Grosse campagne internationale contre cette dame dont nous ne connaissons rien : ni le pays, ni l'histoire, ni la situation réelle par rapport à l'armée, ni la vie intérieure ; et dont nous n'avons pas partagé le sort : un père assassiné quand elle avait deux ans, l'interdiction de revoir son mari mourant en 1999, de très longues années d'assignation à domicile... Nous ne savons pas qui sont ses porte-paroles (répètent-ils ce qu'elle a elle-même dit ou lui attribuent-ils leurs propres opinions ?). Bref, nos médias la jugent dans un fauteuil, et nous avec eux.
Ce qui se passe est terrible, mais cette façon d'encenser puis de démolir quelqu'un en dit long sur les médias et nous, leur public: lécher, lâcher, lyncher.
Et si nous nous occupions des Rohingyas au lieu de chercher des coupables, ne s'en porteraient-ils pas mieux. Au fond ce que nous disons de cette dame ne les intéresserait pas s'ils avaient le loisir de nous écouter. Ce n'est pas un jeu vidéo ou un feuilleton télévisé.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Ignoble Laureate
September 15, 2017
Myanmar’s Nobel Peace Prize winner
has remained silent about a crisis described this week by the U.N.’s
human-rights chief as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Photograph by
Soe Zeya Tun / Reuters
During her fifteen years under house
arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi—now the de-facto leader of Myanmar—found solace in the
poetry and novels of authors such as George Eliot, Victor Hugo, John le Carré,
and Anna Akhmatova. Another favorite, she has said, was Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and
Grey Falcon,” an epic travelogue about Yugoslavia written on the eve of the
Second World War. West described a country that Aung San Suu Kyi would have
recognized as being much like her own: a fragile mosaic of ethnicities,
languages, historical backgrounds, and cultural traditions.
In a short essay called “Let’s Visit
Burma,” published in 1985, Aung San Suu Kyi described the “colourful and
diverse origins and customs” of her compatriots. Rakhine state, in the west of
Myanmar, was something of a “mystery” in this respect, she wrote. Its
population had originated from “Mongolian and Aryan peoples who had come over
from India.” Owing to its geographical position, Bengal had also “played a major
part” in its history and culture. Among the state’s numerous ethnic groups
—Arakanese, Thek, Dainet, Myo, Mramagyi, and Kaman—others displayed “the
influence of Bengali.” But she assured readers that while there are “more
people of the Islamic faith to be found in [Rakhine] than anywhere else in
Burma,” it had been “predominately Buddhist” for centuries.
By groups that “displayed the
influence of Bengali”, Aung San Suu Kyi certainly meant the Rohingya, a
stateless minority in northern Rakhine that most Myanmar people consider to be
Bangladeshi immigrants. Since August 25th, when militants from the Arakan
Rohingya Salvation Army attacked police posts and an Army base, as many as a
thousand Rohingya have been killed and over three hundred and seventy thousand (more
than third of the Rohingya population) have been forced into neighboring
Bangladesh, human-rights groups estimate. Aung San Suu Kyi’s champions are now
contemplating her fall from grace, appalled that the Nobel Peace Prize winner
remains silent about and unmoved by a crisis described this week by the U.N.’s
human-rights chief as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” There have been
widespread
calls for the
Nobel Committee to strip her of the prize. But there is no statutory procedure
for doing so, nor is it clear how this would end the murder, rape, and mass
exodus of the Rohingya at the hands of Myanmar’s Army.
The most urgent and powerful appeals
to Aung San Suu Kyi have come from her fellow Nobel laureates. The Pakistani
activist Malala Yousafzai, who won the prize for her advocacy of girls’
education, condemned the “tragic and shameful treatment” of the Rohingya. “I am
still waiting for my fellow Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do the same.”
Addressing a letter to his “dear sister,” the anti-apartheid activist Desmond
Tutu wrote of his “profound sadness” and called on Aung San Suu Kyi to end the
military-led operations. “If the political price of your ascension to the
highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep,” he
wrote. The Dalai Lama subsequently urged her to find a peaceful solution to the
humanitarian crisis, saying that Buddha would have “definitely helped those
poor Muslims.”
This is not the first time that
laureates have spoken of their displeasure with Aung San Suu Kyi. In December
last year, when the military conducted another brutal offensive against the
Rohingya, thirteen Nobel winners, including Muhammad Yunus, Shirin Ebadi, and
Leymah Gbowee, signed an open letter deploring the Army’s use of helicopter
gunships, arbitrary arrests, and the rape of women. “Despite repeated appeals
to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” they concluded, using her honorific, “we are
frustrated that she has not taken any initiative to ensure full and equal
citizenship rights of the Rohingyas. Daw Suu Kyi is the leader and is the one
with primary responsibility to lead, and lead with courage, humanity and
compassion.”
When Aung San Suu Kyi accepted her
own prize, in Oslo, in June, 2012, she said that, under house arrest, “it felt
as though I were no longer a part of the real world. . . . What the Nobel Peace
Prize did was to draw me once again into the world of other human beings
outside the isolated area in which I lived, to restore a sense of reality to
me. . . . I began to understand the significance of the Nobel Prize.” Since
becoming State Counsellor, in 2016, however, she has retreated into the solitude
of her former life. Her husband, Michael Aris, died, of cancer, in 1999—she was
prevented by the military regime from saying goodbye to him—and she rarely sees her sons. People close to her
describe a life of morbid
isolation, living
alone in the administrative capital, Naypyidaw—arguably the dreariest city on
earth—pouring over state documents late into the night. She rarely gives
interviews, and is reluctant to delegate responsibilities (there is no obvious
successor to lead her party when she’s gone).
