Burma’s (not) Mother Teresa

Aung San Suu Kyi is undoubtedly doing what she can to limit the army’s cruelty in Rakhine state, but she is not going to throw away Burma’s first chance of a real democracy after almost 60 years of military rule by going public about it. It’s not sainthood, but it does qualify as wise political leadership.

Nelson Mandela had it easy by comparison to Aung San Suu Kyi. He gained his status as a secular saint by steadfastly demanding democracy through decades of imprisonment, but when he became South Africa’s first freely elected president in 1994 he really had the power. Photographs courtesy of Wikipedia

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

April 24, 2017

LONDON, ENGLAND—“I’m just a politician,” said Burma’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in a BBC interview last week; “I’m no Mother Teresa.” Fair enough: she has a country to run, and an army to hold at bay. But she’s no Nelson Mandela either, and that has deeply disappointed some people ...

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