Her imprisonment for a total of 19 years is an assault on the people of Myanmar

Benedict Rogers for UCA News

Earlier this week, Myanmar’s legitimate and democratically-elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, marked a cumulative total of 19 years in detention since 1989.

Following the military coup that overthrew her elected government on Feb. 1, 2021, she began her fourth period of detention which has already lasted almost four years. The multiple prison sentences she is currently serving total 27 years.

Yet the silence of the world in response to Myanmar’s crisis and her unjust imprisonment is deafening.

Here is a nearly 80-year-old woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and inspired singers like Bono to compose songs — like U2’s Walk On — about her.

Here is a woman who — following her release from years under house arrest in 2010 — received world leaders at her home in Yangon and traveled the globe championing her country’s apparent transition to democracy.

Here is a woman who led Myanmar’s democracy movement into a power-sharing government with the military that had repressed the country for decades, and appeared to usher in a new — albeit very fragile — transition to some new era of relaxation and reform.

Here is a woman who, after a five-year term as the head of her country’s first democratically elected, civilian-led government in half a century, won re-election and a new mandate in 2020.

And here is a woman who today should be approaching the end of her second term in government, not enduring her fourth term of incarceration.

So why are world leaders not shouting from the rooftops for her release?

Perhaps it is because her time in government fell far short of the ideals for which she had previously spent years in jail.

Perhaps it is because the atrocities the military perpetrated during her time in office — especially the genocide of Rohingyas — understandably complicated emotions. Not only her failure to condemn unequivocally such atrocity crimes, but her apparent willingness to defend the military lost her friends around the world.

If so, such silence is profoundly short-sighted and misjudged — for three reasons.

First, it fails to understand the complexities she faced in government and the tightrope she walked.

For sure, she made profound misjudgments, about which I have spoken out unambiguously many times.

The day she went to the Hague to defend the military against genocide charges was a day when my heart sank to new and great depths.

The interviews she gave refuting evidence of atrocities broke my heart and stretched my ability to defend her almost to breaking point. And I said so at the time. While I had long been reluctant to join the growing anti-Suu Kyi bandwagon, I certainly could not defend her appearance at the Hague.

But however difficult it was to witness those misjudgments, let us also remember how constrained she was.

She did not have to go as far as to defend the military but she was limited in what she could say if she wanted her power-sharing gamble to have a chance of success.

And whatever ill-judged remarks and unnecessary and unwise compromises she made, she did establish the Kofi Annan Commission to begin to address the Rohingya crisis. Though silent in condemnation and not always well-judged in her words, she was not oblivious to the search for justice and the pursuit of peace and reconciliation.

Second, whatever one thinks of her conduct in office, if we believe in democracy, we must recognize that she and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won an overwhelming re-election mandate in November 2020.

Her overthrow and imprisonment as the result of General Min Aung Hlaing’s coup is an assault on democracy and an appalling injustice, and for that reason, democrats around the world should be protesting passionately.

And third, whatever disappointments one might feel about Suu Kyi personally, her imprisonment is an assault on Myanmar’s people.

Remember, she is one of over 21,000 political prisoners in jail in Myanmar today and because she is the one political prisoner the world knows, she is a face and symbol for them all.

If we fail to speak out for her, we betray all 21,000 brave political prisoners in Myanmar today. Since the coup, over 28,000 have been arrested, including 589 children — and only a few thousand have been released over the past four years.

Those prisoners are subjected to dire mistreatment and conditions, including torture, sexual violence, and denial of medical care.

In July last year, the International Commission of Jurists released a report, Unseen and Unheard: Violations of the Human Rights of Women Deprived of Liberty in Myanmar, documenting violations of international law committed against women detainees. 

Political prisoners are dying as a consequence of the denial of medical care. On Jan. 10, for example, Myo Min Oo died due to untreated kidney stones, in Daik-U Prison in Bago Region, according to the Political Prisoners Network-Myanmar.

Over 100 political prisoners have died in jail, including Suu Kyi’s lawyer and former senior NLD spokesman U Nyan Win, whom I used to meet regularly in Yangon.

Some voices are beginning to speak out for Suu Kyi. Last month just before Christmas, three former British foreign secretaries called for her release. This week, Japanese filmmaker Toru Kubota — who had himself been arrested in Myanmar — joined the calls. British newspaper The Independent has made a powerful documentary film — to be officially screened in London next week — and has been campaigning for her freedom. And of course, her son Kim Aris has been leading the charge.

Now, as she marks 19 years cumulatively in detention — with periods of apparent freedom and hope in between — it is time once again to campaign for her release.

Whatever disappointments we may feel about her, and whatever her failures in her first term in government, whatever misgivings we may have about some of her remarks or misjudgments in the recent past, nothing whatsoever can justify her current imprisonment.

The injustice against her, and the injustice against the people of Myanmar, ought both to inspire us to resurrect that long-used campaigning slogan: #FreeAungSanSuuKyi. But we must do more than wave it as a protest slogan — we must turn it into sustained action.

The world faces many crises — the Middle East and Ukraine being uppermost in our minds. But let us not allow the prominent to obscure the apparently marginal. Let us also not allow the search for the perfect prophet to marginalize the imperfect pioneer. And let us not permit the slightly controversial to outweigh an egregious and outrageous injustice.

Aung San Suu Kyi was never a saint, and those who portrayed her as such must reflect today on their over-zealousness.

But nor is she or should she be a pariah.

She is a courageous, remarkable, extraordinary human being whose character traits of determination, persistence, and intransigence are her strengths in times of adversity and perhaps her faults in times of negotiation.

That recipe may partly be why she is in jail today — but it is also why we should invest in efforts to campaign for her release this year, and freedom for her beautiful but benighted country of Myanmar.

*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.