Aung San Suu Kyi

The 2021 coup returned Myanmar to military rule and shattered hopes for democratic progress in a Southeast Asian country beset by decades of conflict and repressive regimes.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority group, have fled persecution in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, fueling a historic migration crisis.

In by-elections held in Myanmar over last weekend, Aung San Suu Kyi's ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) (at least, ruling the civilian portion of the government), won seven of the thirteen seats up for grabs, losing several seats that had been held by NLD politicians. The NLD did take most of the seats contested in central Myanmar, an area dominated by ethnic Burmans. Taking just more than half the seats open in the by-election was a significant drop from the 2015 national elections, when the NLD won about 85 percent of the seats in the lower house of the Myanmar parliament. The shift signifies several potential trends, which will be watched closely in the run-up to the 2020 Myanmar national elections. For one, popular sentiment may be moving against the NLD overall. The government has done little to improve the Myanmar economy, offering relatively incoherent economic plans and presiding over continuing severe inequality. Suu Kyi's popular image has been dented international by the massive rights abuses in Rakhine State, and her willingness to stand up for the Myanmar army, although it is unclear whether those actions would have hurt her with ethnic Burman voters. Still, these actions make her seem indecisive and ineffective, damaging her political brand. Voter turnout was low in several of the by-elections, possibly suggesting overall dissatisfaction with the government and the NLD for failing to right the economy, improve the rule of law, and make good on promised peace deals, among other challenges. Worse for the NLD, the seats lost were mostly in ethnic minority areas, where popular sentiment appears to be swinging hard against Suu Kyi and her party. That many ethnic minority voters would be souring on the NLD is not surprising. Under the Suu Kyi government, the military has actually expanded its battles against many ethnic minority insurgent groups, and peace deals that would affect ethnic minority areas in the north and northeast have gained little traction. Ethnic parties are combining forces, and may continue to do so in the 2020 elections, making the NLD's road to a lower house majority harder. The NLD has time to revive its declining fortunes, and Suu Kyi remains the central figure in Myanmar civilian politics. But these trends are potentially ominous for the NLD for the 2020 election. According to AFP, “political analyst Maung Maung Soe told AFP that the low voter turnout in most of these constituencies hurt the NLD's showing, and voter apathy could really impact them in the next election in 2020—adding that in comparison, the military-aligned USDP has unwavering support.” This is an astute observation. A significant increase in voter apathy could pave the way for the military's favored party, itself bolstered by the popularity, among Burmans, of the military's brutal actions in Rakhine, to make major gains in 2020.

Since late August, when attacks by Rohingya insurgents on police posts in Myanmar led to a massive reprisal by the army and other security forces in Rakhine State, the country has witnessed some of its worst violence in years. The armed forces, and apparently local vigilantes, have driven over 400,000 Rohingya out of Rakhine just since August. The plight of the Rohingya has captured significant international attention. It has been covered in major news outlets and at the top of the agenda at the United Nations, but the discussion has focused on Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto head of government—and not on the top generals. Suu Kyi has come in for withering criticism (including from me here) from other Nobel laureates, rights groups, and foreign officials for downplaying the crisis in Rakhine State. Suu Kyi is hardly without blame, but not nearly enough focus has been placed on the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. To read more on Min Aung Hlaing and his role, see my new article in The National.

Despite Myanmar’s recent transition to civilian leadership, the military has retained significant power and is most to blame for the sectarian violence against the Rohingya.

