The Economist: After two years of civilian rule, Myanmar’s politicians are gloomy

March 30th marked two years since the army ceded power to the NLD. But it left in place a constitution that exempts it from civilian control, puts it in charge of internal security and grants it a quarter of seats in parliament, massively curtailing the new government’s authority. The constitution also deliberately bars Ms Suu Kyi from the presidency, as the parent of foreigners (her children are British citizens). Ms Suu Kyi has at least got around that: she is, in her own words, “above the president”. In late March the placeman she had installed in the presidency announced on Facebook that he was resigning to “take a rest”. Parliament promptly elected a new one, Win Myint, an NLD loyalist like his predecessor. Little will change as a result. Ms Suu Kyi remains firmly in charge.

Some things have improved markedly since the NLD took office. Myanmar has jumped up Transparency International’s corruption index, a survey based on public perceptions. Citizens are also much freer to speak their minds than they used to be. But NLD politicians are novices who struggle to put ideas into practice. Some were first elected in 1990, but were never allowed to take their seats in parliament. Instead, the army put many of them in jail. While Ms Suu Kyi runs the country, a clique of these ageing former political prisoners runs the party. They are not running much. The NLD is more a fan club than a party articulating policies and training future leaders. As a party whip puts it, “NLD minus Aung San Suu Kyi equals nearly zero.” [...]

The NLD is also cutting itself off from people with ideas. Foreign advisers are regarded with growing suspicion because of their complaints about Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority. Parliament is cooking up legislation to curb the activities of the UN and international NGOs. The NLD is even more hostile towards home-grown activists. The government has passed a law making it easier for police to ban protests. Mael Raynaud, a long-term observer of Burmese politics, notes that the NLD’s imprisoned leaders did not witness the blossoming of civil society in the 2000s thanks to a loosening up by the army and in response to a devastating cyclone. Years of repression also fostered paranoia, which has left the NLD prizing loyalty over competence.

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The New Yorker: What Happened to Myanmar’s Human-Rights Icon?

Recently, I travelled to Myanmar and interviewed dozens of people to assess what had gone wrong. Many of them pointed out that Suu Kyi’s power is sharply limited. She has no authority over the Army, while military officers still control key areas of government and have the power to reverse democratic reforms. Some believe that she has made a political calculation not to risk domestic popularity for the sake of a hated and powerless minority; others regard her as lacking political skills. There are also those who think that she shares the Army’s authoritarian reflexes and the anti-Muslim prejudices of the Buddhist Bamar majority. But almost everyone I talked to expressed surprise at the speed and the scale of her transformation. “We never expected that Aung San Suu Kyi would get us this far,” a former student activist and political prisoner who once served as her bodyguard told me. “But, at the same time, we never expected that Aung San Suu Kyi would have changed so much herself once she got into power.” [...]

Last week, I met with Wai Wai Nu again, but outside Myanmar. She now believed that her people might be facing extinction. She told me she worried that there was a plan to drive the entire Rohingya community from the country. She had been monitoring Burmese social media, and was horrified by what she read. Burmese officials were saying that mass rape couldn’t have occurred because Rohingya women were too filthy. “Because the civilian government is saying these things, people are becoming more and more full of hate,” Wai Wai Nu said. “Before, it was a military dictatorship, so no one believed them when they said awful things. But now it’s the civilian government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi saying these ignorant things and that legitimizes the hate.”  [...]

Buddhist ultranationalism has eroded the center ground of Burmese politics. In the 2015 elections, the N.L.D., anxious to avoid accusations that it was a “Muslim party,” refused to field a single Muslim candidate. For the first time since independence, no Muslims currently serve in parliament. And Suu Kyi’s government has made no attempt to revoke laws that limit the number of children Muslims can have and that create obstacles for marriages between Muslim men and Buddhist women. [...]

He was right that Suu Kyi has little alternative but to work with the people she once campaigned against. The euphoria that surrounded her ascent obscured how extensive the military’s power remains. The Army controls the ministries for defense, home affairs, and border affairs, and a quarter of the seats in parliament are reserved for men in uniform. Even ministries that are in civilian hands, such as finance, are full of holdovers from the previous regime, and much of the country’s budget is reserved for military use. Myanmar’s constitution, written by the military in 2008, presents additional difficulties. It allows the Army to declare a state of emergency and seize power, and it also contains a clause that makes Suu Kyi ineligible for the Presidency. (Her current official title, State Counsellor, is a workaround.) Suu Kyi wants to amend the Constitution and become President, but this requires military support. Her defenders often cite the precariousness of her constitutional position as a reason for her reluctance to speak out about Army abuses. While pushing the military for constitutional reform, she must also avoid antagonism and a return to military rule. [...]