There’s no evidence that the
laureates’ chorus of indignation has any bearing on Aung San Suu Kyi, or
whether their declarations can break the spell of isolation and bring her back
to the outside world. The only response she has made to the present crisis in
Rakhine was a Facebook post, detailing a phone conversation she had with
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In it, she criticized the “huge
iceberg of misinformation calculated to create a lot of problems between
different communities and with the aim of promoting the interest of the
terrorists.” While Aung San Suu Kyi has remained silent, the offices and
ministries under her charge have not, describing the Rohingya as Bengalis and
publicly advocating the use of force in certain situations. “If they are going
to harm you, you can shoot
them,” Aung
San Suu Kyi’s spokesman, U Zaw Htay, said. The most egregious case of the
recklessness of Aung San Suu Kyi’s government came last month, when it accused
international aid workers of supporting terrorists, prompting fears for the
safety of thousands of people in Myanmar employed by charities and N.G.O.s.
There have been demands that the U.S. government stop using the name
“Rohingya”, and when a Rohingya women gave details of an alleged gang rape,
Aung San Suu Kyi’s office dismissed it as “fake rape.”
Aung San Suu Kyi’s biographer, Peter
Popham, writes in “The Lady and
the Generals: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle for Democracy” that she “has become an object
lesson in the slipperiness of the concept of heroism, and the folly of
hero-worship.” Indeed, the tenor of the denunciations suggests that Aung San
Suu Kyi’s critics are angered as much by a sense of personal betrayal as they
are by her silence. She has exposed the artlessness with which many in the West
reduced a complex personality into a Rapunzel of the East, emptied of her more
illiberal traits, such as an authoritarian leadership style, and some
potentially unsavory views on Muslims. The BBC correspondent, Fergal Keane, who
probably knows Aung San Suu Kyi better than any other foreign journalist, has
admitted that “we knew too little of Myanmar and its complex narratives of
ethnic rivalries. . . . And we knew too little of Aung San Suu Kyi herself.” In
a rare interview with Keane in April, she denied ethnic cleansing was taking
place in Rakhine, and resisted the cruder perceptions of her persona: “I am
just a politician. I am not quite like Margaret Thatcher, no. But on the other
hand, I am no Mother Teresa, either.”
Unlike Thatcher, a consummate
political operator, many have commented upon Aung San Suu Kyi’s weakness as a
politician. Her failure to act against the military operation in Rakhine, so
the argument goes, is not a result of her bigotry but because she is unable to
outmaneuver the generals in Myanmar’s very own game of thrones.
Few can blame Aung San Suu Kyi for
her political impotence. The constitutional arrangements of Myanmar would foil
the shrewdest operative. Designed by the military, in 2008, the constitution
gives the armed forces control of three ministries—the interior, borders, and
defense—that are beyond the oversight of the civilian government. It bars Aung
San Suu Kyi from becoming President, and allows the Army to veto any attempt at
constitutional reform. The irony, then, is that if Aung San Suu Kyi once
represented the power of the powerless, she is now powerless in power, taking
the flak for the Army’s unrelenting inhumanity in its fight against ethnic
rebels on the borderlands, and the Rohingya.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s powerlessness
hardly matters on this issue, anyway: hatred of the Rohingya is one thing that unites Myanmar. Despite their political
differences, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, and
the military are in lockstep when it comes to the problem of northern Rakhine.
Years of xenophobic, anti-Rohingya propaganda, pushed from the late
nineteen-seventies by the military government, endures in the nation’s
collective memory, and is stoked by the hate sermons of Buddhist monks like
Ashin Wirathu. By speaking up for the Rohingya, Aung San Suu Kyi imperils her
standing in the eyes of her fellow-citizens.
When she was thrust into the public
eye, in 1988, it was her lineage, rather than her politics, that was the
driving force. As the daughter of General Aung San, the nationally revered
founder of modern Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi was at the mercy of activists who
recognized the dynastic force that her name, and looks (she is the spitting
image of her father), lent to their struggle against the generals. Responsible
for negotiating Burma’s independence from the British Empire, Aung San was
assassinated by paramilitary forces of the former Prime Minister U Saw, in
1947, six months before its official declaration. Aung San Suu Kyi was just two
years old at the time, but there’s no doubting her love and admiration for him.
In a 2013 radio interview with the BBC, she described her father as “my first
love and my best love.” This filial piety is perhaps the key to understanding
Aung San Suu Kyi as saint and sinner.
Her father was an extraordinarily
tenacious, even ruthless, man who navigated between the British and Japanese
empires in order to achieve his objective—a unified, independent Burma. He was
also a Burmese nationalist who cared little for the nation’s ethnic minorities.
Today, he is universally venerated in Myanmar, while few outside the country
know who he is. This has almost certainly influenced Aung San Suu Kyi, who
mimics his leadership style, moral code, and political priorities. The Rohingya
are a distraction from her overriding ambition: to complete her father’s dream
of unifying the country and ending a civil war that has raged between ethnic
rebel forces and the Myanmar government since 1948. As Rebecca West wrote in
“Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” in a passage that Aung San Suu Kyi likely
associated with her father when reading the book under house arrest, “it is the
habit of the people, whenever an old man mismanages his business so that it
falls to pieces as soon as he dies, to say, ‘Ah, So-and-so was a marvel! He
kept things together so long as he was alive, and look what happens now he has
gone!’ ”
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