During her fifteen years under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi—now the
de-facto leader of Myanmar—found solace in the poetry and novels of
authors such as George Eliot, Victor Hugo, John le Carré, and Anna
Akhmatova. Another favorite, she has
said,
was Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” an epic travelogue
about Yugoslavia written on the eve of the Second World War. West described a
country that Aung San Suu Kyi would have recognized as being much like her own: a
fragile mosaic of ethnicities, languages, historical backgrounds, and
cultural traditions.

In a short essay called “Let’s Visit Burma,” published in 1985, Aung San Suu Kyi
described the “colourful and diverse origins and customs” of her
compatriots. Rakhine state, in the west of Myanmar, was something of a
“mystery” in this respect, she wrote. Its population had originated from
“Mongolian and Aryan peoples who had come over from India.” Owing to its
geographical position, Bengal had also “played a major part” in its
history and culture. Among the state’s numerous ethnic groups
—Arakanese, Thek, Dainet, Myo, Mramagyi, and Kaman—others displayed “the
influence of Bengali.” But she assured readers that while there are
“more people of the Islamic faith to be found in [Rakhine] than
anywhere else in Burma,” it had been “predominately Buddhist” for
centuries.

By groups that “displayed the influence of Bengali,” Aung San Suu Kyi certainly
meant the Rohingya, a stateless minority in northern Rakhine that most
Myanmar people consider to be Bangladeshi immigrants. Since August 25th,
when militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked police
posts and an Army base, as many as a thousand Rohingya have been
killed and over three hundred and seventy thousand (more than third of
the Rohingya population) have been forced into neighboring Bangladesh,
human-rights groups estimate. Aung San Suu Kyi’s champions are now contemplating
her fall from grace, appalled that the Nobel Peace Prize winner remains
silent about and unmoved by a crisis described this week by the U.N.’s
human-rights chief as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” There
have been widespread
calls for the Nobel Committee to strip her of the prize. But there is no
statutory procedure for doing so, nor is it clear how this would end the
murder, rape, and mass exodus of the Rohingya at the hands of Myanmar’s
Army.

The most urgent and powerful appeals to Aung San Suu Kyi have come from her
fellow Nobel laureates. The Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, who won
the prize for her advocacy of girls’ education, condemned the “tragic
and shameful treatment” of the Rohingya. “I am still waiting for my
fellow Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do the same.” Addressing a
letter to his “dear sister,” the anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu
wrote of his “profound sadness” and called on Aung San Suu Kyi to end the
military-led operations. “If the political price of your ascension to
the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too
steep,” he wrote. The Dalai Lama subsequently urged her to find a
peaceful solution to the humanitarian crisis, saying that Buddha would
have “definitely helped those poor Muslims.”

This is not the first time that laureates have spoken of their
displeasure with Aung San Suu Kyi. In December last year, when the military
conducted another brutal offensive against the Rohingya, thirteen Nobel
winners, including Muhammad Yunus, Shirin Ebadi, and Leymah Gbowee,
signed an open letter deploring the Army’s use of helicopter gunships,
arbitrary arrests, and the rape of women. “Despite repeated appeals to
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” they concluded, using her honorific, “we are
frustrated that she has not taken any initiative to ensure full and
equal citizenship rights of the Rohingyas. Daw Suu Kyi is the leader and
is the one with primary responsibility to lead, and lead with courage,
humanity and compassion.”

When Aung San Suu Kyi accepted her own prize, in Oslo, in June, 2012, she said
that, under house arrest, “it felt as though I were no longer a part of
the real world. . . . What the Nobel Peace Prize did was to draw me once
again into the world of other human beings outside the isolated area in
which I lived, to restore a sense of reality to me. . . . I began to
understand the significance of the Nobel Prize.” Since becoming State
Counsellor, in 2016, however, she has retreated into the solitude of her
former life. Her husband, Michael Aris, died, of cancer, in 1999—she was
prevented by the military regime from saying goodbye to him—and she
rarely
sees her sons. People close to her describe a life of morbid
isolation,
living alone in the administrative capital, Naypyidaw—arguably the
dreariest city on earth—poring over state documents late into the
night. She rarely gives interviews, and is reluctant to delegate
responsibilities. (There is no obvious successor to lead her party when
she’s gone.)