“Aung San Suu Kyi has the benefit of having become an icon without saying a whole lot,” Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, told me. “Havel came to his position by saying a lot, by being a moral voice. Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t say much at all. She was a moral symbol, and we read into that symbol certain virtues, which turned out to be wrong when she actually began speaking.” Suu Kyi was not an intellectual, like Havel, or a freedom fighter, like Mandela, or an organizer, like Walesa. And, unlike her father, she did not die before her legend could be tarnished.

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The New Yorker: Aung San Suu Kyi, the Ignoble Laureate

The most urgent and powerful appeals to Aung San Suu Kyi have come from her fellow Nobel laureates. The Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, who won the prize for her advocacy of girls’ education, condemned the “tragic and shameful treatment” of the Rohingya. “I am still waiting for my fellow Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to do the same.” Addressing a letter to his “dear sister,” the anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu wrote of his “profound sadness” and called on Aung San Suu Kyi to end the military-led operations. “If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep,” he wrote. The Dalai Lama subsequently urged her to find a peaceful solution to the humanitarian crisis, saying that Buddha would have “definitely helped those poor Muslims.”

This is not the first time that laureates have spoken of their displeasure with Aung San Suu Kyi. In December last year, when the military conducted another brutal offensive against the Rohingya, thirteen Nobel winners, including Muhammad Yunus, Shirin Ebadi, and Leymah Gbowee, signed an open letter deploring the Army’s use of helicopter gunships, arbitrary arrests, and the rape of women. “Despite repeated appeals to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” they concluded, using her honorific, “we are frustrated that she has not taken any initiative to ensure full and equal citizenship rights of the Rohingyas. Daw Suu Kyi is the leader and is the one with primary responsibility to lead, and lead with courage, humanity and compassion.” [...]

There’s no evidence that the laureates’ chorus of indignation has any bearing on Aung San Suu Kyi, or whether their declarations can break the spell of isolation and bring her back to the outside world. The only response she has made to the present crisis in Rakhine was a Facebook post, detailing a phone conversation she had with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In it, she criticized the “huge iceberg of misinformation calculated to create a lot of problems between different communities and with the aim of promoting the interest of the terrorists.” While Aung San Suu Kyi has remained silent, the offices and ministries under her charge have not, describing the Rohingya as Bengalis and publicly advocating the use of force in certain situations. “If they are going to harm you, you can shoot them,” Aung San Suu Kyi’s spokesman, U Zaw Htay, said. The most egregious case of the recklessness of Aung San Suu Kyi’s government came last month, when it accused international aid workers of supporting terrorists, prompting fears for the safety of thousands of people in Myanmar employed by charities and N.G.O.s. There have been demands that the U.S. government stop using the name “Rohingya”, and when a Rohingya women gave details of an alleged gang rape, Aung San Suu Kyi’s office dismissed it as “fake rape.”

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Al Jazeera: By-elections to test Aung San Suu Kyi's popularity

Saturday marks the first time the country has gone to polls since NLD swept to power, in an early indication of views on her leadership amid increased fighting with armed ethnic groups and slower economic growth.

Hundreds of voters lined up outside polling stations on the outskirts of Myanmar's commercial capital Yangon, though the scene lacked the fanfare and enthusiasm that marked the historic 2015 polls. [...]

While the outcome of the by-elections will not affect the balance of power within the parliament where the NLD enjoys a large majority, it offers a chance to gauge the popularity of the administration in a country where nationwide public polls are not available.

Win Htein, one of the NLD's top leaders, said the party faced language barriers and problems with armed groups in the Shan state districts being contested. Fighting in some of those areas has intensified in recent months. [...]

Nobel Peace Prize winner Suu Kyi is also facing international criticism for her government's handling of a crisis in the Muslim-majority Rakhine region, where soldiers have blocked access for aid workers and are accused of raping and killing civilians.

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