In a historic election this year, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won the Myanmar general elections with a sweeping majority in the parliament.
Suu Kyi has been a global figure and the face of human rights since the time she returned to Myanmar in the late 1980s. After spending over two decades under house arrest and a prolonged struggle against the military-led government to bring democracy to Myanmar, Suu Kyi’s party will finally be able to form the government.
However, a technicality in the Myanmar constitution, will not allow Ms. Suu Kyi to take the highest office in the country. An amendment to the Myanmar constitution, which came into effect in 2008, debars any person from holding the President’s office who has or had a foreign spouse. This amendment was quite clearly aimed at limiting Ms. Suu Kyi.
But this does not seem to hold back Ms. Suu Kyi who has made it quite clear, in her recent interviews, that she will anyway run the country by putting a ‘proxy’ President. By saying that “the head of the state does not necessarily have to be the head of the government,” she has not minced her words when it came to indicating that the authority of running the government will lie with her. Her statements have not gone down well with many who see them as going against the pro-democracy ideology of Suu Kyi.
Her loud and clear message declaring her position in the country, however, isn’t the only thing ruffling feathers. Many have questioned Suu Kyi’s silence on the plight of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Devoid of Burmese citizenship and the right to hold a public office, Rohingya Muslims are known as one of the most persecuted communities in the world. This situation has been called one of the worst refugee crisis in history. (Courtesy of Youth Ki Awaaz)
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