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Former Columnist Jailed for Facebook Criticism of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi

123 points by sgt 8y ago

pjc50 8y ago
Myanmar seem to have managed the elected transition of power from a military dictatorship to a civilian dictatorship, but not any steps beyond that.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Those things take time. If you don't execute everyone from the old regime, there are tons of rich people, executives, special interests, influential families, etc, that remain in place and are still important after the transition. (The post-WWII Germany was full of ex-nazi hardcore sympathizers, and nazi executives and officials in all kinds of positions of power until the 80s or so). De-nazification (not the half-arsed, soon abandoned program of the same name [1]) was a big demand of younger germans in the 60s and 70s. Now, if you do execute all important people from the old regime, on the other hand, you have now had yourself a taste of big corrupting power over others. And unless you kill every relative, friend, etc as well, you have a recipe for civil war and further bad blood between you and those that remained. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
  - pjc50 8y ago
    This fed into the "de-Baathification" of Iraq, where simply firing people in a purge of the regime resulted in a situation of both ineffective governance and a huge pool of excluded people who could form a resistance movement against the occupying coalition. Plenty of people and weapons from that have ended up in the Syrian civil war. Conversely the South African "truth and reconciliation commission" seems to have played a part in the healing of that country - but at the cost of leaving crimes unpunished. Northern Ireland has opted for an intermediate approach of trying to draw a line under everything as quietly as possible - no truth, no justice, but no more killing. Arguably many of the US's current problems stem from inadequately addressing the pro-slavery faction. At least now the question of "what is the significance of all these statues from the losing side of the civil war?" is back in the public consciousness.
    - davidhyde 8y ago
      > Conversely the South African "truth and reconciliation commission" seems to have played a part in the healing of that country - but at the cost of leaving crimes unpunished. You punish people to deter others for committing the same crime. The other benefit, revenge, has a scope that is too narrow to benefit the masses. So, if you are replacing an evil regime with a new regime and there is no possibility that the old regime will come back (apartheid has run by a small minority of the population) then there is no benefit from punishing past crimes. This is why the "truth and reconciliation commission" was so successful. Very few countries can boast to such a peaceful political turnaround.
      - maze-le 8y ago
        >> Very few countries can boast to such a peaceful political turnaround. I'd say most countries in Eastern Europe and some in South America certainly can boast that. Political changes don't nessecarily have to be bloody, violent affairs.
      - M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
        > Very few countries can boast to such a peaceful political turnaround. Or such a slow descent into tyranny. Let's see when Julius Malema and his supporters eventually do call for the eradication of white people.
    - toomanybeersies 8y ago
      De-Baathification is arguably one of the primary driving factors in the birth of ISIS. It was such a terrible policy, and set the USA up to fail from the beginning in their mission to implement a stable, functioning government.
  - lr4444lr 8y ago
    No one expected a miracle, but she was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient! She could have done much more to prevent the atrocities happening to the Rohingya.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      She could have done much more to prevent the atrocities happening to the Rohingya. Such as?
      - Freak_NL 8y ago
        Actually using the name Rohingya, for a start¹. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_people#Denial_of_the_%22Rohingya%22_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_people#Denial_of_the_...
      - bogomipz 8y ago
        Truthfully address the crisis: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/20/fact-check-aung-san-suu-kyi-rohingya-crisis-speech-myanmar https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/20/fact-check-aun...
      - bilbo0s 8y ago
        >Such as? I'm no policing expert, but I think a start might be arresting the assailants. I mean in a lot of cases, the videos are being posted to the assailant's Facebook. Now again, I'm no crack detective, but that seems like some evidence you could use to me.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      So was Henry Kissinger. I don't really understand the detail of the situation of her release and taking power but I'm starting to suspect we may have been lied to, or at least given a drastically oversimplified version of events.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >but she was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient Wasn't Obama as well? And he maintained a torture camp, occupying forces, and tons of bombings. The "Nobel Peace Prize" is a political tool, not some valuable metric. Someone mentioned Kissinger having one as well...
  - bogomipz 8y ago
    What doesn't take time though is speaking out about the ethnic cleansing operations being carried out by the military. Her comments at the World Economic Forum on ASEAN were beyond pathetic: "There are of course ways in which, with hindsight, the situation could’ve been handled better," “But we believe that in order to have long-term security and stability we have to be fair to all sides. We can’t choose who should be protected by rule of law,” she said."[1] In the same speech she addressed the two recently jailed journalists with the following: >"The judgement … had nothing to do with freedom of expression at all, it had to do with the Official Secrets Act,” she said. “I don’t think anybody has actually bothered to read it."[1] There's a difference between playing the long game and being complicit. [1] http://time.com/5394791/aung-san-suu-kyi-rohingya-crisis-handled-better/ http://time.com/5394791/aung-san-suu-kyi-rohingya-crisis-han...
- stult 8y ago
