If Time could be reversed, I think Aung San Suu Kyi would like to go back to December 10, 1991, when her two sons stood on the podium of the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf. 30 years later, when she was again placed under house arrest by the military junta, she no longer had the same aura.
The world once cheered for her, but now, it is silent.
At that time, Aung San Suu Kyi, as the leader of the opposition under house arrest by the military government, had become the most famous non-violent and non-cooperative democracy fighter after Gandhi and Mandela in the international arena. She has been honored by the international community with honorary citizenship and honorary doctorates from dozens of countries and universities, making her one of the brightest symbols of Burma’s modern history as a former British colony.
As the last prime minister of the British colony, her father, Aung San Suu Kyi Sr, was the father of Burma’s independence movement and is revered by Burmese as the father of the nation. But unfortunately, on the eve of Burma’s independence, he was assassinated by his political rivals. As the old Aung San had a large number of gunmen at his disposal, there was no leader after independence, and the country lacked a rallying point. The contradictions between the military and the civilian ruling clique deepened, which became the cause of military intervention in Burma in the following decades.
In 1962, a coup d’état was staged by the Burmese authorities, and military chief Ne Win began a 26-year-long military government.
As the daughter of the father of the nation, Aung San Suu Kyi’s first half of her Life was not so bad in the midst of the storm. Her mother was appointed ambassador to India in order to weaken her Family‘s influence, so she spent her teenage years in India. Because of her ties to the UK, she went on to study in the UK, enrolling at Oxford University and then getting her PhD at the University of London. While in England, Aung San Suu Kyi married British Mike Aris in 1972 and had two sons. The whole family, except for her, is of British nationality.
In March 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi finally returned to Burma when her mother became seriously ill. This was at a time when the Burmese military was divided, Ne Win had been ousted from power, and the new military government was brutally suppressing opposition forces and the country was in turmoil.
As the daughter of the father of the nation, Aung San Suu Kyi can be said to be a natural good sign. In August 1988, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s first public appearance was a powerful rallying cry, with as many as a million people gathering to support her, as a political vegetarian who for the first time put forward the ideal of a non-violent and peaceful path to change.
With the fervent support of the crowd, Aung San Suu Kyi gave up her dream of becoming a Writer and has been determined to devote herself to politics ever since. She then formed the NLD, which quickly became the largest opposition party in all of Myanmar. Her popularity also terrified the military government, which placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest in July 1989 on charges of inciting unrest, beginning her long, intermittent life in a cage.
The combination of her Western-educated background, her advocacy of democracy, and her peaceful line of non-violence and non-cooperation …… allowed Aung San Suu Kyi to quickly gain widespread international support and become a fighter on par with Mandela. During her house arrest, in order to show support for her, the international community has successively imposed all-round sanctions on the Burmese military government, and calls for Aung San’s release have been incessant. At this time, Aung San could be said to have become a positive representative of Myanmar in the international community. The famous French director Luc Besson even made a film of the same name, “Aung San Suu Kyi”, starring Michelle Yeoh, based on her, which brought numerous tears.
In November 2010, under international pressure, the military government released Aung San and agreed to her candidacy, and in March 2012, Aung San kicked off her political rise with a speech on state-run television entitled “Freedom from Fear. In 2015, her party went one step further, defeating the ruling party to form a cabinet for the first time.
Aung San, who began to ascend to the pinnacle of power, began a jaw-dropping metamorphosis while the world watched in anticipation.
Myanmar’s constitution, adopted in 2008, explicitly states that presidential candidates themselves and their family members cannot be foreign nationals. This law, though, seems to specifically target Aung San – as her husband and son are both British. But the restriction cannot be said to be completely unreasonable from a national interest point of view – as most countries actually have such a provision. It doesn’t make sense to allow someone whose entire family is foreign except for herself, and who actually lives in a foreign country, to run for office.
After Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won the election, she has become both foreign minister and minister of presidential affairs, but she is still a long way from being president, after all. To circumvent this law, Aung San Suu Kyi has created a customized post “Senior Minister of State” – yes, this familiar term comes from Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who retired in 2004 and created this post specifically for her. In 2004, he retired, but not before creating this post, which seemed like an idle position, but was in fact the post of The Emperor, essentially to smooth the transition and allow his then junior son Lee Hsien Loong to take over.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s role as “Senior Minister of State” was exactly the same, as she put her close friend Htin Kyaw in the presidency as her own front man to facilitate control of the situation. This is exactly like the way Putin pushed Medvedev to the presidency and took the reins himself. And she has made no secret of her intentions, openly claiming that she would be the leader of the real power above the president.
If the power maneuver was only slightly disappointing, it was Aung San Suu Kyi’s subsequent Rohingya crisis and crackdown on journalists that was a major disappointment.
The Rohingya are a Muslim community in Myanmar that the British colonial government migrated from next door in Bangladesh to develop the country. The post-independence Burmese government regarded them as illegal immigrants and did not recognize the Rohingya as citizens. Coupled with the fact that the main faith in Myanmar is Buddhism, the conflict of beliefs has led to increasingly sharp ethnic conflicts. Since 2010, there have been bloody clashes between the Rohingya and the Burmese government, which eventually turned into large-scale crackdowns. The Rohingya were killed and injured, triggering a refugee crisis. After an investigation, the UN publicly condemned Daw Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to stop the violence, saying she was partly responsible for not using her authority and moral reputation to curb the spread of hate speech in the country, and for allowing the military to act recklessly. In the face of the UN’s censure, Aung San chose to side with the military, and for that reason led a legal team to the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands in 2019 to personally defend the allegations, making light of the situation and drawing an international outcry.
More surprisingly, in 2018, two local journalists employed by Reuters were sentenced to seven years in prison for violating the Telecommunications and Communications Act – a law that is similar to “provocation” in Myanmar – for reporting on a killing spree by Burmese government forces. As recently as 2017, even Aung San herself said she wanted to change it. As a result, she re-sentenced the journalist anyway. In September of the same year, a political commentator for the Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper was also sentenced to seven years in prison by Myanmar’s judicial authorities for “secession” because of his constant criticism of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The Burmese court found that the criticism “led to unrealistic ideas about Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
This is a different person from the goddess of democracy who just a few years ago publicly preached on television about “freedom from fear” and the Nobel laureate who said in Oslo, Norway, that “the Nobel Prize has made the international community aware of Myanmar’s pursuit of democracy and human rights and that we will not be forgotten by the world. The Nobel laureate seems to be a completely different person.
The ideals she once fought for have completely disappeared since she came to power.
This series of maneuvers has shocked the international community and sparked a series of outrage over the retraction of honors – dozens of countries and international organizations have withdrawn the Oxford Freedom Prize, Berlin Freedom Prize, Canadian Honorary Citizenship, Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award and other honors given to Aung San Suu Kyi… …Overnight, Aung San Suu Kyi’s lofty reputation, which she had traded decades of lost freedom for, crumbled to a few scraps of brick.
When the Burmese junta rolled back into town on February 1, 2021, and resumed the familiar pattern of coups, Aung San Suu Kyi was back to square one once again. While the international community remains in a state of condemnation, there is little support for her personally.
The old hearts are easy to change, but the old hearts are easy to change. There are many examples of power corrupting people’s hearts, from ancient times to the present. Those who look very political aesthetic spiritual leaders or moral icons, no matter how outwardly glamorous, in the absence of institutional constraints, can not escape the laws of human nature. They may even be more than the dark side that they attacked back then.
In the twilight of an idol, what remains is a heavy sigh.
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