Unsung Aung San
Has the world forgotten Aung San Suu Kyi? Jailed for a series of trumped-up corruption offences by the Myanmar military junta, the 78-year-old is reported to be suffering a series of health problems, despite denials by the regime. She is said to be suffering from such severe gum disease that she is unable to eat, as well as from ongoing dizziness and vomiting.
Aung San Suu Kyi is the towering figure of Burma – now Myanmar. Since her return to the country of her birth in 1988, after study abroad and working for the United Nations for three years, she has been the prominent figure in the fight for democracy and freedom for her people. For much of that time, Aung San Suu Kyi has been either under house arrest or in prison, including almost 15 years between 1989 and 2010.
Aung San Suu Kyi helped to establish the National League for Democracy (NLD) in 1988 of which she became the General Secretary. The League was set up by several retired military officers who criticised the military junta following the August 1988 uprising. For the past 35 years, she has headed the organisation, also serving as the chairman while the League was a registered political party.
Her place in modern Burmese history is familial. Her father Aung San, founded the modern Burmese army and negotiated independence from the British in 1947. She was just two years old when he was assassinated by his rivals, having secured the nation’s self-government. Her mother, Khin Kyi, was appointed her nation’s ambassador to India and Nepal in 1960. This allowed her to study in India and later at Oxford.
Burma evokes various memories for different generations of Australians. Rudyard Kipling’s romantic poem ‘Mandalay’ popularised the country in the late 1800s, as did the musical version at the beginning of last century. But for my father’s generation, memories of World War II, the Thai Burma Railway (which was mostly in Thailand) and the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps left an indelible impression of brutality and inhumanity. For those fortunate to visit in the past few decades, it is wonderful country of gentle and friendly people, but it is a state wrecked by a military dictatorship.
The failure of the military dictatorship to invest in basic infrastructure is evident throughout Myanmar. Once the most prosperous country in the ASEAN region, Myanmar is now the least. The critical infrastructure challenges are evident: poor roads and inadequate transport; and an antiquated electricity transmission system that suffers regular blackouts. Addressing these issues is central to economic progress, but that has been abandoned by the junta. Tourism - to Yangon (Rangoon), which has the most extensive collection of colonial buildings of any city in the world; to southern seaside locations; or to inland attractions like Lake Inle - has all but ceased. Without the support of Russia and China, the economy would collapse completely.
When the NLD received almost 60 per cent of the vote at the 1990 election, the military refused to hand over power and placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. Eventually international pressure won her release in 2010, allowing her to run for parliament. She was able to travel again, including to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize which she had been awarded in 1990. The League swept to power in the 2015 election, heralding global hopes that Myanmar was finally evolving into a democracy. For five years, these hopes seemed a real possibility. Banned from becoming president because she had married a foreigner, Aung San Suu Kyi was appointed State Counsellor, the equivalent of prime minister. But there were ongoing challenges. Under the constitution, the military retained significant power, especially the holding of the command and control of all the defence and security offices in the country and a presence in the parliament. There was also the ongoing challenges of the persecution of the Rohingya population. Although a commission was established on Rakhine State, Aung San Suu Kyi was criticised for not condemning the military’s actions, denying ethnic cleansing and not assuring the Rohingyas of citizenship. She was also widely criticised for failing to protect the freedom of the press. The International Court of Justice found ‘real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice to the rights’ of the Rohingya and that the Burmese government was not doing enough to remedy the situation.
Visiting Myanmar in 2017, it was clear that there was a covert hold on power by the military. But there was also a cautious optimism that an evolution towards freedom and democracy was underway. As history now reveals, that optimism was misplaced. The military staged a coup after the 2020 elections, declaring them fraudulent, and arrested Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021. In a series of trials, she was sentenced to a total of 33 years in jail.
When I was first elected to Parliament, the Hawke government would regularly raise her cause. I recall Neal Blewitt in particular railing against the junta and calling for her release from arrest in answers to questions in the House. The junta has arrested more than 25,000 people, holds some 20,000 in jail and has killed more than 4,000 people. Last year it executed four prominent political activists. It has caused the displacement of well over 1.5 million people, destroyed at least 70,000 homes and plunged millions into a humanitarian crisis. The denial of basic health care for millions is systematic according to the United Nations.
Why has the world seemingly forgotten Aung San Suu Kyi? Did she fall out of favour for her response to the Rohingya issue, although she was walking a political tightrope with the ever presence and control of the Burmese military? Or is it that other issues such as the war in Ukraine and China’s aggression having sucked media attention?
Long-time Burma watcher and author Benedict Rogers wrote recently that the global silence about Aung San Suu Kyi and the ongoing plight of the Burmese people is partially a consequence of the understandable discomfort with the compromises she made while in power. ‘But whatever disagreements we may have with her over the positions she took, for example, over the genocide of the Rohingyas or the war against Myanmar’s ethnic nationalities, and however profound those disagreements may be, she does not deserve to be in jail, and she certainly deserves the basic right to medical care. Disagreement with her record in government does not justify apathy over her plight or that of her country today. She won an overwhelming re-election mandate in democratic elections in 2020 and should be well into her second term in government, not in prison and at risk of death.’
‘It would be convenient for the regime for Aung San Suu Kyi to die in jail,’ writes Rogers. ‘If she dies behind bars, it will be the junta that killed her.’ It is time for Australia and the other democratic nations of the world to renew their advocacy for the people of Myanmar.
First published in the Spectator Australia.
