As of Wednesday, the Burmese democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi will have spent a total of 20 years in detention in Myanmar, five of them since her government was overthrown by a military coup in February 2021.
Almost nothing is known about her state of health, or the conditions she is living in, although she is presumed to be held in a military prison in the capital Nay Pyi Taw. For all I know she could be dead, her son Kim Aris said last month, although a spokesman for the ruling military junta insisted she is in good health.
She has not seen her lawyers for at least two years, nor is she known to have seen anyone else except prison personnel. After the coup, she was given jail sentences totalling 27 years on what are widely viewed as fabricated charges.
Yet despite her disappearance from public view, she still casts a long shadow over Myanmar.
There are repeated calls for her release, along with appeals to the generals to end their ruinous campaign against the armed opposition and negotiate an end to the civil war that has now dragged on for five years.
The military has tried to remove her once ubiquitous image, but faded posters of The Lady, or Amay Su, Mother Su, still appear in tucked away corners of Myanmar.
Could she still play a role in settling the conflict between the soldiers and the people of Myanmar? After all, it has happened before. In 2010, the military had been in power for nearly 50 years, brutally crushed all opposition, and run the economy into the ground. Just as it is doing now, it organized a general election which excluded Aung San Suu Kyi's popular National League for Democracy (NLD), ensuring that its own proxy party, the USDP, would win.
As with the current election, which is still underway in phases, the one in 2010 was dismissed by most countries as a sham. Yet at the end of that year, Aung San Suu Kyi was released, and within 18 months she had been elected an MP. By 2015, her party had won the first free election since 1960, and she was de facto leader of the country.
Today’s conditions differ markedly from those in 2010. The top generals have no reformers in their ranks, and no hopes of the kind of compromise that restored democracy in the previous era.
The 15 years Aung San Suu Kyi spent detained after 1989 were under conditions of house arrest in her family home in Yangon, where she garnered international admiration for her dignified, non-violent resistance. Today, however, she is invisible.
With an uncertain health at the age of 80, it remains unclear how much influence she would have if she were released. Yet her long struggle against military rule makes her synonymous with hopes for a freer, more democratic future in Myanmar. There is simply no one else of her stature in the country, reaffirming her necessity in navigating Myanmar's path out of its current deadlock.
