Free Aung San Suu Kyi – and let her finish what she started

There is a simple question to be answered about the world’s most famous female political prisoner, fallen human rights idol and former leader of Myanmar: should Aung San Suu Kyi be in prison?

The answer to that, on a variety of grounds, is emphatically in the negative.

The charges against her are as fabricated as they were when she was forced to spend nearly 15 years under house arrest. The conditions she is held in would be inhumane even for a younger, fitter person and her sentence of 27 years imprisonment is grotesquely long.

Some will have little pity for her, given she failed to prevent and to call out the mass murder of innocent Rohingya people, a Muslim minority whose survivors were driven from their homes into exile in Bangladesh.

An Independent TV documentary published today, entitled Cancelled: The Rise and Fall of Aung San Suu Kyi, lays bare her fall from grace. She is no longer the heroic figure she was in the long years of persecution and house arrest, when she sacrificed her own freedom to campaign for democracy in her homeland.

She could easily have lived out a life of relative ease in, say, Oxford, where she was educated, an obvious refugee from a regime that had murdered her father, briefly the first ruler of newly independent Burma in 1947. She did not take the easy path, and in due course, she was to find herself taking a leadership role within a government where the ever-powerful generals still exerted considerable power.

Unforgivably, in the eyes of many human rights campaigners, she made too many compromises with the hard men of the military and made a serious misstep at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, trying to play down charges of genocide levelled at the regime she was a part of. But anyone forced to work with a military junta with no moral compass is not under any normal circumstances for decision-making as she tried to keep the democratic flame alive against an existing tyranny.

Much good it did her, however, as she is now, aged 79 and in frail health in a miserable prison cell, an increasingly forgotten and even despised figure among those who once venerated her. She is no longer a fashionable cause.

She is, though, the same person, with the same beliefs, and in any case, she is not serving time for her role in the governance of Myanmar in the period from 2015 to 2021 when the Myanmar authorities launched their reign of terror on the Rohingya. She should indeed be accountable for her actions as “state counsellor”, in effect president, during that terrible era. She has vital questions to answer, actions to attempt to justify, actions and failures to explain and apologise for, and, as appropriate, suffer the consequences.

Like anyone else, including many who have faced international justice on charges of crimes against humanity, she should face the lawyers and allow justice to take its course. She can make the case, familiar to many trying to pioneer democracy in an inhospitable and unpromising environment, that resigning and speaking out rather than working from within would have made zero difference to the military junta, and might conceivably have made matters worse if what modest influence of mercy and restraint she could exert was entirely removed. Hers was an impossible dilemma.

Her current imprisonment in what are reportedly dangerous surroundings and solitary confinement cannot be regarded as some sort of proxy for a proper course of accountability and justice. No prisoner should be incarcerated in this way, guilty or innocent, because it is plainly a violation of their human rights, which are universal. Ms Suu Kyi should actually be part of a wider process of truth and reconciliation.

Indeed, if it is the democratic wish of the people of Myanmar, she should be able to lead them once again to freedom, provided she has the physical strength to do so. The former foreign secretary, William Hague, summarises the reality of the situation well: “I think it’s possible to be critical of her, but also say we should be campaigning for her release. She is not a non-person. We might suspend judgement on our view of her in history, but nevertheless this is a person utterly unjustly treated by a military dictatorship. And so we should not forget her.”

That is certainly true, but the point is also that the world should not forget about the hermit kingdom of Myanmar, a place left behind by progress and modern norms of democratic governance. As a charismatic personality carrying a famous name and a global profile, Aung San Suu Kyi could still be the person that her people would freely choose to bring their country together, and that includes ending the persecution of the Rohingya and providing them with some form of restitution and a better, more secure future in their own country.