  It's a delicate transition even when the civilians have actual full authority over the government (see: South Africa, or worse yet, Zimbabwe). But when Myanmar transitioned to the free elections which put Suu Kyi in power, the military specifically reserved a significant minority of seats in the legislature and maintained constitutionally-guaranteed independence from the civilian government. On top of that, the military had been the only functional institution in Myanmar for over 50 years. During that time, there was no real court system, no free media, no private industry, and no significant educational institutions. Even before the military took over, the majority of the colonial government bureaucracy consisted of Indians that the British brought in with them, the vast majority of whom left with the British, gutting civilian institutions. The military controlled every aspect of everyone's lives. Their retreat from total control left an enormous institutional vacuum, with Buddhist monasteries left as the only nearly national stable institution (which has fed tensions with minority Muslim ethnic groups). When I was working there a few years ago, people barely knew what the laws were for creating a corporation. No one knew how to verify who owned what land. The military suddenly allowed free press for the first time since the 1960s, and immediately a plethora of dubious publications sprung up to compete with the hilariously inaccurate government-run propaganda rag, the Light of Myanmar. People just weren't equipped to evaluate journalistic quality yet. So fundamental elements of a free society just weren't in place. And the population was in many ways unprepared for democracy. Atrocious education and decades of propaganda make it difficult to rationally exercise democratic authority. Particularly when there are strong ethnic tensions, because the majority tends to abuse their authority to the detriment of the minority. Hence the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. So Suu Kyi is left in a tenuous position. She can't allow dissent within her own party without risking fragmentation and a loss to a military-centric coalition. She can't let her own party run wild without risking unfettered ethnic cleansing and a military backlash/coup if their special privileges are revoked. This latest move is disheartening for many reasons, but more than anything it is evidence of just how desperate the situation in Myanmar really is, despite whatever brief optimism grew out of the nation's partial democratization.
  - majos 8y ago
    I can acknowledge that Suu Kyi's position forces ugly compromises, but I don't see how she her or her party really needs to jail journalists. Especially when 1. this article claims that the offense is criticism of her, and 2. as you mention, public trust in journalism seems low anyway. At any rate, are we even sure that this is the work of Suu Kyi's faction? It would be a pretty fiendish move for the military to suppress free speech and make it look like Suu Kyi's work, since (as we see here) it would weaken her status with the west. But I have no idea how to verify something like that.
- matklnz 8y ago
  Civilian dictatorship, such an euphemism for "democracy"
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Democracy is not a dictatorship. If you'd ever lived under both, you'd understand the difference. In a dictatorship, only one person's vote counts. In a democracy, there are a lot of people whose votes count. It may seem the same to you, but if you have to experience it you'd almost immediately see that it feels very different. I was a WHOLE lot more careful when I was living in a nation with a dictatorship. One slip up could throw away a lot of your life in a dirty developing nation prison cell.
JorgeGT 8y ago
"It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it" ~ Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from fear, 1991.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted. - Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune, Missionaria Protectiva
  - mtgx 8y ago
    I feel like this comment thread needs a link to CGP Grey's excellent Rules for Rulers video, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
    - afarrell 8y ago
      I’ve read thd book this is based on—its a good book and pessimistically presents what is actually a quite optimistic model of power.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- megous 8y ago
  Looks like she was right.
majos 8y ago
Here's a Reuters article from back when he was detained in July [1]. It includes this unflattering paragraph: "Myanmar has detained at least 38 journalists since Suu Kyi came to power in 2016, according to Athan, a freedom of expression activist organization. These include two Reuters reporters who are on trial accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act." I'm starting to think that the Nobel Peace Prize should only be awarded posthumously, or perhaps once a person steps down from power (though this would be hard to quantify). Scientific contributions are rarely undone, but a person's overall contribution to world peace can vary quite a bit over the course of their life. [1] https://reut.rs/2KVsJq7 https://reut.rs/2KVsJq7
- jules 8y ago
  The peace prize has been a joke for quite a while now.
  - cuboidGoat 8y ago
    Not just the peace prize. I've heard of astrophysicists describing the physics award as the "No Bell" prize after Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The peace prize was really a joke from the start though, considering the origin of the money.
    - dagw 8y ago
      The peace prize was really a joke from the start though, considering the origin of the money How do you figure? Is it unreasonable for a man to look at the damage his work has done on the world and wish to atone for it?
      - cuboidGoat 8y ago
        There's a lady who thinks all that glitters is gold...
    - matklnz 8y ago
      What's the origin of the money?
idoubtit 8y ago
Aung San Suu Kyii's contempt for human rights is nothing new. I referenced this behavior in 2013 in fr.wikipedia : « How can Aung San Suu Kyi – a Nobel Peace Prize winner – fail to condemn anti-Muslim violence? », The Daily Telegraph,‎ 2013-10-24, http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fdavidblair%2F100242929%2Fhow-can-aung-san-suu-kyi-a-nobel-peace-prize-winner-fail-to-condemn-anti-muslim-violence%2F http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.tel... « Aung San Suu Kyi is turning a blind eye to human rights in the name of politics », The Guardian,‎ 2013-11-26 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/27/aung-san-suu-kyi-is-turning-a-blind-eye-to-human-rights-in-the-name-of-politics https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/27/aung-s... I had to "fight" to add these to wikipedia. My first edits were revoked. When the first accusation of genocide appeared in 2016,there was a editing conflict because I added a paragraph about the Rohingya in the top summary. I finally was allowed to put a single sentence about it, which was preceded by another sentenced explaining that Suu Kyi was powerless against the army. I certainly wasn't very tactful, and I lack experience on such conflicts, but that made me extremely distrustful of every Wikipedia article.