There’s no evidence that the laureates’ chorus of indignation has any
bearing on Aung San Suu Kyi, or whether its declarations can break the spell of
isolation and bring her back to the outside world. The only response she
has made to the present crisis in Rakhine was a Facebook post, detailing
a phone conversation she had with Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan. In it, she criticized the “huge iceberg of misinformation
calculated to create a lot of problems between different communities and
with the aim of promoting the interest of the terrorists.” While Aung San Suu Kyi
has remained silent, the offices and ministries under her charge have
not, describing the Rohingya as Bengalis and publicly advocating the use
of force in certain situations. “If they are going to harm you, you can
shoot them,” Aung San Suu Kyi’s spokesman, U Zaw Htay, said. The most egregious case of the
recklessness of Aung San Suu Kyi’s government came last month, when it accused
international aid workers of supporting terrorists, prompting fears for
the safety of thousands of people in Myanmar employed by charities and
N.G.O.s. There have been demands that the U.S. government stop using the
name “Rohingya”, and when a Rohingya woman gave details of an alleged
gang rape, Aung San Suu Kyi’s office dismissed it as “fake rape.”

Aung San Suu Kyi’s biographer, Peter Popham, writes in “The Lady and the Generals: Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle for Democracy” that she
“has become an object lesson in the slipperiness of the concept of
heroism, and the folly of hero-worship.” Indeed, the tenor of the
denunciations suggests that Aung San Suu Kyi’s critics are angered as much by a
sense of personal betrayal as they are by her silence. She has exposed
the artlessness with which many in the West reduced a complex
personality into a Rapunzel of the East, emptied of her more illiberal
traits, such as an authoritarian leadership style, and some potentially
unsavory views on Muslims. The BBC correspondent, Fergal Keane, who
probably knows Aung San Suu Kyi better than any other foreign journalist, has
admitted that “we knew too little of Myanmar and its complex narratives
of ethnic rivalries. . . . And we knew too little of Aung San Suu Kyi
herself.” In a rare interview with Keane in April, she denied that ethnic
cleansing was taking place in Rakhine, and resisted the cruder
perceptions of her persona: “I am just a politician. I am not quite like
Margaret Thatcher, no. But, on the other hand, I am no Mother Teresa,
either.”

Unlike Thatcher, a consummate political operator, many have commented
upon Aung San Suu Kyi’s weakness as a politician. Her failure to act against the
military operation in Rakhine, so the argument goes, is not a result of
her bigotry but because she is unable to outmaneuver the generals in
Myanmar’s very own game of thrones.

Few can blame Aung San Suu Kyi for her political impotence. The constitutional
arrangements of Myanmar would foil the shrewdest operative. Designed by
the military, in 2008, the constitution gives the armed forces control of
three ministries—the interior, borders, and defense—that are beyond the
oversight of the civilian government. It bars Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming
President, and allows the Army to veto any attempt at constitutional
reform. The irony, then, is that if Aung San Suu Kyi once represented the power
of the powerless, she is now powerless in power, taking the flak for the
Army’s unrelenting inhumanity in its fight against ethnic rebels on the
borderlands, and the Rohingya.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s powerlessness hardly matters on this issue, anyway: hatred of
the Rohingya is one thing that unites
Myanmar. Despite their political differences, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National
League for Democracy, and the military are in lockstep when it comes to
the problem of northern Rakhine. Years of xenophobic, anti-Rohingya
propaganda, pushed from the late nineteen-seventies by the military
government, endures in the nation’s collective memory, and is
stoked by the hate sermons of Buddhist monks like Ashin Wirathu. By
speaking up for the Rohingya, Aung San Suu Kyi imperils her standing in the eyes
of her fellow-citizens.

When she was thrust into the public eye, in 1988, it was her lineage,
rather than her politics, that was the driving force. As the daughter of
General Aung San, the nationally revered founder of modern Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi was at the mercy of activists who recognized the dynastic force that
her name, and looks (she is the spitting image of her father), lent to
their struggle against the generals. Responsible for negotiating Burma’s
independence from the British Empire, Aung San was assassinated by
paramilitary forces of the former Prime Minister U Saw, in 1947, six
months before its official declaration. Aung San Suu Kyi was just two years old
at the time, but there’s no doubting her love and admiration for him. In
a 2013 radio interview with the BBC, she described her father as “my
first love and my best love.” This filial piety is perhaps the key to
understanding Aung San Suu Kyi as saint and sinner.

Her father was an extraordinarily tenacious, even ruthless, man who
navigated between the British and Japanese empires in order to achieve
his objective—a unified, independent Burma. He was also a Burmese
nationalist who cared little for the nation’s ethnic minorities. Today
he is universally venerated in Myanmar, while few outside the country
know who he is. This has almost certainly influenced Aung San Suu Kyi, who mimics
his leadership style, moral code, and political priorities. The Rohingya
are a distraction from her overriding ambition: to complete her father’s
dream of unifying the country and ending a civil war that has raged
between ethnic rebel forces and the Myanmar government since 1948. As
Rebecca West wrote in “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” in a passage that
Aung San Suu Kyi likely associated with her father when reading the book under
house arrest, “it is the habit of the people, whenever an old man
mismanages his business so that it falls to pieces as soon as he dies,
to say, ‘Ah, So-and-so was a marvel! He kept things together so long as
he was alive, and look what happens now he has gone!’ ”