Suu Kyi’s image in shreds as reporters head to prison

YANGON: The jailing of two Reuters journalists shreds what remains of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s reputation as a rights champion, critics say, after she failed to come to their defence or speak up for the persecuted Rohingya minority.

Suu Kyi was once a staunch advocate for the free press and a darling of the foreign media.

During her long years of house arrest under the former junta – which choked the media inside Myanmar – it was foreign correspondents who carried her message of peaceful defiance to the outside world.

Glowing profiles burnished her image, with comparisons made to the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King.

Suu Kyi remains adored inside Myanmar. Supporters of her democracy battle say she has limited control over the military, which ceded full control in 2015 after almost 50 years in power.

But her response to the Rohingya crisis has sent her international reputation into a tailspin.

Former friends and supporters have looked on aghast at her lack of criticism of last year’s military campaign against the Rohingya.

Yesterday’s conviction of two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and their seven-year sentence has sent a chill through Myanmar’s already embattled press community. Yet throughout the trial Suu Kyi has been unmoved by calls to intervene, or even criticise the court case.

Bill Richardson, a US diplomat and until recently a Suu Kyi confidante, alleges that she denounced the two journalists when he tried to raise their plight in person.

“Suu Kyi’s response was filled with anger, referring to the journalists as ‘traitors’,” the former New Mexico governor said.

Shortly after the set-to in January, Richardson quit his position on an international advisory body into the Rakhine crisis, labelling it a whitewash. — AFP