123 points by sgt 8y ago

Myanmar seem to have managed the elected transition of power from a military dictatorship to a civilian dictatorship, but not any steps beyond that.

coldtea 8y ago
Those things take time. If you don't execute everyone from the old regime, there are tons of rich people, executives, special interests, influential families, etc, that remain in place and are still important after the transition. (The post-WWII Germany was full of ex-nazi hardcore sympathizers, and nazi executives and officials in all kinds of positions of power until the 80s or so). De-nazification (not the half-arsed, soon abandoned program of the same name [1]) was a big demand of younger germans in the 60s and 70s. Now, if you do execute all important people from the old regime, on the other hand, you have now had yourself a taste of big corrupting power over others. And unless you kill every relative, friend, etc as well, you have a recipe for civil war and further bad blood between you and those that remained. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
- pjc50 8y ago
  This fed into the "de-Baathification" of Iraq, where simply firing people in a purge of the regime resulted in a situation of both ineffective governance and a huge pool of excluded people who could form a resistance movement against the occupying coalition. Plenty of people and weapons from that have ended up in the Syrian civil war. Conversely the South African "truth and reconciliation commission" seems to have played a part in the healing of that country - but at the cost of leaving crimes unpunished. Northern Ireland has opted for an intermediate approach of trying to draw a line under everything as quietly as possible - no truth, no justice, but no more killing. Arguably many of the US's current problems stem from inadequately addressing the pro-slavery faction. At least now the question of "what is the significance of all these statues from the losing side of the civil war?" is back in the public consciousness.
  - davidhyde 8y ago
    > Conversely the South African "truth and reconciliation commission" seems to have played a part in the healing of that country - but at the cost of leaving crimes unpunished. You punish people to deter others for committing the same crime. The other benefit, revenge, has a scope that is too narrow to benefit the masses. So, if you are replacing an evil regime with a new regime and there is no possibility that the old regime will come back (apartheid has run by a small minority of the population) then there is no benefit from punishing past crimes. This is why the "truth and reconciliation commission" was so successful. Very few countries can boast to such a peaceful political turnaround.
    - maze-le 8y ago
      >> Very few countries can boast to such a peaceful political turnaround. I'd say most countries in Eastern Europe and some in South America certainly can boast that. Political changes don't nessecarily have to be bloody, violent affairs.
    - M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
      > Very few countries can boast to such a peaceful political turnaround. Or such a slow descent into tyranny. Let's see when Julius Malema and his supporters eventually do call for the eradication of white people.
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    De-Baathification is arguably one of the primary driving factors in the birth of ISIS. It was such a terrible policy, and set the USA up to fail from the beginning in their mission to implement a stable, functioning government.
- lr4444lr 8y ago
  No one expected a miracle, but she was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient! She could have done much more to prevent the atrocities happening to the Rohingya.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    She could have done much more to prevent the atrocities happening to the Rohingya. Such as?
    - Freak_NL 8y ago
      Actually using the name Rohingya, for a start¹. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_people#Denial_of_the_%22Rohingya%22_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_people#Denial_of_the_...
    - bogomipz 8y ago
      Truthfully address the crisis: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/20/fact-check-aung-san-suu-kyi-rohingya-crisis-speech-myanmar https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/20/fact-check-aun...
    - bilbo0s 8y ago
      >Such as? I'm no policing expert, but I think a start might be arresting the assailants. I mean in a lot of cases, the videos are being posted to the assailant's Facebook. Now again, I'm no crack detective, but that seems like some evidence you could use to me.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    So was Henry Kissinger. I don't really understand the detail of the situation of her release and taking power but I'm starting to suspect we may have been lied to, or at least given a drastically oversimplified version of events.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >but she was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient Wasn't Obama as well? And he maintained a torture camp, occupying forces, and tons of bombings. The "Nobel Peace Prize" is a political tool, not some valuable metric. Someone mentioned Kissinger having one as well...
