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If you allow yourself to be intimidated, then you will go on being intimidated—Aung San Suu Kyi
“The world views her as one of the great heroes of our time.” —His Holiness the Dalai Lama
by Purusharth Chawla 16 April 2021
Abstract: The political system inherited by Suu Kyi on her return to Burma had enough problems for women, not only in society but also within women’s groups formed for women’s upliftment. There emerged two categories of women’s groups. On the one hand, were the Elite feminists or the traditionalists aiming to promote the role in as many fields as possible. Still, their goal of “preserving Myanmar culture” only aimed to strengthen traditional and patriarchal notions of femininity.
Aung San Suu Kyi was born in a nation with a complex colonial history conquered by the British after a series of wars with Burma. Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father, being the chief of the Burma Independence Army, revolutionary group, negotiated Burma’s independence, emerging as a national hero and a future leader, in 1947; Aung San was assassinated by political rivals the same year. Burma was granted freedom in January 1948, and Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) took over the Independent Union of Burma with U Nu as the first democratically elected Prime Minister.
For a decade Post-independence (1948 – 1958), women’s participation in the democratic process and parliamentary democracy increased. However, the increase was only symbolic, and women were still confined to a margin, connected with the family name, loyalty, respect, family solidarity, et al. Women who took up essential positions were treated as ceremonial heads following on their father’s or husband’s name in politics, maintaining their position until a family heir can take responsibility. Suu Kyi’s mother, Daw Khin Kyi, a nurse by profession, in a similar fashion, rose to be an important public figure post her husband’s assassination in 1948. She followed up to be Burma’s Ambassador to India in 1960, leaving Myanmar with her daughter Aung San Suu Kyi, where she gained an education and then moved on to the United Kingdom to attain a graduation degree in Politics and Economics, working with the United Nations in the late sixties, and entering a marriage with Michael Aris.
There was a political turmoil within the ruling party in a decade of its rule, leading to a military coup led by General Ne Win establishing a Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) in 1962. With the advent of a conservative patriarchal regime, the space for women in politics was reduced further.
After the 1962 coup, the Burma Socialist Programme Party, backed by the, was discouraging female leadership and did not provide an institutional incentive or opportunity for women to hold political power positions. (Harriden, 2012, 07)
The Annual Farmers’ and Workers’ Conferences sponsored by the Burma Socialist Programme Party neither represented women’s views nor offered women’s initiatives. As Harriden (2012) points out, “Women occupied 15 per cent of the party membership, of 225,000 women among 1.5 million members in 1981.” Eighty-five per cent of the party belonged to the men, and women were relegated to the party’s margins with no policy initiatives taken to accommodate or cater to their needs.
It was only in 1988 when Suu Kyi returned to Burma to take care of her ailing mother that she experienced a Burma so different from the one she had left as a child. Myanmar had adopted a new constitution with a one-party system policy, after which Ne Win declared himself as the President of the State in 1974. A decade and a half later, a nationalistic fervour had taken over Myanmar. People demanded a new constitution to overthrow the one-party system, establishing a real democracy catered to their rights and freedom. The Ne Win government suppressed these demands by using thorough force, killing or wounding hundreds of thousands of protestors across the country. The Military capitalised on the unrest, using it as the pretext to form the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) and institute martial law.
