For most of their lives, the two half-British sons of the fallen human rights figure Aung San Suu Kyi have kept out of the limelight. Recently, however, the former Myanmar de facto leader’s younger son, Kim Aris, has been speaking out, concerned that the world has forgotten about his imprisoned mother, who was toppled by a military coup in February 2021, and who at the age of 80 now faces worsening heart problems and is in dire need, he says, of urgent medical attention.
Contrary to claims she is being held under house arrest, Mr Aris believes she is in solitary confinement in a prison in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital. “I don’t think anybody outside of the prison or the military has seen her for over two years, at least. No one has been allowed to see her,” he told the veteran Myanmar correspondent Bertil Lintner earlier this month. “The military have said she is being held under house arrest, but there is no evidence of that … At other times, they said she has had a stroke. We actually got a letter right around the earthquake this year that she has died. It’s obviously hard to deal with all this false information.”
What most observers do agree on is that the charges over which Ms Suu Kyi was sentenced were dubious and politically motivated. The UN Security Council and Secretary General Antonio Guterres have separately called for her release. Mr Aris claims that “even China wants to see my mother free” in order that the elections the military junta has scheduled to begin this December could be regarded “to be in any way, shape or form legitimate”.
But amid the civil war in Myanmar, and turmoil and devastation in other parts of the world, including Gaza and Sudan, Ms Suu Kyi’s plight is drawing little attention. The woman who sprang to fame in 1988 after she addressed half a million people at a rally in Yangon, the country’s then capital, became a pro-democracy hero, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991; although by then she was already under house arrest, after her party, the National League for Democracy, won a general election the previous year. The Tatmadaw, the military forces that had once been led by her own father, Myanmar’s father of independence, Gen Aung San, refused to accept the result and kept her under armed guard for most of the next two decades.
Ms Suu Kyi’s star never faded, and when, under the junta’s “Roadmap to democracy”, the NLD won the 2015 general election, she and her party were congratulated by leaders around the world. It wasn’t long after, however, that her image began to be tarnished as she was accused of standing by while the Myanmar military perpetrated a series of atrocities on the Muslim Rohingya minority in the country’s far west. In 2019, she made a speech at the International Court of Justice in The Hague defending Myanmar’s military against the charge of genocide. By this point, cities, states and museums had already rescinded honours she had been awarded, and there were calls for her Nobel to be revoked.
In 2021, nine months after the coup, I wrote in these pages that the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya that took place under Ms Suu Kyi’s watch was probably the reason why there was not greater global support for Myanmar’s embattled democracy movement. Mr Aris also acknowledges that this may well have lessened sympathy for her predicament, but he denies the allegation that she colluded with the military’s actions.
“The UN got it wrong, as did the international community,” he has said. She was “trying to do everything she could to stop those abuses”. She ran “a parallel government” and was “not in control” – the military was.
He points to her ICJ speech and says that “given what she sacrificed, people could have looked into it more before denouncing her”. It is true that if you read the full text, Ms Suu Kyi did in fact say: “if war crimes have been committed by members of Myanmar’s Defence Services, they will be prosecuted through our military justice system, in accordance with Myanmar’s Constitution”. She also referred to “the sufferings of the many innocent people whose lives were torn apart as a consequence of the armed conflicts of 2016 and 2017, in particular, those who have had to flee their homes and are now living in camps in Cox’s Bazar” (in neighbouring Bangladesh).
A son who was a young teenager when he saw his mother first put under house arrest in Yangon, who has observed her suffering from afar, who witnessed his father Michael die from cancer in 1999 in Britain, after the junta refused him a visa to enter Myanmar to say a “final goodbye” to his wife: we can surely understand why Mr Aris wishes to stand up for Ms Suu Kyi.
His protestations will not clear her name. Even her fellow Nobel laureate, Desmond Tutu, condemned her in 2017. “If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence” over the Rohingya, he wrote, “the price is surely too steep”. Mr Aris has retorted, saying: “I think she spoke out a great deal but what she said wasn’t reported.” If he can produce documentary evidence of her doing so, perhaps the case for her defence can and should be constructed.
But on a human level, it is hard to disagree with Mr Aris that his ailing mother should not have to serve out her remaining years alone, in a cell he says is “infested with cockroaches and mosquitoes” and with no air conditioning even in the extreme heat. The twilight of Ms Suu Kyi may be the fading away of a politician whose halo turned to ashes of shame. But could he be right that “she is one of the few people who can extract any sort of peace out of the mess the country is in right now”?
I would not previously have thought so, but the present situation in Myanmar is so dire that any straw of hope is worth clutching. And even if she could not help, Ms Suu Kyi surely deserves better than her current fate.
Mr Aris is highly reluctant to become a public figure of any sort. But we can comprehend, and perhaps applaud him, when he says: “Although I never wanted to take up the cause and follow in her footsteps, I cannot stand aside and let what is happening unfold before me without at least trying to stand up and do my bit.”
