Suu Kyi was initially sentenced to four years in prison, it was announced Monday morning. Later in the day, state television reported that the military junta, the rulers in Myanmar, has reduced that sentence.
Since the Myanmar army took power on February 1 this year, the Southeast Asian country has been in chaos. Almost the entire top of the democratically elected ruling party of 76-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi is in prison or under house arrest. Junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing said Suu Kyi’s party had committed fraud in the parliamentary elections a few months earlier.
mock trial
Suu Kyi . appeared in May in a mock trial before the judge for ‘incitement’ and ‘violating the corona rules’. Suu Kyi received her sentence on Monday. That used to be four, but now two years in prison. The sentence of former president Win Myint has also been halved to two years.
Suu Kyi faces other charges, for which she could face years in prison. She was charged with election fraud two weeks ago. Her party NLD won the last parliamentary elections by force majeure. The military took power in February before the NLD could take its seats in parliament.
Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In recent years, it has fallen off its international pedestal for its permanent refusal to support the Rohingya minority threatened in Myanmar.
Flash mobs
Small demonstrations against the coup are still regularly held in Myanmar. More than 1,300 people have died as a result of violence by security forces against those demonstrations, according to human rights groups.
To avoid actions by soldiers, the activists now appear in flash mobs, only to disappear just as quickly. On Sunday, a military truck drove into one such demonstrating flash mob in Yangon, the country’s largest city. This included five dead and dozens injured.
Experts have been warning for weeks that clashes between junta and opposition could degenerate into eand civil war.
In the early 1990s, Suu Kyi spent a long period under house arrest. During that period she won the first democratic elections in Myanmar, which had just changed its old name Burma. However, the military junta in power at the time did not recognize the outcome.
Suu Kye was also under house arrest from 2003 to 2010. Five years later, Suu Kyi became head of government, but in the background the army was pulling the strings. When the National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi’s party, won the elections again last fall, another coup followed.
Rohingya
Suu Kyi himself is not undisputed either. She is accused of not standing up enough as head of government for the Rohingya, an Islamic minority in Myanmar. In 2016 and 2017, the government army drove some 700,000 Rohingya to neighboring Bangladesh. The United Nations described this military campaign as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing and possible genocide. In 2019, Suu Kyi had to answer to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for the prosecution of Rohingya.
Supplement: This post has been updated throughout the day.
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