Undaunted: Suu Kyi, Mandela, De Lima
The unfolding crisis in Myanmar is a political tragedy wrapped in horror inside a heartbreaking morality tale. As prominent historian Thant Myint-U lamented, “The doors just opened to a very different future,” and that he has “a sinking feeling that no one will really be able to control what comes next.”
Myanmar’s tragedy is like a mirror that reflects all that has gone wrong with the world. The tragic tale of Aung San Suu Kyi, who went from a global democratic icon to a pariah and now once again a detainee, holds eternal lessons about the importance of political conviction.
Sen. Leila de Lima’s struggle comes to mind. Four years of detention and a thousand calumnies have only strengthened De Lima’s steely resolve. In the broad sweep of history, her current political isolation may only represent a blip in time, for political fortunes tend to be capricious. But few will forget those who remain undaunted in their quest for freedom.
The brazen coup against a democratically elected government shows how easily despots and crooks can take full advantage of an existential crisis. From El Salvador’s “millennial dictator” Nayib Bukele to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, populists are unabashedly using emergency measures to consolidate personal power in the name of fighting a pandemic.
The Myanmar coup also revealed the true nature of the country’s much-vaunted political reforms in the past decade. Myanmar’s junta was never interested in true “democratization,” but only in largely cosmetic political “liberalization” aimed at ending the country’s geopolitical isolation. The humiliating defeat of the junta’s proxies in last year’s elections at the hands of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, coupled with Gen. Min Aung Hlaing’s presidential ambitions and post-retirement paranoia, showed the limits of the decade-long “discipline-flourishing democracy” experiment.
But unlike in the past, Suu Kyi’s tragic fall from power, as she faces years-long detention on spurious charges, seemingly hasn’t gained much global sympathy this time. The world aches for the people of Myanmar, yet many can’t shake off their bitter disappointment at the moral betrayal displayed by Suu Kyi with her defense and obfuscation, even before the International Court of Justice, of the junta’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingya minority.
While much of the world saw unquestionable mass atrocities, she tried to downplay “[t]he situation in Rakhine” as “complex and not easy to fathom.” Throughout many interviews and international gatherings, she deployed such language when asked about the systematic violence inflicted on a minority group in her country.
To be fair, this may have helped her prevent a direct conflict with the junta. But for many, this was also a cynical form of populism amid the rise of ethnonationalism in Myanmar.
Her tragedy echoes the lives of countless enablers, the once-progressives who chose to join the bandwagon of authoritarian populism in the Philippines and other troubled democracies in the name of political pragmatism.
Suu Kyi managed to secure a landslide election victory in 2020, just to lose it all in an overnight coup. Her story shows that not only history, but also politics will be unkind to those who are willing to bend their convictions for the sake of expediency. It also shows that she was no Asian Mandela.
Nelson Mandela, the political conscience of the 20th century, was imprisoned for 27 years. Long incarcerated in a concrete cell on Robben Island, he “could walk the length of my cell in three paces,” he recounted. And “When I lay down, I could feel the wall with my feet and my head grazed the concrete at the other side.”
That “cramped space,” the width of which was hardly six feet for the tall Mandela, would serve as his “home for I knew not how long.” And yet, he remained undaunted and held on to his convictions. By the time he made his famous “walk to freedom,” he was a man of 72 years, but few doubted the mettle of his leadership.
Over the next decade, Mandela would not only oversee the overthrow of a once formidable apartheid regime, but also the democratic transformation of his country. De Lima, and many others like her incarcerated for their convictions, have in Mandela—not Suu Kyi—the right role model to draw inspiration from.