- bogomipz 8y ago
  What doesn't take time though is speaking out about the ethnic cleansing operations being carried out by the military. Her comments at the World Economic Forum on ASEAN were beyond pathetic: "There are of course ways in which, with hindsight, the situation could’ve been handled better," “But we believe that in order to have long-term security and stability we have to be fair to all sides. We can’t choose who should be protected by rule of law,” she said."[1] In the same speech she addressed the two recently jailed journalists with the following: >"The judgement … had nothing to do with freedom of expression at all, it had to do with the Official Secrets Act,” she said. “I don’t think anybody has actually bothered to read it."[1] There's a difference between playing the long game and being complicit. [1] http://time.com/5394791/aung-san-suu-kyi-rohingya-crisis-handled-better/ http://time.com/5394791/aung-san-suu-kyi-rohingya-crisis-han...
stult 8y ago
It's a delicate transition even when the civilians have actual full authority over the government (see: South Africa, or worse yet, Zimbabwe). But when Myanmar transitioned to the free elections which put Suu Kyi in power, the military specifically reserved a significant minority of seats in the legislature and maintained constitutionally-guaranteed independence from the civilian government. On top of that, the military had been the only functional institution in Myanmar for over 50 years. During that time, there was no real court system, no free media, no private industry, and no significant educational institutions. Even before the military took over, the majority of the colonial government bureaucracy consisted of Indians that the British brought in with them, the vast majority of whom left with the British, gutting civilian institutions. The military controlled every aspect of everyone's lives. Their retreat from total control left an enormous institutional vacuum, with Buddhist monasteries left as the only nearly national stable institution (which has fed tensions with minority Muslim ethnic groups). When I was working there a few years ago, people barely knew what the laws were for creating a corporation. No one knew how to verify who owned what land. The military suddenly allowed free press for the first time since the 1960s, and immediately a plethora of dubious publications sprung up to compete with the hilariously inaccurate government-run propaganda rag, the Light of Myanmar. People just weren't equipped to evaluate journalistic quality yet. So fundamental elements of a free society just weren't in place. And the population was in many ways unprepared for democracy. Atrocious education and decades of propaganda make it difficult to rationally exercise democratic authority. Particularly when there are strong ethnic tensions, because the majority tends to abuse their authority to the detriment of the minority. Hence the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. So Suu Kyi is left in a tenuous position. She can't allow dissent within her own party without risking fragmentation and a loss to a military-centric coalition. She can't let her own party run wild without risking unfettered ethnic cleansing and a military backlash/coup if their special privileges are revoked. This latest move is disheartening for many reasons, but more than anything it is evidence of just how desperate the situation in Myanmar really is, despite whatever brief optimism grew out of the nation's partial democratization.
- majos 8y ago
  I can acknowledge that Suu Kyi's position forces ugly compromises, but I don't see how she her or her party really needs to jail journalists. Especially when 1. this article claims that the offense is criticism of her, and 2. as you mention, public trust in journalism seems low anyway. At any rate, are we even sure that this is the work of Suu Kyi's faction? It would be a pretty fiendish move for the military to suppress free speech and make it look like Suu Kyi's work, since (as we see here) it would weaken her status with the west. But I have no idea how to verify something like that.
matklnz 8y ago
Civilian dictatorship, such an euphemism for "democracy"
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Democracy is not a dictatorship. If you'd ever lived under both, you'd understand the difference. In a dictatorship, only one person's vote counts. In a democracy, there are a lot of people whose votes count. It may seem the same to you, but if you have to experience it you'd almost immediately see that it feels very different. I was a WHOLE lot more careful when I was living in a nation with a dictatorship. One slip up could throw away a lot of your life in a dirty developing nation prison cell.