In a major address to the Myanmar public, and the international community today, Aung San Suu Kyi gave her first significant speech about the ongoing crisis in Rakhine State. This crisis has now become probably the worst humanitarian catastrophe in East Asia. Reports suggest that people have been fleeing Rakhine State at a faster rate than in any refugee exodus since 1971. Over 400,000 people have fled Rakhine State into Bangladesh in recent weeks. The UN has referred to the crisis as ethnic cleansing, and there seems to be no letup in the Myanmar military’s offensive in Rakhine State. Although President Trump did not mention the Rohingya in his address at the United Nations, Secretary of State Tillerson called Suu Kyi about the crisis. Other countries that historically have been strong backers of Suu Kyi, including Britain and Sweden, have expressed growing concern, and called private UN sessions about the crisis. Suu Kyi decided not to come to this week’s United Nations General Assembly, and instead gave a major speech in Naypyidaw about the crisis. The speech confirmed much of what has already become evident about her approach to Rakhine State. That approach, reflected in this speech, is one in which she downplays the crisis, focuses instead on her other domestic priorities, refuses to recognize the Rohingya as citizens of Myanmar, plays to overall public opinion in Myanmar, and mostly defers to the military. Suu Kyi sees her major priorities as addressing insurgencies in the north and northeast of the country, as I mentioned in a recent Washington Post article; she views the Rakhine crisis, however horrific, as just one among many challenges in border lands. The speech reflected these priorities. She, like many ethnic Burmans, seems to view the Rohingya as outsiders—she referred in the speech to “Muslims” in Rakhine State but did not refer to them as Rohingya. She also seems to understand the political calculus in Myanmar; most of the population, as well as the army commanders, probably are supportive of the army’s scorched earth approach to Rakhine State—or at least do not mind it. Crowds rallied in central Myanmar to hear and cheer Suu Kyi’s speech; the domestic context of how her approach to Rakhine is viewed is vastly different from the international context. Although Suu Kyi did indeed intend the speech for international audiences, and spoke in English, she only generally condemned all rights violations. She suggested that Naypyidaw did not understand the causes of the refugee outflow, basically pardoning the military for atrocities that are largely to blame for the exodus. She also seemed to suggest that the situation on the ground in Rakhine was becoming more peaceful and that many Rohingya were not fleeing—a dubious claim—and this might be because the situation in Rakhine is not as dire as the world believes. There is little evidence to support the idea that the armed forces are creating peace in Rakhine. She further added that Myanmar did not fear investigations into the crisis, even though journalists and aid workers have largely been kept out of northern Rakhine. There is political calculus by Suu Kyi in this speech. The military commander-in-chief dominates security policy, and she may feel she can little sway what the armed forces do in Rakhine anyway. Most of the Myanmar population probably is uninterested in Rakhine State—at best. But the speech was still even less than Suu Kyi perhaps could have said to an international audience, and it understates her own influence both domestically and internationally. Though the military has control of security policy, Suu Kyi’s immense popularity at home means that she could use the bully pulpit to change minds and indirectly influence the armed forces—and demonstrate that the civilian government is not totally prostrate to the army. She did not try to do any of those things today.

Myanmar is essentially run by one of the world’s most lauded humanitarians. Yet since her party took power last year, Aung San Suu Kyi—the country’s de facto leader, though not its official president—has stood by and watched the slaughter and flight of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya. In a speech earlier today in Myanmar, Suu Kyi again mostly ignored the plight of the Rohingya. For more on why Suu Kyi has shied away from confronting the issue, see my Washington Post Outlook article.

As the Myanmar military attacks the Rohingya minority, the country's female leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has done little to stop the violence. The harsh lesson from it all: women leaders do not always promote peace.

