The New York Times reports that the release of Aung San Suu Kyi “just five days after an election that recast the structure of military rule in Myanmar” — poured more cement into the foundation, that is — “suggested that the generals who rule the country were confident of their position and ready to face down the devotion she still commands both among her countrymen and among Western nations.”
By “face down the devotion,” doesn’t the Times staff means “yield to the devotion”? One of Burma’s ruling generals’ incentives for freeing Suu Kyi was to provide a key human rights indicator that the West could point to when making the case that the time has come to lift the embargo and sanctions on Burma before China corners the market all its resources.
Meanwhile, of Suu Kyi’s stated intention to return to the human-rights fray, the Times reports that she “will be re-entering a battleground more complicated and difficult than the one she had faced in the past.” For example, partly at Suu Kyi’s behest, her party, the National League for Democracy “declined to take part in the election, calling it unfair and undemocratic, and was required to formally disband. But Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi was assailed for that decision by party members who saw the vote, however flawed, as an opening. . . . ‘She’ll be facing a mountain of expectation and challenges,’ said Aung Zaw, editor of The Irrawaddy, a Thailand-based exile magazine.”
Besides the internal divisions in her party, Suu Kyi is also being asked to address the results of the election and the fate of other political prisoners who remain behind bars. Meanwhile, Burma’s festering wound, the junta’s oppression of the country’s ethnic minorities, has become inflamed “over the junta’s border guard force . . . plan aimed at assimilating all armed ethnic groups under its command.”
Suu Kyi’s freedom, the Times concludes “may be a burden as much as it is a liberation.” Let’s not make her feel like being sequestered in her house was so bad after all.