Aung San's Fall From Grace

Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the coveted Nobel Peace Prize, knows too well what it is like to be persecuted. So why is the political leader of Myanmar allowing hundreds of thousands of Rohingyan Muslims to be driven from their country in what the UN describes as “ethnic cleansing”? William Langley investigates.

During her long, hard 15 years under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi lived alone in a decaying lakeside villa, denied news, medicine, even contact with her children, but sustained by an outside world that revered her as a heroine. Worthy Western institutions showered her with awards and honours, and right-thinking celebrities from George Clooney to Yoko Ono joined the rolling campaign for her release. Suu Kyi’s remarkable one-woman battle to bring democracy to her native Myanmar (formerly Burma), became a global cause célèbre, and when, barely two years ago, she became the country’s first civilian leader in decades, millions rejoiced.

But today, 72-year-old Suu Kyi is an international pariah, her saintly reputation shattered. The same organisations that handed her prizes are scrambling to disassociate themselves from her, and her Hollywood fan club has retreated into embarrassed silence. Her old Oxford college, St Hugh’s, has taken her portrait down, and The Nobel Peace Prize committee, which gave her its award in 1991, is under pressure to rescind the honour.

At the core of Suu Kyi’s fall from grace is an unfolding human disaster in the west of the country, where hundreds of thousands of Muslims, a religious minority known as the Rohingya, have been driven from their homes in a wave of military operations characterised by the United Nations as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Witnesses have described mass shootings, rapes and burnings, and the exodus has created a vast refugee crisis in neighbouring Bangladesh.

To the dismay of her former admirers, Suu Kyi has refused not only to intervene, but even to criticise the military’s onslaught. In the few – mostly prickly and defensive – statements she has made, she has dismissed the allegations of atrocities as exaggerations, and claimed that the actions are needed to curb terrorism.