the world was captivated by joyous scenes of celebrations outside Aung San Suu Kyi’s home in Yangon after she was finally released from house arrest. Her passionate efforts to free Myanmar from the oppressive yolk of decades of military dictatorship helped her gradually expand her role in Myanmar’s burgeoning democracy. Many had been elated when, in 2012, she finally delivered her Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo, 21 years after being awarded the Peace Prize. As she told the Nobel Committee in that speech, the award was recognition to her that “the oppressed and the isolated in Burma were also a part of the world.” She spoke somewhat more cautiously about Myanmar, but added that she and her party, the National League for Democracy, “stand ready and willing to play any role in the process of national reconciliation.”
Yet Myanmar’s once-celebrated transition to democracy, seen as the fulfillment of Aung San Suu Kyi’s dream, has instead resulted in her pivoting from a champion of the people to the guardian of the praetorian realm. Her steadfast support of the military’s campaign against the Rohingya has resulted in at least one of her prominent human rights awards being stripped away. Any hopes that some on the Nobel Committee may have quietly harbored, of the peace laureate quietly resigning or suddenly remembering her roots, were dashed this week. The one-time darling of the international human rights community and high-brow U.N. elites is doubling down on her longstanding claim that the Burmese military was justified in suppressing what she claims was a terrorist threat from the Rohingya.
Perhaps, as much as anything else, the slow motion, too-little-too-late recognition by groups like Amnesty International that Aung san Suu Kyi is far from deserving of their praise says more about the sad state of who speaks with authority in the international human rights community. After all, it has been widely reported that U.N. officials largely ignored the early warning signs of genocide in Myanmar when my friend and former colleague at the International Crisis Group, Michael Shaikh, sounded the alarm in 2014 while he was on a U.N. mission in Yangon.
That shameful and willful ignorance at the U.N. is perhaps not surprising, however, given the U.N.’s history of falling short in other ethnic conflicts where the specter of war crimes has loomed, such as in Sri Lanka. According to a confidential report cited by Foreign Policy, Shaikh and others on the U.N. human rights team in Yangon at the time were silenced by the top U.N. official in Myanmar, who was apparently more committed to maintaining good relations with the government than to justice. As Shaikh put it, the official, who left the country in 2017, had “totally succumbed to the pressure of maintaining that Myanmar had to be a human rights success story,” like much of the U.N.’s leadership following its failures in Sri Lanka.
But now, with three major legal cases pending against Myanmar’s military and civilian government, will the tide finally turn? The international human rights community has been inert and far too reluctant to admit that it failed in its judgment of Aung San Suu Kyi’s moral character. Her decision this week to go to the mat for Myanmar’s generals in The Hague should be a wake-up call.
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