Aung San Suu Kyi isn’t the villain of Myanmar’s tragedy

Myanmar is in freefall. Since the February 2021 military coup, the nation has plunged into unrelenting chaos with widespread atrocities, thousands of lost lives and over two million displaced.

A repressive military regime has compounded the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions with the imprisonment of all elected leaders, including State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint, cabinet ministers and over 21,000 prisoners of conscience.

Amid the horrors of this harrowing landscape, some critics have chosen to target not the architects of this tragedy, the State Administration Council junta, but rather its most prominent victim.

Benedict Rogers’ recent article, “The world must end its silence on Aung San Suu Kyi” (Union of Catholic Asian News, January 17, 2025) indulges in distorted half-truths. Despite his so-called good intentions, Rogers casts Suu Kyi as the villain in a tragedy engineered by the very military she has consistently opposed.

This is not journalism—it’s the rhetorical equivalent of lighting a pyre beneath a woman enduring her 19th year of imprisonment, including her fourth concurrent year in solitary confinement, and calling it justice.

Mainstream news has taken to calling Myanmar a “forgotten country,” but a documentary from The Independent last December reveals a country not so much forgotten as deliberately ignored. Some lament the fall of “the one democratic hope that Burma had,” her betrayal by those who unreasonably expected a saint and then abandoned her when sullied by realpolitik.

“Some journalists I speak to now admit they got it wrong about my mother,” explains Aung San Suu Kyi’s son, Kim Aris, featured prominently in the film “Cancelled”, talking to us before its release.

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