Have Myanmar’s generals overreached themselves by declaring last November’s general election null and void and arresting Aung San Suu Kyi,...
Have Myanmar’s generals overreached themselves by declaring last November’s general election null and void and arresting Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party, the National League for Democracy, swept the election with an overwhelming majority ? I believe they have.
The story of her life has often been told. The many odds that she has faced. Her ups and downs. She came home from the United Kingdom to nurse her mother. She was elected to lead a popular movement. She never left. An election she swept, but juntas tend to be suspicious of elections, and so they snatched the prize from her party and put her in jail.
An offer was made. She could leave to nurse her husband, a British national. But she wouldn’t be allowed to come back. She stayed. Her husband died. She never saw her sons grow up. Fifteen years of incarceration. Global adulation. The Nobel Prize for Peace as consolation prize. Then came the Rohingya crisis. Why didn’t she speak up for them ? Adulation became condemnation. Withdraw the prize, said her critics. Paint over the streets named in her honour.
She won the November 2020 election. The result: incarceration again. Perhaps her admirers turned critics can now begin to...
