The Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi used to be regarded as a kind of secular saint. Leader of the largest democratic political party in the country, she won the 1990 general election by a landslide. Instead of assuming power, however, she was placed under house arrest by Myanmar’s military junta. She remained under confinement for some 15 years, denied the right to visit her British husband Michael Aris on his deathbed at the end of the decade. Aung San Suu Kyi thus became one of the heroes of our time and, like another comparable figure, Nelson Mandela, a member of the select pantheon of Nobel Peace Prize winners.
But now as the Myanmar army burns and pillages its way across Rohingya villages, Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence has led to widespread anger and condemnation. Nearly three-quarters of a million of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in a predominantly Buddhist land, have been forced from their homes, half of these in the last few weeks alone; some 3,000 of them have been killed while survivors seek refuge in neighboring Muslim Bangladesh. The army blames attacks by Rohingya militants for provoking this reprisal, but the vast and coordinated destruction is wildly disproportionate to the limited attacks by the insurgents that killed around a dozen Burmese security personnel in late August.
