Sitting in a dimly-lit bamboo shelter in the world’s largest refugee camp, Rohingya Muslims like Azizur Rehman could be forgiven for hating Aung San Suu Kyi.
Five years ago, the then-leader of Myanmar appeared at the International Court of Justice to deny the Rohingya were victims of genocide by her country’s military, much to the shock of the rest of the world.
Yet Rehman, 34, speaks enthusiastically from Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh about the now jailed Myanmar leader and her father General Aung San, Myanmar's independence hero, who in 1946 declared that Myanmar’s citizens “will live together and die together” and assured full rights and privileges for the Rohingya. One year later, he was assassinated.
“I don’t think she (Suu Kyi) is the real enemy of the Rohingya,” he tells The Independent. “She was just a rag doll who never had absolute power.”
Instead he blames the army itself and the Mogh Baghi – a common term used by refugees for the Arakan Army, the most powerful Buddhist rebel group in Myanmar accused of forcefully displacing tens of thousands of Rohingya.
“I don’t know if I, or the tens of thousands of people like me, will ever return to Burma. But I believe Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from detention could awaken her conscience and give her a chance to redeem herself for not speaking up for the Rohingya when she was in power.”
Rehman, who fled Rakhine State during the 2017 mass exodus, now works as a community leader in the camp, helping those who continue to flee war and destruction since General Min Aung Hlaing led a military coup that overthrew Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government in February 2021.
As Myanmar plunges deeper into civil war under military rule, Rohingya refugees like Rehman are reassessing their views on the jailed leader.
Desperate and frustrated with the ever-waning attention on one of the world’s most persecuted communities, many Rohingya in exile cling to the belief that the release of Suu Kyi will provide them some hope for repatriation to Myanmar.
Rehman’s perspective appears to be representative of many of the Rohingya who have fled across the border to Cox’s Bazar.
Now in her fourth year of solitary confinement in Myanmar, Suu Kyi, 79, was long celebrated as a global democratic icon for standing up to the Myanmar generals, but later fell from grace due to her silence and perceived complicity in the brutal military crackdown of 2017 – an operation that led to mass killings and displacement of over 700,000 Rohingya.
As the Myanmar military faced accusations of "widespread and systematic clearance operations," including mass murder, rape, and destruction of Rohingya villages, Suu Kyi stood at The Hague in 2019 and dismissed the claims. She argued that the allegations against the military presented an “incomplete and misleading factual picture” and blamed the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) for triggering what she described as an “internal conflict”.
While Suu Kyi conceded that disproportionate military force may have been used and civilians killed, she said the acts did not constitute genocide. At Bangladesh’s refugee camp, some refugees at the time shouted "liar, liar, shame!" as they watched Suu Kyi on television.
Five years later, in November last year, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan requested an arrest warrant against General Hlaing “for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya, committed in Myanmar, and in part in Bangladesh”. This request is currently under review by ICC judges, who will determine whether to issue the warrant.
Umma Hanee, 75, remembers watching the ICJ hearing where Suu Kyi defended the army against accusations of genocide.
“It was due to the power of the general that she was unable to speak up for the Rohingyas at that time and General Min Aung Hlaing was actually the person in power, who used to direct violence against people in Rakhine state,” Hanee says.
“Rohingyas are the citizens of Myanmar and everyone, including Suu Kyi should raise their voice for us.”
Mohammad Shakir, 35, blames General Hlaing for pushing the Mogh Baghi into the Rakhine state, calling him the “main culprit” of the crisis in Myanmar.
“General Min Aung Hlaing has controlled the power in Myanmar,” he asserts.
Shakir believes that if “Rohingyas now stand with her (Suu Kyi) and demand her release, she might testify that Rohingya did not commit violence, but the junta did”.
The refugees in Bangladesh say they follow the happenings in Myanmar and updates on Suu Kyi through TV and online news on their phones despite bad reception in parts of the camps – once a forested area inhabited by wild animals, now home to nearly a million displaced people.
It is not the first time Suu Kyu has been under house arrest. Arrested three times before, she has spent more than 18 years of her life with little company and no connection with the outside world.
Once likened to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights in Myanmar in 1991. At the time, she was under house arrest imposed by the military junta for her role in leading the pro-democracy movement.
Her younger son Kim Aris, who lives in London, has raised concerns over his mother’s health in interviews with The Independent and made a direct appeal to the military-run government in Naypyidaw to release her on the fourth anniversary of the 2021 coup.
The Independent TV’s documentary Cancelled: The Rise and Fall of Aung San Suu Kyi shines a light on her continued imprisonment.
In Cox’s Bazaar, Sabikun Nahar, who has lived in a cramped 12ft by 12ft shelter for two years, tells how she once owned a large piece of land in Myanmar.
She alleges that the land is now occupied by the military and used for conducting activities against their people.
Nahar believes that Suu Kyi’s downfall is intrinsically linked to the 2017 crisis.
“If the 2017 influx had not happened, she might not have been jailed. Even when she was in power, she was making efforts to repatriate us. But this angered Min Aung Hlaing, and he jailed her. That’s why we are still unable to return to Myanmar,” she says.
Many Rohingya had high hopes when Suu Kyi became Myanmar’s first civilian leader after decades of military rule—largely because of her father’s legacy. General Aung San had openly referred to the Rohingya as “our own people”, a recognition later erased by successive military regimes.
Rehman and others remember the "red identity cards" issued under Aung San’s leadership—proof of their Burmese citizenship—only to be replaced later with white cards, marking them as Bengalis and Muslims rather than Myanmar nationals.
“That was the only identity proof my family held for a short period of time. Since then, we are fighting for our identity and our homeland, facing systematic oppression at the hands of the junta,” Rehman says.
Abdul Karim, a 60-year-old refugee whose mother had a similar identity card, lamented that Suu Kyi did not fulfil her commitment to ensure peace in Rakhine state and remembered her father “who was more sympathetic to them.
“We voted for her in the election as she was our only hope. But she failed us and the world,” he says.
The influx of Rohingyas into the already overcrowded camps in neighbouring Bangladesh has never stopped since 2017. It has been exacerbated by the 2021 coup which has unleashed a civil war in parts of the country, especially in the Rakhine state. It is one of the poorest among the country’s seven states and has a vast majority of the population of Rohingya Muslims.
Human rights groups have raised concerns over the living conditions in the camps where the majority of the population solely relied on the UN’s funding for food and healthcare.
The United Nations’ food agency earlier this week said it was planning to slash food rations for Rohingya refugees by more than half from next month, a move that activists say would cause widespread malnutrition among the already vulnerable community.
The Independent spoke to those who have escaped violence, rapes and forced conscription in their country. The fighting in Myanmar has intensified between rebel groups and the military since the latter claimed power and overthrew the democratically elected government.
In the last year, the military has lost huge swaths of territory to the rebel groups, including in nearly all of Rakhine State, according to reports. It has also lost territory in the west and northern Shan State in the east of Myanmar and large parts of Kachin State in the north.
Hanee, a septuagenarian, says there are textbooks in Myanmar on General Aung San while Suu Kyi had her contribution written and erased with the multiple military coups the country has seen.
She says the only way to bring peace in Myanmar is after Suu Kyi is released and the Arakan Army is held accountable and taken over.
Noor Hashim, a refugee himself who works with trafficking victims at the camps, says Suu Kyi is one of them.
“Suu Kyi has been the victim of the military like us,” he explains, demanding that she should be released and allowed to spend the rest of the days with her family.
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