Sentenced to four years for inciting the revolt and violating the norms against the coronavirus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner is facing nine more charges that could deprive her of liberty for the rest of her days
The first conviction of many expected for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese leader deposed in the military coup in February. Under house arrest since then, she has been sentenced to four years in jail for inciting revolt and violating regulations against the coronavirus pandemic. They are only two of the eleven charges that weigh on her, which add up to several decades in prison and, at 76 years old, could deprive her of freedom for the rest of her days. Among them are corruption, electoral fraud, violation of official secrets and even illegal importation of ‘walkie-talkies’. Everything that has occurred to the coup military junta to withdraw it from circulation so that it cannot oppose its plans to reinstate the dictatorship in Myanmar, the official name of the former Burma.
Along with her, the former president of the country, Win Myint, who was her ally in the National League for Democracy (NLD), has been sentenced to the same sentence. This party swept last year’s elections, the second that were held freely after 2015, and seemed to have consolidated the transition to democracy after six decades of dictatorship. Furious at its humiliating defeat, the Army staged a coup in February alleging electoral fraud that was not seen by the Burmese who voted en masse for the NLD, nor by the international observers who certified the cleanliness of the elections.
Although journalists cannot access the trials against them and their lawyers are prohibited from speaking, the Burmese government-in-exile has already reported that Aung San Suu Kyi and Win Myint deny all the allegations. “She is fine, but the generals are preparing prison terms totaling 104 years. They want me to die in prison, “Dr. Sasa, one of the leaders of the Government of National Unity, who is trying to restore democracy to Burma from exile, told the BBC.
But it will be difficult, if not impossible, because the military is repressing with blood and fire the protests against the coup, which have already left more than 1,300 dead and 10,600 arrested. On Sunday, the soldiers rammed a vehicle into the crowd peacefully demonstrating for democracy in Yangon (formerly Rangoon). “The harsh sentences against Aung San Suu Kyi for these false accusations are the latest example of the Army’s determination to eliminate all opposition and drown those released in Myanmar,” Amnesty International criticized. In his view, “the court’s absurd and corrupt decision is part of a devastating pattern of arbitrary punishment that has seen more than 1,300 dead and thousands arrested since the February coup.”
Resentful image
Born in 1945 into the elite of Rangoon, Burma’s former strong woman is the daughter of General Aung San, an independence hero assassinated when she was just two years old. Educated in the best schools and in Oxford, she worked at the UN, where she met her husband, the British professor Michael Aris, with whom she had two children. Returning to Burma to visit his sick mother in 1988, in the midst of a revolt against the dictator Ne Win, he took over from the democratic movement and won the 1990 elections, which were annulled by the military junta.
The Lady, as she is popularly known among Burmese people, spent a decade and a half under house arrest that separated her from her children and prevented her from saying goodbye to her husband before he died of cancer in 1999. For all these sacrifices she made in Her fight for democracy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. But she did not hesitate to embrace pragmatism and renounce her principles when her party won the 2015 elections and seized power in Burma. This was made clear to him in an interview as soon as he was released in 2010, when he advocated good relations with China and recognized that economic interests were above political ones.
In recent years, and despite continuing to enjoy majority support in his country, his image has suffered abroad for his criticism of Muslims, hated without dissimulation in Buddhist Burma. In December 2019, and without having to do so, he went to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to deny the persecution of the Rohingya, which the UN has described as “ethnic cleansing.” Icon of the fight for freedom and later an accessory to genocide, Aung San Suu Kyi once again becomes a martyr for democracy.
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