Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi is regarded as one of the champions of civil rights globally and has been in a struggle against the Myanmar junta.
Myanmar state-run broadcaster on Tuesday said Myanmar civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been pardoned in five criminal cases. This does not mean he will be freed as she still faces 14 other cases but this means that her sentence in some cases will be reduced.
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For decades, Aung San Suu Kyi has been hailed as a civil rights champion as she spent decades in house arrest and prison under the junta rule in Myanmar. Suu Kyi had a troubled childhood as she lost her father at the age of two. Aung San died in 1947 and her mother Khin Kyi served as ambassador to India.
She studied in India and attended the University of Oxford where she met her husband Michael Aris and had two children. Until 1988, she lived a quiet life but when she returned to take care of her ailing mother, she did not go back seeing the atrocities committed by junta leader and military strongman U Ne Win.
She began her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights around the same time.
She has faced multiple house arrests since 1990 after founding the National League for Democracy (NLD). Her party won the election in 1990 but the army did not accept the results. She garnered international attention when she won the Nobel Prize in 1991. Her husband died in 1999 without getting to meet her as he was denied entry. Suu Kyi did not leave because she was confident that if she left Myanmar she would not be allowed to return.
The early 2000s saw Suu Kyi remaining under house arrest. Her sentence was renewed in 2009 which barred her from contesting the 2010 elections. She continued her opposition to military rule.
MORE FREEDOM
The new decade saw restrictions being eased and in 2012, Aung San Suu Kyi, won a seat in the elections. She was also allowed to travel abroad where she met world leaders like Barack Obama and addressed the British Parliament.
However, she could not become the president as she could not run for the post due to her marriage to Michael Aris. The constitutional provision banning a candidate from running for the presidency whose spouse or children are foreign nationals prevented her from becoming the president.
Despite the roadblocks, the NLD won the elections in 2015. The elections would be Myanmar’s first openly contested parliamentary elections. Suu Kyi ruled by proxy as Htin Kyaw was elected president in 2016.
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STATE COUNSELOR
Trouble started brewing once more between the military and the NLD after the party decided to create a new position – the state counsellor – which was more powerful than the president and akin to the prime minister and put Suu Kyi in that role in 2016.
The military and the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) decried the move.
Her international reputation also took a severe hit as she defended the army and the Rohingya genocide in 2018. Some of her awards and honours were also revoked.
However, at home in Myanmar, Suu Kyi and her NLD enjoyed significant support. In 2020, the NLD was on its way to a major electoral victory but there were accusations that elections were not held properly and were also cancelled in some sections of the country because of insecurity, which left ethnic communities disenfranchised.
The military claimed election fraud and declared a state of emergency on February 1, 2021, the day the new parliament would hold its first session and sent Aung San Suu Kyi to prison.
She was charged for being in possession of walkie-talkies which were illegally imported, for interacting with crowds amid the Covid pandemic and for other acts of civil disobedience.
(with inputs from Britannica, Associated Press and AFP)
