Aung San Suu Kyi is saintly, but is she right?
It is an anniversary that fewer people mark each year. Thirty or so brave souls were set upon by state-sponsored thugs in Yangon (Rangoon, Myanmar’s main city) this past weekend for even trying. Several hundred others would have joined them at Yangon’s holiest pagoda, Shwedagon, but were blocked by the police.
Seventeen years ago this week Myanmar (which was still called Burma back then) held an election. To the befuddlement of the generals running the place, the main opposition, the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, who was already under house arrest, won by a landslide. It took some 60% of the votes and 80% of the seats. The generals simply ignored the result and pretended the election was for something other than a parliament. Incredibly, within a few months, some foreigners were taking their word for it.
The brave protesters at the Shwedagon pagoda wanted to pray for Miss Suu Kyi. On May 27th her latest spell of internment was due to end. But two days beforehand, with that bizarre fixation on legal form typical of regimes that least understand the rule of law, the junta extended it.
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