The political system inherited by Suu Kyi on her return to Burma had enough problems for women, not only in the society but within women’s groups formed for the upliftment of women. There emerged two categories of women’s groups. On the one hand, were the Elite feminists or the traditionalists aiming to promote the role in as many fields as possible. Still, their goal of “preserving Myanmar culture” only aimed to strengthen traditional and patriarchal notions of femininity. These groups, established mainly by the government with the participation of the privileged women of Myanmar such as the Maternal and Child Welfare Association, the Myanmar National Committee for Women Affairs, and the Myanmar Women’s Affairs Federation, were unable to fulfil their role of achieving social or political change for women on the ground. They ignored the sexual crimes against women committed by the Military against women from ethnic groups (WCRP, 2004). The others were the Progressive feminists from outside the land who wanted to change women’s status following Suu Kyi’s stature and popularity in the international political sphere. A significant step further was the emergence of another group, The Women’s League of Burma, in 1999, with women from twelve organisations of exiled ethnic groups. The group represented a diverse cultural upbringing with a common goal to uplift all women, reflecting a deep sense of sisterhood. The group differed in race, ethnicity, culture and religion, with the common goal to increase the participation of women in the struggle for democracy, human rights and the national peace process, improving the role of women of Myanmar at the national and international levels (WLB, 2011).
This historical-political context discussed above marked Aung San Suu Kyi’s political career in Burma (renamed Myanmar in 1989). Suu Kyi toured the entire country and addressed political gatherings against the country’s military rule, bringing people together, forming a pro-democracy political party, National League for Democracy. Suu Kyi was soon put under house arrest for creating political turmoil in the country by the Military. Suu Kyi’s house arrest boosted the Military’s campaign against the suppression of rights and an authoritarian rule, giving them enough confidence to hold elections. The elections conducted in 1990 with some anti-democracy parties’ support did not help the Military achieve its goal. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy swept the elections by winning 392 out of 485. The Military did not accept the results of the elections and put more leaders under house arrest.
Intersectional Feminism: The Fourth Wave
While the third wave of feminism focused on the question of what is it to be a woman, including ideas of gender, race, economy, transfeminism, the fourth wave furthered the idea of intersectionality with a broader reach via modern tools such as the internet. Kira Cochrane (2019), in her analysis of the fourth wave feminism, describes the fourth wave feminism movement, “What’s happening now feels like something new again. It’s defined by technology: tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online.” Intersectionality in feminism has been defined as “a prism for seeing how various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other,” by Kimberle Shaw, an American Law professor who coined the term Intersectional Feminism 1989. Intersectionality acknowledges that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression, and one must consider everything and anything that can marginalise people – gender, race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, et al.
Though Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar emerged as an inspiration for women to take up more public roles, her position as a feminist is diluted in the backdrop of her handling of the Rohingya crisis where those on margins were further marginalised. Suu Kyi failed to protect them or voice out a protest in their favour despite being the government’s de-facto leader. Rohingya Muslims are an ethnic community of Muslims residing primarily in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. The state policies of Myanmar against this particular community have been draconian, with laws and acts revoking their citizenship. Abdul Gaffar (2018) describes the atrocities against the community,
The U.N. refers to the Rohingya as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. However, the UNHCR has failed to provide sufficient protection to these vulnerable people, and the international community has not paid sufficient attention to the problem. Thus, the Rohingya are unwanted in Myanmar and not welcome in host countries. Ultimately, they seem not to belong anywhere with no one to protect them. (pg. 03)
In 2017, the Rohingya militant group attacked 30 police outposts. What followed was the persecution of the entire community and described as the “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” by the United Nations. There were burning the whole villages of the Rohingyas, mass rape and torture of Rohingya women and children, burning alive of these people and much more, forcing them to flee to neighbour Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, and India. The Aung San Suu government took no responsibility for the crisis or did nothing to protect these citizens. A report published by U.N. investigators in August 2018 accused Myanmar’s Military of carrying out mass killings and rapes with “genocidal intent”. The otherwise champion of human rights, Nobel Peace winner, failed to protect human rights within her country. When in 2012 Suu Kyi accepted her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize post her release from house arrest, her speech in Oslo became a ray of hope for all ethnic minorities in Myanmar when she said, Burma is a country of many ethnic nationalities, and faith in its future can be founded only on a true spirit of union. Ultimately our aim should be to create a world free from the displaced, the homeless and the hopeless, a world in which each and every corner is a true sanctuary where the inhabitants will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace.