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Robert Kagan suggested that, in this period of uncertain governance by the White House, Congress should take a much more forceful approach to governing, as it did in the 1860s and, to some extent, in the 1920s. He noted that Congress already has defied the president on Russia policy and, to some extent, on health care, and he outlined ways in which Congress could become the central policymaker in Washington. Among others, Kagan suggested that: “on matters where [Republicans and Democrats] both see a threat to the nation’s interests … Congress can wield the power of the purse … [like] a joint national security committee headed by the chairs and ranking members of the foreign relations, armed services, and intelligence committees, for instance.” It seems hard to believe that the current Congress, split among GOP factions, with little experience legislating, and unsure how to approach a president who enjoys high popularity with the GOP base, will take on broad governing powers the way Kagan suggests. What’s more, congresspeople in both parties have, over the past twenty years, gotten used to an increasingly so-called “imperial presidency,” in which so much of the policymaking process is driven by the executive, especially on foreign policy issues. However, on one region of the world—Southeast Asia—the possibility for Congress to take the lead, to be the driving policy actor, actually exists. As I noted in an earlier blog post, over the past two decades Congress has played a central role in determining Southeast Asia policy. In many respects, Congress has dominated Southeast Asia policy more than it has any other region of the world; several top House and Senate leaders including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have significant interests in Southeast Asia policy. For years, the region was largely ignored by multiple U.S. administrations, and Congress was free to craft sanctions policy on Myanmar, to shape policy toward Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and to weigh in significantly on U.S. policy toward Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia. Now, not only has the White House paid relatively little attention to growing crises in mainland Southeast Asia but those crises are quickly spiraling out of control. In just the past two months, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen has shut down the National Democratic Institute’s operations in Cambodia, cracked down on top members of the opposition CNRP party, shut a range of press outlets, and seems prepared to potentially close the CNRP for good, in the run-up to next year’s 2018 national elections. Cambodia was never a true democracy, but this intense repression goes far beyond the political situation in Cambodia during the 2000s and early 2010s—it is a dramatic increase in the level of repression, one that puts Cambodia on the verge of becoming a full dictatorship. Hun Sen is only growing bolder; this week, he vowed “to continue leading his impoverished Southeast Asian nation for another 10 years,” according to the Associated Press. The White House has seemed mostly uninterested in the Cambodia crackdown; the State Department has said it is “deeply concerned” over Hun Sen’s actions. With the offices of Senator Mitch McConnell and several other top congressional leaders long interested in Cambodia, the opportunity is there for Congress, rather than the White House, to develop a tough approach to the growing climate of repression in Cambodia. Similarly, in Myanmar the situation in Rakhine State has in recent months spiraled from bad to worse. Some 120,000 people have fled into Bangladesh in recent weeks, after a spate of attacks by Rohingya insurgent groups and a brutal Myanmar army campaign in Rakhine State, which reportedly has included widespread burnings of homes and swaths of land. Official figures state that around 400 people have been killed in the latest spate of fighting in Rakhine State, but it is hard to know if that number is accurate—it could be wildly understated. The military is stepping up its force presence in Rakhine State. The BBC today reported that Myanmar may be mining the border with Bangladesh. Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto head of government, has downplayed the severity of the crisis, earning international condemnation. Yesterday, in a call with Turkey’s president, Suu Kyi reportedly blamed “terrorists,” for what she dubbed “a huge iceberg of misinformation” about the crisis in Rakhine State. She previously has downplayed the scale of the crisis and the army’s role in it, and there is little indication that Suu Kyi will or can restrain the military from a scorched earth policy in Rakhine. Again, the White House has taken a low-key stance toward the crisis, as it has in Cambodia. Politico’s Nahal Toosi reported this week that the “Trump admin – including the State Department has been silent re: killings of Rohingya” but that after significant prodding from Toosi, the State Department issued a comment to Politico that “expresses ‘deep concern’ re: Myanmar violence. But it doesn't name Rohingya.” Congress, again, should take the lead. The letters sent this week to Suu Kyi and her government by Senator John McCain and Congressman Edward Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, were important first steps. But Congress could do more. It can revisit the possibility of extending IMET to Myanmar, and call new hearings on the Rohingya crisis, before the visit of Pope Francis in November, to expose the potential atrocities and help people understand the situation in western Myanmar. And if the situation in Rakhine State gets worse, Congress should consider even sterner measures toward Myanmar—despite the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi in theory now runs the country.

The National League for Democracy (NLD)-led government in Myanmar has now been in office for more than a year, with Aung San Suu Kyi as de facto head of government. Suu Kyi certainly wields sizable influence. In fact, Suu Kyi has often been criticized, by commentators and members of her own party, for keeping too tight-fisted control of actions by the government, so much so that NLD members of parliament seemingly have little to do. To be sure, on some policy areas, Suu Kyi does not have the level of control that leaders of other, more established democracies enjoy. The military remains an extraordinarily powerful actor in Myanmar, and one apparently capable of operating, in outlying areas at least, without even clearing policy through the Cabinet. The military retains its percentage of seats in parliament, essential control over its budget, and its strong resistance to any constitutional change. Proponents of constitutional change that might reduce the formal powers of the armed forces, like former NLD lawyer U Ko Ni, have been murdered. Nonetheless, there are areas of policy over which Suu Kyi should enjoy significant influence, and freedom of the press is one of them. Suu Kyi was a longtime opposition leader, at a time (mostly) when Myanmar’s media was tightly controlled, the security forces regularly detained reporters, and state media outlets used their pages to mock and condemn her. She could use her bully pulpit to promote independent media, greater freedoms for journalists working throughout Myanmar, and an end to media monopolies. She could step in strongly if journalists were detained, and call for greater transparency in government— transparency that might actually work in her favor, since a more vibrant Myanmar press could well expose abuses by the armed forces and, indirectly, apply pressure for constitutional change. But Suu Kyi has not taken this approach. Instead, over the past year, press freedom in Myanmar seems to have regressed. In some respects, press freedom in Myanmar now seems more restrictive than it was in the final years of the former Thein Sein government. The Suu Kyi government has not tried to change existing laws that are major barriers to a free press. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ Shawn Crispin notes: “Chief among those laws is section 66(d) of the Telecommunications Law, a broad provision that carries potential three-year prison terms for cases of defamation over communications networks. While the law was used only occasionally against journalists under military rule, politicians, military officials, and even Buddhist monks are increasingly using it now to stifle online and social media criticism.” The Myanmar chapter of the PEN press freedom group has estimated that over 55 cases have been filed, under this law, just in the year since Suu Kyi’s government came into office. Meanwhile, late last month three journalists were arrested in Shan State, under a different Unlawful Association law. These reporters included one from The Irrawaddy; they had been covering one of the country’s ethnic insurgencies as well as allegations of abuses by the state security forces. “The return of a climate of fear is very disturbing,” wrote The Irrawaddy’s editor-in-chief, Aung Zaw, after the publication’s reporter was arrested. As with the rising toll of defamation cases, Suu Kyi has said nothing about the arrests in Shan State. A spokesperson for her party told the New York Times, “For media personnel, press freedom is a key need … For us, peace, national development and economic development are the priority, and then democracy and human rights, including press freedom.” Meanwhile, Suu Kyi’s government has enacted other restrictions on press access.  It has made it nearly impossible for journalists to cover parts of Rakhine State in the west. The Suu Kyi government also recently refused to provide visas to UN investigators tasked with analyzing the situation in Rakhine State and allegations of abuse by Myanmar security forces in Rakhine State. In some ways, the Suu Kyi government is looking more and more like its predecessors.  

