Ten years of freedom ends: Myanmar's tarnished heroine sees dark days return

While her international reputation is stained, ‘The Lady’ is beloved at home and her detention will be seen as a return to military oppression

Aung San Suu Kyi calls for Myanmar protests in wake of coup

Myanmar protesters residing in Japan hold photos of Aung San Suu Kyi as they rally against the military coup Photograph: Issei Kato/Reuters


Ben Doherty and Rebecca Ratcliffe
Mon 1 Feb 2021 06.54 GMT

A decade ago, there was such hope.

In the dusk of a cool November evening in 2010, Myanmar’s feared military dropped the barricades on University Avenue that had separated Aung San Suu Kyi from her people for so long.

As The Guardian reported the elation then:

In longyis and sandals, Aung San Suu Kyi’s supporters ran the 400 yards to the front gate of her home. One woman, a portrait of “The Lady” pinned to her shirt, wept as she ran, calling out her name. They pushed against the ancient, sagging bamboo fence, singing and chanting, “long live Aung San Suu Kyi”.

Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest was greeted with similar rapture around the world. Prime ministers and presidents hailed her liberty as the dawn of a new democratic era in her nation, so long under the ruthless jackboot of an uncompromising military junta.

The daughter of the Father of the Nation – General Aung San, who had founded the tatmadaw and helped win his country its independence - had become, through the confinement of 15 years of house arrest out of 21, an icon of peaceful democratic resistance.


Aung San Suu Kyi calls for Myanmar protests in wake of coup

Throughout her detention, Suu Kyi was unimpeachable. Lauded with prizes - the Nobel, the Sakharov, the US presidential medal of freedom – she represented grace and dignity.
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But in the decade since her release, Suu Kyi transitioned from democratic icon to working politician, and fell hard from her pedestal.

Her demise, in the west’s eyes, was slow, before it was swift.

The 2015 election saw her National League for Democracy win resoundingly. Unable to become president (because her children, with late academic Michael Aris, are foreign nationals), she became instead state counsellor and foreign minister, the country’s de facto leader.

But the deals she needed to make with a military that still – by dint of the country’s new constitution - controlled 25% of parliamentary seats as well the government’s key ministries, meant she was fundamentally weakened.

The promised economic liberalisation was meek and cronyistic, and the longed-for development for the country’s poorest never came.

Concerns grew that her acquiescence brought legitimacy to a regime still controlled by those in uniform, and which remained deeply undemocratic.

But most glaring was her unwillingness or inability to condemn the atrocities of the military her father founded, as it waged a genocide against the Rohingya minority in the country’s west – torching villages, raping and murdering those who could not escape over the border into Bangladesh.

The world called on Aung San Suu Kyi to defend the most marginalised, the most oppressed in the nation she led. Instead of defence, there was dissemblance.

“The situation in Rakhine state is complex and not easy to fathom,” she told the international court of justice in the Hague, saying allegations of genocide were an “incomplete and misleading factual picture of the situation”.

Aung San Suu Kyi is, and has always been, a Burmese nationalist, her concept of nation deeply bound up in ethnic identity. The plight of Myanmar’s multifarious ethnic minorities (not just the Rohingya) has always been her blind spot.

The daughter of the country’s greatest nationalist hero, it is a core tenet of her personal and political philosophy.

But while she has fallen unceremoniously in the eyes of the international community, she remains adored in Myanmar.

Inside the country, her detention by the army will be seen as a return to the dark days of oppressive military rule. The military has announced it will take control of the country for a full year, while, it says, it investigates fraud during last year’s general election. On Monday afternoon, Aung San Suu Kyi called on the public to protest against the coup.

The army’s actions could easily backfire, said David Mathieson, an independent Myanmar analyst.

“I don’t think [the military] can count on the inaction of a lot of people around the country,” he said. “You’ve got a generation who grew up with her in house arrest, and a younger generation who grew up with her being free, and really supporting her. And there are a lot of people in ethnic states who can’t stand her, or [her] party – but hate the military,” he added.

Around the world, despite Aung San Suu Kyi’s irreparably tarnished reputation, the military seizing control has been met with universal and vociferous condemnation. Inside the country, there is a deep sense of uncertainty.

“The doors just opened to a very different future,” author and historian Thant Myint-U wrote.

“I have a sinking feeling that no one will really be able to control what comes next. And remember Myanmar’s a country awash in weapons, with deep divisions across ethnic & religious lines, where millions can barely feed themselves.”