When she came to power in 2015, not only did Suu Kyi fail to protect the Rohingyas but denied any crisis in the country. While addressing the National Parliament on the issue, Suu Kyi said that the need of the hour is to focus on the Muslims who have not fled and ask them why did they not even in a state of turmoil rather than only looking at those who fled, the reasons for whose mass exodus, she claimed, were to be enquired. In an interview with the BBC, when asked if she was worried that she would be remembered as the champion of human rights who failed to stand up to the ethnic cleansing in her own country, Suu Kyi replied that ethnic cleansing was too strong an expression, not denying the violence that perpetrated against the Rohingyas in her country. In yet another interview, she sided with the Buddhist majority and claimed that the fear was on both sides. While Muslims were struggling, Buddhists were also subjected to violence, creating a sense of dread. Suu Kyi’s narrative continued as she rejected allegations of genocide when she appeared at the International Court in December 2019.
Thus, Suu Kyi failed to utilise her position of responsibility as the head of a state and as a feminist in the current wave of feminism, relegating those already on the margins further aside based on their religious, economic status, et.al.
Socialist Feminism
Socialist feminism branched out of two theories of feminism. One the Marxist feminism that believes capitalism to be the chief reason for the oppression of women, and the other radical feminism that considers gender to be the main reason for the oppression of women.
Myanmar, post-military rule of two decades, from 2010, began not only a transition process from dictatorship to democracy but from socialism to capitalism. The billboards reading the messages of the Military General changed to advertisements of important global corporate institutions. Investments started flowing into Myanmar in the economic reformation period. Indian, Japanese, American Companies started investing in Myanmar. With the advent of a capitalist economy, Myanmar saw an increase in employment, but it translated into further oppression of women employed in various industries. There came up a significant wage gap between men and women (Gupta, 2017). Similarly, in the garment sector, which includes Garment-Textile-Footwear employees, more women than any other sector, women still face a considerable wage gap due to education, age, geographic location, experience, sub-sector, occupation, marital status, and firm dynamics, women still face a wage gap of nearly 9 per cent (Huynh, 2016). These biases were based on the expectation that women need to take up household responsibilities. Furthermore, women had to face sexual harassment at the workplace, many being a victim of human trafficking (Gupta, 2017). The Suu Kyi government did not formulate enough policies to counter gender barriers and provide a safe environment for these women. It cannot be called the failure of the Suu Kyi administration or dilution of Suu Kyi’s feminism but the gender disparity that lies at the heart of the socio-political structure of Myanmar.
Suu Kyi’s political career can be looked upon from a perspective wherein she herself became the victim of the hypermasculine system governed by the Military in Myanmar despite being the head of the government. She herself has been a victim of sexist discrimination, being described as the “foreigner’s wife” by the Military. Despite winning the elections in a landslide victory, the government still needs 75% of the majority in the Parliament in order to pass any bill or law. The Army still retains a share of seats in the Parliament, thus blocking Suu Kyi’s way to make a change that she proposed on various platforms. In 2017, twenty-five months into her tenure, Suu Kyi addressed this issue yet again from the ASEAN Business and Investment Summit in Manila, claiming, “Many people say that Burmese women are perfectly equal in society – it’s not true”. With Suu Kyi’s premiership there has been an increase in women in politics of Myanmar though they are still not allowed to hold high offices due to the pressure from the Military, with only two portfolios being awarded to women after Suu Kyi’s win in 2015.
Suu Kyi’s feminism comes across as a diluted one given her position in the politics of Myanmar. On the one hand, she chooses to ignore the Rohingya Crisis and be their voice not to undercut her politics in a country of Buddhist majority and solid military influence. On the other hand, she herself stands as a victim of excessive power to the Military provided by the constitution (framed by the Military during their regime). The current Military Coup in Myanmar that happened in January is a testimony of her not-so-strong hold on political change in the country. Suu Kyi is under house arrest once again, with the Army controlling the country only a decade after the democratic transition began in Myanmar.