What strikes you about the torrents of criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi now engulfing Western media is the sense of betrayal. "We honoured you and fought for your freedom — and now you use that freedom to condone the butchery of your own people?" thundered Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. "I am now elderly, decrepit and formally retired, but breaking my vow to remain silent on public affairs out of profound sadness," explained Desmond Tutu in an open letter to his fellow Nobel laureate condemning her silence as "what some have called 'ethnic cleansing' and others 'a slow genocide'" of Myanmar's Rohingya people is occurring on her watch. "Friends of mine devoted their working lives to the campaign for her release", wrote George Monbiot in The Guardian. "But it is hard to think of any recent political leader by whom such high hopes have been so cruelly betrayed."
That feeling is in some sense inevitable. We're perhaps not used to seeing such a fallen angel; a face going from being stamped on wearable face masks given to entire crowds at U2 concerts, to being stamped on protesters' placards with blood-stained fangs drawn over her mouth. But I suspect there's a mythology that has led us here. One that demands a hero, then requires her to be created in our own image. And one that is therefore destined to render Aung San Suu Kyi a villain just as passionately, when that image proves to be a mirage.
It's worth remembering that Suu Kyi's power in this case is largely rhetorical. She occupies the recently created position of Myanmar State Counsellor – and is rightly described as the leader of the country – but she has no real authority over the military, which is undertaking this atrocity. Myanmar's constitution gives that military legal immunity, leaving all military accountability to the military itself. That's why the world's anger at Suu Kyi must be about silence. No one's particularly asking that she do something, rather, that she say something.
And she is, I suppose. It's just mostly against the reports – from journalists and the UN – detailing the true horrors of this ethnic cleansing. The villages being burnt to the ground and fired on from the air, the people being burnt alive in their houses, the slaughtering of children in front of their families, the mass rape of women and girls. "Fake rape" her office's website blared in response to this. It's merely a subset of her hearty embrace of the rhetoric of "fake news", in which she blames "terrorists" for "lying to the world", and the Rohingya of torching their own villages. She may not control the military, but she does control Myanmar's "information committee" that apparently runs the disinformation and propaganda campaign supporting the military's actions.
Of course, her situation is more complex than this overview admits. Her defenders will say that whatever she says will come at a colossal price. This ethnic cleansing campaign sits atop a cultural consensus in Myanmar that regards the Rohingya as illegal immigrants of a sub-national, even subhuman status, irrespective of the fact they have demonstrably had a presence in the country for centuries. To challenge this consensus in any way would therefore be an act of political suicide, leading her supporters to abandon her. To the extent she rules, she rules over a thoroughly disintegrating nation, held together only by a unity pact with the military. She therefore cannot afford to be on a collision course with the military: to take it on may be to risk the collapse of the whole country.
And it's also true that she did convene a committee of diplomats and human rights commissioners, chaired by former UN head Kofi Annan, to devise a plan to resolve the long-running tensions with the Rohingya. Perhaps it is no accident that the military stepped up its campaign as this committee was due to report. Perhaps we're seeing the military pre-emptively derailing any political solution Suu Kyi might seek to implement.
But Kristof's lament that "the moral giant has become a pragmatic politician" seems a strange one. What if she was that politician all along? "Please don't forget that I started out as the leader of a political party," she said in 2013 after a similar bout of criticism. "I cannot think of anything more political than that." It's true that during her heroic resistance she spoke a language of democracy and human rights. But it's also true that language was almost always general, platitudinal. Things like: "fundamental violations of human rights always lead to people feeling less and less human". Or, "the best way to help Burma is to empower the people of Burma". Or, "by helping others, you will learn to help yourselves".
It is from such generalities that we sketched out an icon, then coloured it in liberal, cosmopolitan tones. It's like we assumed that because she was persecuted by a brutal regime, that because she was a worldly, attractive, Western-educated, English-speaking political prisoner, she was really just an exotic version of our idealised selves. That in our admiration and concern for her we were really constructing ourselves, assuming that the world's heroes were of a piece with us, then falling in love with this image.
But you don't govern in the generalities that make image possible. The grist of politics is in the specificities. And what you're unlikely to find in Suu Kyi's history is any specific statement on the Rohingya, affirming their place as fully human or as part of Myanmar. Turns out that on the Rohingya, she has always been silent. Why should we be suddenly shocked if it turns out she acquiesces to – or even shares – the views of the people who voted for her? She never really promised us otherwise. Perhaps she was most instructive when she said "I do not hold to non-violence for moral reasons, but for political and practical reasons". If you're expecting otherwise, I suppose you're bound to feel betrayed.
Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist.
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