Guest contributor
Kirt Mausert
An open letter published in DVB recently urged the newly appointed United Nations Special Envoy, Julie Bishop, to demand proof that Aung San Suu Kyi is alive, well, and not being subjected to the enforced disappearance the junta has imposed on so many others.
That demand is just. No detainee should vanish into state secrecy, and the regime’s refusal to provide evidence of her condition would tell the world something true about the nature of its power.
But the letter did something else alongside its humane request, something that has become the reflexive grammar of writing about Aung San Suu Kyi in the years since the coup.
It asked the reader to set aside, as a matter of mere “political disagreement,” her conduct during the period when the state drove some 700,000 Rohingya across the Naf River into what is now the world’s largest refugee settlement, in Bangladesh.
“Whatever one’s political disagreements with Aung San Suu Kyi over the years,” the letter offered, “no serious observer can deny the magnitude of her sacrifice, discipline, courage, or symbolic importance to millions.”
This sentence is worth pausing on, because it performs the central operation by which her role in the genocide is being quietly converted into a non-issue.
It treats the genocide as a “political disagreement,” a matter of differing opinions about a leader’s record to be weighed against her virtues. And it offers her “sacrifice” and her “symbolic importance” as the weights on the other side of the scale.
I want to suggest that the scale itself is the error. Her sacrifice and her symbolic importance were not counterweights to her complicity. They were what made her complicity valuable.
The case against Suu Kyi does not require a theory of her private beliefs, and it does not depend on the constitutional powers she lacked. It is well established that she did not command the military, did not order the clearance operations, did not control the Western Command.
The serious charge has never been that she did these things. The charge is that the civilian government she led, and which she more than anyone else personified, performed the administrative, rhetorical, and diplomatic labor without which the military’s operational violence could not have proceeded with the international forbearance, domestic permission, and evidentiary obscurity it required.
Consider what that labor actually consisted of:
In December 2016, as the first wave of operations was underway, the State Counsellor’s Office Information Committee — her office, her communications organ, operating under direct civilian authority — published on its official Facebook page a banner reading “Fake Rape,” characterizing testimony of mass sexual violence by soldiers against Rohingya women as fabrication.
The post drew sustained international condemnation. Her office did not remove it, did not address it, did not distance her from it. This was the civilian executive denying atrocities in real time, while they were being committed.
Then there are the journalists. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, the two Reuters reporters who documented the massacre of 10 Rohingya men and boys at Inn Din village, were arrested and prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act — not by the military, but by the civilian apparatus, and tried under the State Counsellor’s government.
They served more than 500 days in prison. The soldiers who carried out the massacre they exposed were convicted, sentenced, and quietly released early; the journalists who exposed it served longer than the killers did.
This is the function for which the apologists have no ready excuse. The appearance at The Hague can be reframed, however dishonestly, as defending the nation’s dignity against foreign judgment.
The denials can be attributed to the military’s pressure. But the prosecution of two journalists protected no civilian space, deterred no coup, and served no purpose except the suppression of the evidence the government’s own narrative depended on suppressing.
There is no version of “she had no choice” that reaches it. The civilian government did not have to prosecute the men who documented the massacre. It chose to, and it kept them in prison while the massacre’s perpetrators went home.
Her social welfare minister, Win Myat Aye, given the lead on camp administration in Rakhine State, told the BBC in 2017 — asked whether the Rohingya were burning their own villages — “yes.”
On the first official visit to the refugee camps in Bangladesh, in April 2018, he addressed the survivors as “Bengali” to their faces.
The same minister has since, as a minister in the anti-junta National Unity Government, apologized for “failing to bring justice to the Rohingya,” explaining his earlier conduct by reference to the constitutional constraints on civilian authority — the very defense now offered on Suu Kyi’s behalf.
The personnel is continuous across what is publicly framed as a clean break. The apologetic grammar is continuous too.
And in December 2019, the defense of Myanmar against the charge of genocide at the International Court of Justice was conducted not by the generals but by the civilian government, with Suu Kyi leading the delegation personally.
It is sometimes said that she went to The Hague to protect the country from foreign judgment, not to defend the military. But this is not what she did there.
She did not lodge a procedural objection to the court’s jurisdiction. She affirmatively denied that genocidal intent was present, characterized the operations as a legitimate response to terrorism, and asked the court to leave any violations to Myanmar’s own military justice system.
