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Review | Burma’s Voices of Freedom: an exhaustive account of the rise and fall of Aung San Suu Kyi
- Author Alan Clements examines how and why the Myanmar leader became a global icon
- Since leading her party to power in 2015, her legacy has been tainted by her handling of the Rohingya crisis
Reading Time:3 minutes
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Burma’s Voices of Freedom
by Alan Clements and Fergus Harlow
World Dharma Publications
3/5 stars
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Aung San Suu Kyi’s precipitous fall from grace reached its nadir last December, in the Netherlands. Myanmar’s leader appeared in front of the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, to answer allegations that her government had committed genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Just four years earlier, the Nobel Peace Prize winner had led the National League for Democracy (NLD) party to a crushing victory in Myanmar’s first free and fair elections since 1960. But in August 2017, an army-led crackdown resulted in more than 700,000 Rohingya fleeing from western Myanmar across the border to Bangladesh.
Despite the United Nations describing the exodus as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, Suu Kyi refused to condemn the army’s actions. Now Myanmar – previously known as Burma – is again a pariah state and Suu Kyi’s reputation has been permanently tarnished.
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Burma’s Voices of Freedom acts, in part, as a reminder of how and why Suu Kyi became a global icon, hailed by presidents and pop stars alike. The book is a massive, four-volume compendium chronicling the struggle for democracy in Myanmar since 1988, when Suu Kyi was named the leader of the pro-democracy movement.
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