The international community is shamed by its silence over Aung San Suu Kyi

Before she was deposed and imprisoned by military generals, the twice-elected leader of Myanmar made tragic errors of judgement in office, and has been abandoned to her fate. But if you are a democrat, whether you approve of her record in government or not, you should demand her release, says Benedict Rogers

Myanmar’s democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, will turn 80 next summer amid growing concerns about her deteriorating health.

Unless there is a significant political change in her country, she looks set to spend yet another birthday in solitary confinement, in one of the ruling military junta’s jails, separated from family, friends and colleagues and denied adequate medical care. She is serving multiple sentences totalling 27 years imprisonment. If she is not released soon, she will die in prison.

Almost a decade after she appeared to have ended more than half a century of brutal military dictatorship – for 15 years of which she was held under house arrest – and begun a fragile but hopeful transition to civilian-led democratic governance, Myanmar’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate is once again held captive by the generals.

Ever since the commander-in-chief of Myanmar’s armed forces, General Min Aung Hlaing, launched a coup against Suu Kyi’s re-elected government in February 2021, Myanmar’s nightmare of repression, war, economic collapse and humanitarian crisis has plunged to new depths of darkness.

In Myanmar today, more than 20,000 political prisoners are in jail, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP). The military has killed more than 5,800 people – and the real death toll is likely to be much higher.

At least 3.4 million people have been displaced by civil war in the country, 40 per cent of whom are children, according to the UN.

In addition to a campaign of airstrikes against civilians, the military’s weapons of choice are the bombing of homes, schools, hospitals and churches, beheadings, torture and gang rape. The UN special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, Thomas Andrews, reports: “Victims have been tortured, raped and beheaded, and their bodies burned.”

On one level, therefore, Suu Kyi is one of many victims of the junta in Myanmar. But – as an Independent documentary, Cancelled: The Rise and Fall of Aung San Suu Kyi, lays bare – she is also a symbol of hopes raised and then dashed.

Following the overwhelming election victory in 2015 for her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), which led to her heading a power-sharing government with the military for five years, she won re-election in 2020 with an enormous mandate. At the conclusion of 2024, we should be approaching the end of her second term of government, but instead she faces her fifth year in jail.

For all her years in opposition, Suu Kyi made extraordinary sacrifices and inspired her people – and the world – by her example.

In her five years in government, faced with the tough choices anyone governing faces and especially constrained by the fact that the military continued to hold the real power, she made mistakes. She was navigating a painful tightrope, and she did not always get it right. Her decision to go to The Hague to defend the military in the face of charges of genocide against the Rohingyas was heartbreaking to watch. Her public rejection of allegations of atrocity crimes was a tragic error of judgment.

But did she fall as far as her critics suggested from saint to sinner? I would argue no.

Firstly, she was never a saint. Like all of us, she has her strengths, and her fallibilities. She is a human being, and always rejected idolisation. It was our mistake to put her on a pedestal which she never wanted, and our mistake to sweep her off it far too swiftly.

It was the great Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn who once said: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.” She did not get everything right – but she showed extraordinary courage.

Yet the key point is this: whether you love her or loathe her, agree with her or not, in 2020 she won a democratic mandate in a far from perfect but nonetheless legitimate election, for a second term. Three months later, that was swept away, not by ballots but by bullets. And if you are a democrat, whether you approve of her record in government or not, on that basis alone you should demand Suu Kyi’s release from prison.

Since the coup, the international community has gone a little quiet over Suu Kyi – perhaps because it is uncomfortable with the compromises she made when she was in government. That is somewhat understandable – although, let us not forget, that when the atrocities against the Rohingyas first broke out in 2016, she rapidly invited former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan to establish an independent commission to provide recommendations on ways forward. That commission was not perfect, but its establishment showed a desire to address the crisis and its recommendations offered a starting point for peace, although they were immediately halted by the escalation in the crisis.

The statement from three former foreign secretaries calling for Suu Kyi’s release is very welcome. The release of The Independent’s powerful documentary, which features her courageous son Kim, friends of mine such as Helena Kennedy KC, former foreign secretary Lord Hague and Suu Kyi’s biographer Peter Popham, and myself, is to be shared widely and heralded. And all of us should step up our efforts to fight for her release and the freedom of her country.

It is appropriate that the documentary is titled Cancelled. In liberal democracies, the phenomenon of “cancel culture” today means the deplatforming and vilification of someone whose views a particular crowd dislike. It is unpleasant, but not necessarily fatal. In autocracies such as Myanmar today, ruled by an illegal, criminal junta that overthrew a democratically elected government and seized power in a coup, “cancelled” means potentially a lifetime – and a death – in prison, with the world averting its eyes. We must not let that happen. We must help free Aung San Suu Kyi and her country.

Benedict Rogers is a human rights activist and writer, and author of three books on Myanmar, including ‘Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads’ and a new book, with a chapter on Myanmar, titled ‘The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny’