{"id":117368,"date":"2018-08-27T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=117368"},"modified":"2018-08-25T17:36:22","modified_gmt":"2018-08-25T16:36:22","slug":"nobel-peace-laureate-suu-kyi-is-most-polished-mouthpiece-of-myanmar-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/08\/nobel-peace-laureate-suu-kyi-is-most-polished-mouthpiece-of-myanmar-military\/","title":{"rendered":"[Nobel Peace Laureate] Suu Kyi Is Most Polished Mouthpiece of Myanmar Military"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Free Rohingya Coalition co-founder Maung Zarni, a member of the TRANSCEND Network<\/a>, says time to reject false messiahs in Myanmar beginning with Aung San Suu Kyi.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

25 Aug 2018 – <\/em>Watching YouTube Myanmar State Counsellor\u2019s 43rd Singapore lecture — 1-hour lecture including the questions and answers \u2013 entitled, \u201cDemocratic Transition in Myanmar: Challenges and the Way Forward,\u201d left me deeply disturbed, pained and outraged.<\/p>\n

The degree of her delusions, distortions and concoctions made me realize that my fellow Burmese dissident has become nothing more than the most polished mouth piece for her former captors, namely the murderous military regime.<\/p>\n

Aung San Suu Kyi wasn\u2019t simply one dissident leader among several potential leaders of significance that I, like millions of other Burmese Buddhists, supported in those long years of vibrant anti-dictatorship opposition after the nationwide uprisings of 1988.<\/p>\n

My sentimental ties to Aung San family is more personal and goes far deeper.<\/p>\n

One late great uncle of mine was her father\u2019s next-door neighbor, class mate and a friend at Pegu Hall (dormitory) when both were young undergraduates who hailed together from the Buddhist heartland of the then Upper Burma to study Pali, literature, law, etc. at the colonial Rangoon University in the early 1930\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Through my relative\u2019s first-hand accounts of Aung San, the anti-colonial revolutionary and founder of Burma Independence Army under WWII Japan\u2019s fascist patronage, as well as my own study of the slain national hero\u2019s voluminous speeches and writings, I have developed a lifelong admiration for the man\u2019s strength of character, integrity, Marxist-influenced non-racialism and unwavering sense of service to the oppressed of colonial Burma, not just Buddhists nor the majority Burmans or Bama, but all people who considered Burma their home.<\/p>\n

In fact, in my high school days in Mandalay of 1970\u2019s I learned the worthy English phrase \u201clove of truth\u201d from one of his writings wherein he pointedly said as a father he wanted to instill the love of truth in his three children.<\/p>\n

So, when I watched Suu Kyi\u2019s speech act performed at the Grand Hyatt in Singapore, available on YouTube, I noted with deep pains and rage that my hero\u2019s world famous, or infamous, daughter packed lie after lie \u2013 all verifiable \u2013 in her prepared lecture, which she proceeded to deliver with a straight face.<\/p>\n

Suu Kyi\u2019s Singapore lecture August 22 was a speech her own martyred father would most definitely feel so ashamed about.<\/p>\n

Two years since Suu Kyi\u2019s assumption of her self-declared \u2018Above-the-President\u2019 office as State Counsellor with her reportedly autocratic control over all ministries save the security-related ministries such as Home Affairs, Defense and Border Affairs, her leadership is noted only for serial failures.<\/p>\n

The commissions she has formed to address the country\u2019s defining problem — crimes against Rohingyas — have become a butt of international jokes. As the country\u2019s most revered politician since her father\u2019s murder in 1947, Suu Kyi has been unable to deliver on every one of the party\u2019s official major priorities: \u201crule of law, peace, development, amendments to the Constitution\u201d.<\/p>\n

And yet in the lecture, the NLD leader served up the typically democracy-indifferent and docile Singaporean audience a rose-tinted view of her leadership and governmental performance, which the official hosts on the panel dutifully clapped and heaped praise on.<\/p>\n

For someone who grew up under General Ne Win\u2019s \u201cBurmese Way to Socialism\u201d (1962-1988), Suu Kyi\u2019s speech sounded more like a typical party General Secretary\u2019s report to the Socialist Polit Bureau presided over by Chairman (despot) Ne Win in the 1960\u2019s and 1970\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The State Counsellor in her own words: \u201cIn each of the three panglong (peace) meetings held over the last two years, we made valuable progress. in the First Union Peace Conference, a seven-step roadmap for peace and national reconciliation was achieved. In the Second Conference, 37 principles were adopted. Before the Third Conference, two more ethnic armed groups signed the ceasefire agreement and during the Conference itself, 1“4 more principles were adopted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only her words are unpersuasive and uncorroborated by the harsh realities of Myanmar ethnic minorities, particularly more than 100,000 Kachin war refugees in the country\u2019s eastern and northern border regions but the world of Myanmar watchers who actually set their foot in these conflict zones offer an assessment radically different from Ms. Suu Kyi\u2019s. Virtually all news reports and field studies about the Burmese military\u2019s internal colonial war of pacification note not only the regression of the country\u2019s peace process under Suu Kyi\u2019s incompetent and failing leadership, typically rich in rhetoric and empty of substance, but also the disappearance of the so-called democratic space even for the ethnically dominant Burman Buddhist public.<\/p>\n

That \u201cdemocratic space\u201d was deliberately allowed by the quasi-democratic regime former General Thein Sein in 2010 designed to tango with the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton administration as the generals sought to rebalance the military\u2019s overreliance on the increasingly aggressive and invasive China in the Burmese affairs.<\/p>\n

The emerging, if belated wisdom in Washington is that the Obama\u2019s Myanmar embracement policy, once held up as one of his signature achievements emboldened, sped up and facilitated the genocidal destruction of Rohingya people.<\/p>\n

Under Suu Kyi\u2019s leadership, Myanmar now faces a growing chorus of international calls for the Security Council for the International Criminal Court referral for international crimes in Western Myanmar state of Rakhine, irrespective of whether such calls will bear fruit. Suu Kyi stands accused, with good reasons, of culpability and complicity in the military\u2019s crimes against humanity and even genocide against Rohingya people.<\/p>\n

It is matters pertaining to Rohingya persecution — which my researcher colleague Natalie Brinham and I call \u201cthe slow burning genocide,\u201d because of its decades-long nature — on which Suu Kyi\u2019s speech act morphed from detectable delusions into deliberate distortions.<\/p>\n

With no basis in reality, Suu Kyi boasted of having implemented most of the Kofi Annan Commission recommendations, thus: \u201c(t)he recommendations of Dr. Kofi Annan\u2019s Commission, 88 in all, of which we have to date implemented 81, aim at the establishment of lasting peace and stability in Rakhine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kofi Annan is no more to do the fact-checking. But former ambassador Laetitia van den Assum, one of his fellow Rakhine Commission members, is still alive to know the untruths, nah, outright lies of Ms. Suu Kyi. Van den Assum tweeted \u201cThe underlying reasons for their (Rohingyas\u2019) flight remain unaddressed\u201d. The tweet came on the eve of the one year anniversary of Myanmar\u2019s large scale military attacks on the unarmed and peaceful Rohingyas in more than 300 villages across northern Rakhine region.<\/p>\n

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The underlying reasons for their flight remain unaddressed. https:\/\/t.co\/ATb7mih2Lu<\/a><\/p>\n

— LaetitiavandenAssum (@lvandenassum) August 23, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n