Roughly one year after Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party took control of Myanmar’s parliament, and Suu Kyi became de facto head of state (Myanmar has a president, but Suu Kyi is widely known to control the government), the euphoria of last year has melted away. When the NLD won a sweeping electoral victory in November 2015, the country’s first truly free and accepted national elections in decades, it gained a massive majority in the lower house of parliament, as well as control of most of the country’s provincial legislatures. Myanmar citizens swept onto the streets of Yangon and other cities to celebrate. The military, which had ruled the country as a junta or a quasi-civilian regime between 1962 and 2015, publicly affirmed that it would accept the results of the election---and, in theory, a transfer of power to a civilian, Suu Kyi-led government. Suu Kyi, the democracy icon and Nobel Peace laureate who was kept under house arrest for years under military rule, had offered a broad slate of promises to the Myanmar public. She had vowed to aggressively push for a lasting peace deal with the country’s many ethnic insurgencies, some of which have been fighting the government for decades. “The first responsibility of the next government is to build peace,” she said in an address in January 2016. She had promised to protect threatened minorities, such as those Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State. She had promised to build a developed country that did not rely on handouts of foreign aid, telling people on the campaign trail in 2015, “we don't want to be a country which needs to ask other countries for help.” Yet in the past year, most of these promises have seemed hollow, and Myanmar’s stability, always fragile, appears to be disintegrating even more rapidly than it was in 2015. For more on my assessment of Suu Kyi’s first year in office, read my new article in The National.

Later this week, State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi will visit Washington, as part of a broader trip to the United States that will include addressing the United Nations General Assembly. In addition to meeting President Obama, Vice President Biden, and several senators and congresspeople, Suu Kyi reportedly will appear at a dinner hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council. There, she plans to outline Naypyidaw’s economic strategies, and likely make a pitch to potential U.S. investors in sectors ranging from mining to telecommunications. But will anything Suu Kyi says, or a reduction in U.S. sanctions on Myanmar, actually spark significantly increased U.S. investment in the country? To be sure, foreign investment is rising sharply overall in Myanmar – up 18 percent year-on-year between March 2015 and March 2016, according to data from Myanmar’s investment authority. But at this point, total approved U.S. direct investment in Myanmar stands at around $250 million although that number surely will increase over the next ten years. Still, $250 million is a small figure, and U.S. companies’ projects make up a handful of proposals currently being vetted by Myanmar’s investment authorities. By comparison, total Singaporean direct investment in Myanmar stands at over $50 billion, while Japan, which was once a nonfactor in Myanmar, has become the eighth largest source of foreign direct investment, and could well be the biggest source by the end of this decade. The head of a Singapore business delegation visiting Myanmar this week told reporters that Myanmar was now the favorite country for Singaporean companies looking for new investment opportunities abroad. These figures for U.S. investment are unlikely to grow that much even if Suu Kyi outlines, in Washington, a clear plan for fostering macroeconomic stability and if the Obama administration relaxes some sanctions.  (The White House is reportedly considering relaxing some remaining sanctions, but is waiting to do so until consulting with Suu Kyi and her aides later this week.) There are large obstacles to U.S. investment in Myanmar that have little to do with sanctions, and that will remain for years, if not decades. The country’s labor force is expensive, when compared to other countries in the region that have increasingly attracted manufacturing investment, like Vietnam. High electricity costs and office rents (in Yangon), and poor physical infrastructure, are major deterrents to companies selling consumer goods. With the price of oil and other commodities currently low, even some of Myanmar’s natural resources are not as attractive as they once were. In addition, although Suu Kyi has taken important steps toward a national peace deal that would bring significant political stability, a lasting national ceasefire is a long way off. The most powerful ethnic insurgency walked out of the Suu Kyi-led peace conference in August. Political instability will remain a part of life, as will military involvement in many sectors of the economy. In addition, as I have written numerous times, while Myanmar has been cited by the White House as a powerful signal of democratic change, and the influence of the rebalance to Asia, the country is of much less strategic importance to the United States than it is to Asian powers like Japan, China, India, and even Singapore. The NLD’s victory has not made the country much more important strategically – to the United States. Since the NLD’s dominant election victory last November, the Japanese government, which had already identified Myanmar as vitally important to Tokyo’s regional interests, has promised nearly $1 billion in loans and grants for the country, to be disbursed roughly over the next year. China, India, and other Asian powers also have substantial aid programs in Myanmar, targeted partly to help boost investment in the country. U.S. assistance is ramping up, and the United States will become a much larger player in aid in Myanmar. But in the near term, the U.S. aid and economic presence will remain relatively small.  