JorgeGT 8y ago

"It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it" ~ Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from fear, 1991.

stephengillie 8y ago
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted. - Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune, Missionaria Protectiva
- mtgx 8y ago
  I feel like this comment thread needs a link to CGP Grey's excellent Rules for Rulers video, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
  - afarrell 8y ago
    I’ve read thd book this is based on—its a good book and pessimistically presents what is actually a quite optimistic model of power.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
megous 8y ago
Looks like she was right.

majos 8y ago

Here's a Reuters article from back when he was detained in July [1]. It includes this unflattering paragraph: "Myanmar has detained at least 38 journalists since Suu Kyi came to power in 2016, according to Athan, a freedom of expression activist organization. These include two Reuters reporters who are on trial accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act." I'm starting to think that the Nobel Peace Prize should only be awarded posthumously, or perhaps once a person steps down from power (though this would be hard to quantify). Scientific contributions are rarely undone, but a person's overall contribution to world peace can vary quite a bit over the course of their life. [1] https://reut.rs/2KVsJq7 https://reut.rs/2KVsJq7

jules 8y ago
The peace prize has been a joke for quite a while now.
- cuboidGoat 8y ago
  Not just the peace prize. I've heard of astrophysicists describing the physics award as the "No Bell" prize after Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The peace prize was really a joke from the start though, considering the origin of the money.
  - dagw 8y ago
    The peace prize was really a joke from the start though, considering the origin of the money How do you figure? Is it unreasonable for a man to look at the damage his work has done on the world and wish to atone for it?
    - cuboidGoat 8y ago
      There's a lady who thinks all that glitters is gold...
  - matklnz 8y ago
    What's the origin of the money?

idoubtit 8y ago

Aung San Suu Kyii's contempt for human rights is nothing new. I referenced this behavior in 2013 in fr.wikipedia : « How can Aung San Suu Kyi – a Nobel Peace Prize winner – fail to condemn anti-Muslim violence? », The Daily Telegraph,‎ 2013-10-24, http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fdavidblair%2F100242929%2Fhow-can-aung-san-suu-kyi-a-nobel-peace-prize-winner-fail-to-condemn-anti-muslim-violence%2F http://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.tel... « Aung San Suu Kyi is turning a blind eye to human rights in the name of politics », The Guardian,‎ 2013-11-26 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/27/aung-san-suu-kyi-is-turning-a-blind-eye-to-human-rights-in-the-name-of-politics https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/27/aung-s... I had to "fight" to add these to wikipedia. My first edits were revoked. When the first accusation of genocide appeared in 2016,there was a editing conflict because I added a paragraph about the Rohingya in the top summary. I finally was allowed to put a single sentence about it, which was preceded by another sentenced explaining that Suu Kyi was powerless against the army. I certainly wasn't very tactful, and I lack experience on such conflicts, but that made me extremely distrustful of every Wikipedia article.