A day after Myanmar’s military had pulled off a well-choreographed coup, the country’s civilian leader, Aug San Suu Kyi finds herself right back where she was just over a decade ago, under house arrest.
Her standoff with the military comes after she has deeply disappointed many once-staunch supporters in the international community by cozying up to the country’s generals while in power. The leaders in the West are still denouncing her detention, but they no longer view her as a paragon of democratic leadership.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party had won last November’s elections, catching the generals by surprise. They had immediately cried voter fraud, an allegation that the country’s election commission had dismissed and had proved on Monday as to who wants to control the country, rounding up Suu Kyi and other top leaders under the cover of darkness.
With the flights being grounded and communications largely cut, Myanmar plunged back into isolation and darkness, ending ten years of new freedoms and quasi-civilian rule that the Obama administration had held up as a beacon of a nascent democracy. The military-owned Myawaddy TV had said that the country would be under a one-year state of emergency.
However, now it’s not clear as to who can lead the country out of the wilderness, with Suu Kyi’s reputation abroad being badly tarnished.
Veteran U.S. diplomat Bill Richardson said that he believes that Aung San Suu Kyi has been an accomplice with the military and that he hopes she realizes that her compact with the devil has boomeranged against her and that she will now take the right stand on behalf of democracy, and then become a true advocate for human rights.
He also added that if she doesn’t step aside, he thinks that the NLD needs to find new leaders then.
Suu Kyi who is the daughter of an independent hero and also the father of the nation has spent almost fifteen years under house arrest before her release in 2010. Her tough stand against the junta has turned her into a symbol of peaceful resistance against the oppressors and has also fetched her Nobel Peace Prize.
During many years of confinement, a parade of foreign diplomats, human rights advocates, and Nobel laureates had streamed into her lakeside villa and demanding that the hard-line military free the elegant woman is known as The Lady, who often wears flowers in her hair.
But since her release, Suu Kyi has been criticized for the political gamble that she had made, showing defense to the military while ignoring and at times even defending the atrocities, most significant in the 2017 crackdown on Rohingya Muslims that the U.S. and others had labeled genocide.
Suu Kyi will be 76 or 77 when the next election is held. She will be weakened but shall remain as the No.1, said Robert Taylor, a prominent scholar of Myanmar’s political history.
