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On Tuesday evening, a spokesperson for the military junta that has ruled Myanmar since February 2021 said that the country’s former leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been in prison since then, she was transferred to house arrest. Burmese general Zaw Min Tun said that the transfer was decided due to the very high temperatures that are being recorded in the country in recent days, and that the measure does not only apply to Aung San Suu Kyi but «for all those who need of particular precautions, in particular elderly prisoners”.
In February 2021, following a military coup, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested along with many other politicians close to her, on charges deemed politically motivated. In recent years in prison you have accumulated sentences until reaching a sentence of 33 years in prison, from which 6 were then removed following a partial pardon granted by the military junta. Very little information has been released about her and her conditions in prison in recent years: her transfer to house arrest was therefore welcomed by the people close to her, who however continue to ask for her complete release. Together with her, Win Myint, president of Mynamar from 2018 to 2021, was also transferred to house arrest.
Suu Kyi is 78 years old and at the time of the coup she was the de facto leader of the country, heading the party that had the majority in parliament. She is a complex political figure who has been at the center of her country’s history for over 30 years: first as a democracy activist during the military dictatorship following the first coup in 1963, a nonviolent leader and Nobel Peace Prize-winning political prisoner , then as leader of the opposition, after his release in 2010; and finally as de facto leader of Myanmar, after his victory in the 2015 elections, the first truly free in 25 years.
After that victory Suu Kyi had disappointed many of the expectations that had been placed in her. Under her leadership, Myanmar’s democratization process had practically not advanced, on the contrary: in some cases the situation had worsened. According to experts, for example, in recent years the press had become less freealso following some very well-known cases of journalists arrested for criticizing the army or for reporting what was happening in areas of ethnic conflict.
Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), had done virtually nothing to eliminate or modify the military regime’s laws that undermine freedom of expression, and the number of political prisoners arrested was started to increase again consistently. Above all, Suu Kyi was accused of first ignoring and belittling and then defending the army’s persecution of the Rohingya minority.
– Read also: Chi è Aung San Suu Kyi