She adopted the military’s account of the operations as her own and delivered it in her own voice. A uniformed general denying genocide is a defendant. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate denying genocide is a character witness. That is precisely why she was there.
Which brings us back to the scale, and to the sacrifice and symbolic importance the open letter places on the side of her credit.
Her sacrifice was real. The years of house arrest were real. The decision not to leave Burma to see her dying husband, knowing the junta might never let her return, was real.
No one should pretend otherwise. But the moral capital accumulated through those years did not sit inertly to her credit while she governed. It was a resource, and she spent it.
The authority with which she stood at The Hague — the authority that made her denial of genocide land differently than a general’s denial would have landed — was the authority of the political prisoner, the laureate, the woman who had given up so much.
The sacrifice was converted into the credibility that shielded the state. It was not a counterweight to the complicity. It was the instrument of it.
The symbolic importance is the same story, only more so. The letter is correct that Suu Kyi was symbolically important to millions of Burmese and to the international community that had spent decades constructing her as the icon of a democratic transition.
But this is not a mitigating fact. Here is the explanation. The arrangement that governed Myanmar after 2011 was a division of labor: the military conducted the operations, and the civilian government performed the legitimating work the military could no longer credibly perform itself before an international audience increasingly intolerant of overt military rule.
The civilian half of that arrangement needed a face — a figure whose moral standing could be deployed to manage the world’s response to what the other half was doing.
Her symbolic importance was the qualification for the role. No one else possessed it. The arrangement required exactly the person the letter asks us to credit for her symbolism, doing exactly the work her symbolism made possible.
This is why the framing of “political disagreement” fails. A political disagreement is what you have about tax policy or the sequencing of constitutional reform.
What is at issue here is documented conduct: a civilian government that denied atrocities while they occurred, prosecuted the journalists who exposed them, obstructed the investigators who came to document them, convened a commission to manufacture a finding of no genocidal intent, and sent its most internationally credible figure to The Hague to deliver that finding in her own voice.
None of this is a matter of opinion. The genocide has been recognized as such by the United States government and by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and is currently being adjudicated at the International Court of Justice.
Why did the civilian government act this way? Not because of some defect in Suu Kyi’s character, and not because she was secretly cruel. The answer is structural.
Her National League for Democracy (NLD) represented, above all, the interests of a Bamar Buddhist political class for whom the Rohingya were a liability in the arithmetic of electoral politics and an irrelevance in the arithmetic of class power.
Their dispossession threatened no interest the party’s base held; their defense would have cost political capital the party declined to spend.
When the constraint was loosest and the choice was freest — the 2020 disenfranchisement of Rohingya voters, four years after the principal atrocities, with the international human-rights apparatus fully mobilized — the civilian government chose dispossession anyway.
That was not coup-prophylaxis, it was alignment.
I should be precise about what this argument does and does not claim. It does not claim that Suu Kyi should be subjected to enforced disappearance, denied medical care, or held incommunicado.
Her detention by the military is its own injustice, and the demand for proof of life is legitimate on its own terms. But her victimhood at the hands of the generals does not retroactively cancel her complicity in the genocide her government administered.
Both things are true at once. The rehabilitation now underway depends on letting the first quietly erase the second — on allowing the image of the disappeared laureate to overwrite the record of the State Counsellor who led the genocide’s diplomatic defense.
The detention is real. The complicity is also real. Neither absolves the other.
The open letter asks the Special Envoy to show up “for your sister in conscience.” I would ask instead that we decline the invitation to treat the genocide as a footnote to a heroic biography.
The heroism and the complicity are not in separate columns. The heroism was the resource the complicity drew upon. To insist on her symbolic importance while bracketing what that symbolism was used to do is not to honor her, but to complete the operation her government began — to finish converting a genocide into a political disagreement, and a genocide’s most valuable civilian asset into a victim deserving only of our sympathy.
She belongs in the historical record as what she was: not a fallen icon, not a tragic figure exceeded by her circumstances, but the head of a civilian government that performed, willingly and by its own design, the functions a genocide requires.
Kirt Mausert lived and worked in Myanmar from 2010 to 2017. He was blacklisted by Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD government in late 2017 — in the same period as the United Nations Special Rapporteur, Yanghee Lee — for naming its complicity in the violence against the Rohingya. He is a doctoral candidate in linguistic anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and edits Yangon Informer, where a fully documented version of this argument appears.
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