Aung San Suu Kyi | A symbol of resistance
When Thailand’s Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow met Myanmar’s newly designated President Min Aung Hlaing in April 2026, he was told that the regime in Naypyitaw
When Thailand’s Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow met Myanmar’s newly designated President Min Aung Hlaing in April 2026, he was told that the regime in Naypyitaw was “considering good things” for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. This was the same general who, as chief of the dreaded junta, had deposed the country’s civilian government yet again in 2021, plunging Myanmar into a protracted civil war before refashioning himself into a “civilian” leader. Suu Kyi — the former State Counsellor and the symbolic head of the pro-democracy movement — had meanwhile been jailed in a high-security prison in the capital, Naypyitaw, after a sentence of close to three decades was handed to her in a farcical trial that followed the coup. The junta sought to legitimise its rule through a stage-managed election, which was held with a low-turnout vote, largely in areas the military controlled, and handed victory to its proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party. After the “victory”, it reduced Suu Kyi’s sentence several times. Yet when ASEAN asked for access to her, it refused outright. The 81-year-old is understood to have been moved to “house arrest” somewhere within Naypyitaw, though very few even among the junta know her whereabouts. This led to a “proof of life” campaign online demanding details of her detention. Ms. Suu Kyi’s limbo is symbolic of the state of the pro-democracy movement, which still regards her as its icon, even in an ethnically fractured country that has been at war with itself since the coup. Suu Kyi, President Win Myint, released only recently, and other leaders of the League for Democracy (NLD) were arrested in 2021, months after the party’s landslide victory in the 2020 elections. But the movement did not collapse with them. Ousted parliamentarians and party figures regrouped to form a government in exile, the Unity Government (NUG), which took up armed resistance against the junta by raising People’s Defence Forces in the Bamar-majority heartland and fighting alongside ethnic armed organisations that had renewed their own wars against the military.
Today, more than five years on, the civil war has claimed more than a lakh lives. While the junta has regained the initiative after heavy setbacks, the resistance remains formidable. Hard-won authority Suu Kyi’s authority as the symbol of the pro-democracy movement was hard-won, even if it was later tarnished by the stances she took as State Counsellor. The daughter of the independence hero Aung San, assassinated when she was two, she was educated in New Delhi and later at Oxford. She married a British academic and raised two sons abroad before returning in 1988 to a Burma going through a revolt against military rule. She soon led that uprising in a role that would cost her nearly 15 years of house arrest across two decades, and make her an international cause célèbre. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while confined. Her release in 2010 came only after the dictator Than Shwe staged a controlled election and began cautiously opening the country to Western investment and legitimacy. The NLD swept by-elections in 2012 and then won a genuine landslide in 2015. The military, forever wary of her clout and her intent to widen the democratic space, had sought to keep her from the presidency through a clause in the 2008 constitution barring anyone with foreign-national children. But she outwitted the generals by getting the NLD to use its parliamentary majority to legislate a new office, the State Counsellor, placed above the president and serving as effective chief executive. Working pragmatically within a parliament where the military still held a quarter of the seats, Ms. Suu Kyi contained the generals politically but her accommodation of them carried a heavy cost. When the military, then commanded by Min Aung Hlaing, led a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya in Rakhine State in 2017, leading to an exodus of more than 7,00,000 and killing thousands, she did not condemn it.
The BriefWire