A Hero Has Fallen

Ellen J. Kennedy, Ph.D., Executive Director

World Without Genocide at Mitchell Hamline School of Law

My husband and I went to Burma, now known as Myanmar, in 2003.  A military government had been in power for decades and had shut down the major university after student pro-democracy protests.  There were almost no open internet cafes and it was impossible to communicate with our children who were in Minnesota.  People were afraid to speak to us unless they were certain they wouldn’t be overheard by a government informer.  And Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s pro-democracy leader, had been under house arrest for years because of her opposition to the government.  She was undoubtedly one of the world’s best-known political prisoners.  We saw her home, the military presence, the guns, and the roadblocks.

Photograph: Bo Bo Lynn/EPA

She was a hero to me, and, indeed, to most of the world. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and awards from many other organizations, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for her determination to bring freedom to her people.

But in 2018 the Museum revoked its award and people called for the Nobel Peace Prize to be revoked as well. What had happened to my hero?

Her late father had negotiated the country’s independence from Britain and was assassinated in 1947 for his advocacy of freedom. Forty years later, Aung San Suu Kyi became the country’s standard-bearer as she formed a political party and her pro-democracy efforts gained ground.

During this time, she married Michael Arias, a British citizen, and they had two sons.

In 1990 there was real hope for change when the military government allowed elections. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the NLD, National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory. But the military would not let the elected candidates take their positions. Had they been seated, Suu Kyi probably would have become the prime minister.

Myanmar came under international pressure to let the rightfully-elected people join the parliament.  Aung San Suu Kyi, still under arrest, became an iconic symbol of martyrdom for democracy.  Many countries imposed economic sanctions against the country because of her arrest and for the ruling junta’s ongoing human rights violations.

In 1999, Suu Kyi’s husband, who had remained in London with their two boys, was gravely ill with cancer. The Myanmar government wouldn’t give him a visa to come to Myanmar, despite appeals from world leaders including the Pope and President Clinton.  Instead, the government urged Suu Kyi to leave Myanmar to visit him. She knew that the government wouldn’t allow her back if she left.

She announced that she would not leave her country and her people.

Her husband was dying. She wore a dress in his favorite color, put a rose in her hair, and made a videotape to share final words with him.  Tragically, the tape arrived in London two days after his death.

I often have wondered what I would have done in her position.  We like to believe that we would do what is morally right in the face of hardship or the danger to ourselves.  We would have been like Miep Geis and brought food to Anne Frank and her family, sequestered in that attic for 25 months, knowing that discovery would mean our certain death.  We would have been like Carl Wilkens, the only American to remain in Rwanda during the genocide, who saved hundreds of lives despite great peril to himself.

Would we be so courageous? Would we stand up?  Fred Amram, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Minneapolis, reminds us that Hitler took power in 1933 and Auschwitz didn’t begin operating until 1941. There was a long descent into the hell of the Holocaust from 1933 to 1941, a time when that descent could have been stopped – IF people had stood up.  But they were afraid, or complicit, or uncaring.

Like Miep Gies and Carl Wilkens, Aung San Suu Kyi stood up.  She remained in Myanmar even while her husband was dying, refusing to abandon her fight for freedom.

But where is Aung San Suu Kyi’s moral commitment today?

Genocide is being perpetrated by the Myanmar government against a small Muslim minority known as the Rohingya in Rakhine state in the country’s western region. The UN has called the Rohingya “the most persecuted people on earth.”  They are stripped of their citizenship, as were Anne Frank and the Jews living under German occupation; they are denied access to education, employment, adequate food, sanitation, and medicine; and army troops have tortured, raped, and murdered innocent men, women, and children.

The Myanmar government is deliberately forcing the Rohingya out of Rakhine state. Rakhine is rich in natural resources, particularly oil and natural gas, with proven gas reserves of at least 10 trillion cubic feet. China, Myanmar’s major trading partner, has built pipelines through Rakhine state to take oil and gas from that region into China.  This is part of China’s global Belt and Road Initiative, which will develop China’s economic and political control around the world.  With the Rohingya out of the way, the resources can be extracted without interference.

August 25 marks the second anniversary of the Myanmar army’s brutal campaign against the Rohingya. More than 750,000 people fled into neighboring Bangladesh, a country that has announced plans to send them back to Myanmar despite that country’s refusal to take them. And the Rohingya won’t go back until they can be guaranteed citizenship and fundamental safety and security.

In 1935. the German government took citizenship away from the Jews.  We know how that story ended – Jews had nowhere to go and no country would take them in.

The Rohingya are stateless, denied citizenship in their home country of Myanmar. They have nowhere to go and no country will take them in – just like the Jews.  What will happen to them?

Since taking the office of State Counsellor in 2015, a position akin to Prime Minister, Aung San Suu Kyi has failed to respond to the persecution of the Rohingya people. She refuses to acknowledge that Myanmar’s military has committed massacres.

She once said, “It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it, and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” She has sacrificed her fear of losing power in the current government to the moral imperative of standing up against this genocide.