Later this week, Myanmar State Counselor, and de facto head of government, Aung San Suu Kyi travels to the United States. She will address the United Nations General Assembly and will meet with President Barack Obama in the White House this Wednesday. She also will hold meetings with a range of other U.S. officials, Myanmar specialists, and companies. As James Hookaway of the Wall Street Journal notes, the trip clearly solidifies Aung San Suu Kyi’s role as de facto head of government, although she is not technically president. And Aung San Suu Kyi has been careful to balance her state diplomacy, visiting China last month before Myanmar’s national peace conference, and in advance of her trip to the United States. She also has visited other powers important to Myanmar such as Thailand. What does the Myanmar leader hope to gain from this trip to the United States? For one, according to numerous Myanmar officials, she hopes to gain clearer support from the Obama administration for her approach to handling the ongoing tensions in western Rakhine State. There, where conflict has erupted between Buddhists and Muslims since the early 2010s, Aung San Suu Kyi’s seeming indifference to the plight of the Muslim Rohingya initially damaged her image in the United States, and globally. Now, she has asked former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to head up a commission tasked with investigating the violence in Rakhine State, where more than 140,000 Rohingya have been driven out of their homes, with many living in displaced persons camps in the state now. Some human rights groups, like Fortify Rights (a group focusing on the Rohingya and Rakhine State) have welcomed the appointment of Annan, which potentially gives the investigation more credibility. The appointment of Annan also has helped rehabilitate Aung San Suu Kyi’s image among human rights groups in the United States and elsewhere. But Annan is still working on a commission---it will not have any powers to enforce any recommendations it makes, as the former UN Secretary General himself has made clear. The Obama administration likely will press Aung San Suu Kyi to be clearer about how she will address many of the entrenched social and economic problems in Rakhine State, including land grabbing, which remains a persistent problem. Second, Aung San Suu Kyi will push for enthusiastic U.S. government support of her strategy for achieving a permanent and national peace. The peace conference organized by the National League for Democracy (NLD) government last month received only a mixed reception from many of the remaining ethnic insurgencies; the largest, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), had its representatives walk out of the meeting. U.S. officials should press Aung San Suu Kyi for clearer indications of how she plans to handle the next meetings of the national peace dialogue, how she plans to woo back the UWSA and other insurgents to the peace table, and what her vision is for some kind of future, more federal Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi also will likely want the Obama administration, and U.S. investors, to publicly support the NLD’s economic strategy. Although this remains relatively vague, the new Myanmar government has rolled out a strategy that seems to prioritize making Myanmar’s agricultural sector more productive, improving macroeconomic stability, making the financial sector more stable, and addressing endemic corruption. However, the government has not made clear how it plans to address several extremely important economic issues, including the continuing problem of land confiscation, and the lack of clear land tenure laws. The NLD government has created a commission to assess land tenure challenges, but some Myanmar rights groups worry that the commission will simply bury land disputes. Even more worryingly, the government also has offered no clear direction about how it will address the fact that groups linked to current and past armed forces leaders have control over many sectors of the Myanmar economy. The ongoing influence of the armed forces over so much of the economy is a factor that adds to graft, opaque business dealings, land tenure problems, and many other challenges. Aung San Suu Kyi also likely will push the White House for further reductions in U.S. sanctions, as a broader sign of U.S. support for the direction of Myanmar’s democratization. Last spring, the Obama administration relaxed some remaining U.S. sanctions on Myanmar, after the big NLD election victory last year and Aung San Suu Kyi’s successful formation of a government. Opinion within the NLD remains divided on how far Aung San Suu Kyi should push, but some sanctions relief would be seen by most NLD members---and probably most Myanmar citizens---as another signal of support for the government’s political and economic programs.