How the Myanmar earthquake could hasten the release of Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected leader of Myanmar, is reported to have survived last week’s devastating earthquake unharmed in the prison cell where she is kept in solitary confinement. But could the disaster prove the prelude for her return to power?

If it did, it would be only the latest of the stunning reversals of fortune that have dotted her career.

The former Oxford housewife – who, with her National League for Democracy (NLD), has won the only three fair general elections held in Myanmar in the past 65 years – was jailed on trumped-up charges in 2021. Now aged 79, it is feared she could die in prison.

Suu Kyi’s return to official favour is not on anyone’s list of probable outcomes of the disaster. Her present situation is substantially worse than any she has endured in more than 20 years of official persecution.

Her long years of house arrest after 1990 were punctuated by occasional overtures of peace from the ruling generals, but this time around there has been nothing of the sort. She is not locked up in the modest comfort of her home, but in a squalid jungle jail, and if there have been any approaches by the military, they have not been publicised. Everything possible has been done to turn her into an unperson.

Two factors, however, make her dramatic rehabilitation possible.

One is her legitimacy in power. Despite the generals’ baseless claims to the contrary, Suu Kyi won the elections of 1990, 2015 and 2020 by landslide margins, results recognised by foreign monitors as fair.

The other factor is the suddenly increased vulnerability of the ruling generals in the aftermath of the disaster.

Legitimacy is the philosopher’s stone for Myanmar’s generals, the goal which eluded them for so many years after the great uprising of 1988.

One military leader, Senior General Thein Sein, crafted a route for his country back into the company of nations. He set up a sort of Potemkin democracy in which the army’s dominance was guaranteed but which permitted a token role for democracy and civilian politicians. The result was Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest in 2010, her election to parliament the following year, the lifting of sanctions and Myanmar’s return to some degree of respectability.

All that was junked in February 2021 when Thein Sein’s successor, Min Aung Hlaing, seized power. Today, Myanmar has never been more painfully isolated. China gives grudging support to the regime as the alternative to outright anarchy on its border; Russia’s support seems more sincere. But otherwise, Myanmar is as much of an international pariah as it was in the dark days after the suppression of the Buddhist monks’ revolt in 2007.

There is no doubt that the army craves a return to international respectability. Military sources wax lyrical about the good old days of the 2010s when the economy was relatively buoyant and the army savaged the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state but, thanks to its democratic fig leaf, was able to shrug off international criticism.

Today, everything about the regime stinks – and there seems no way out of the mess.

More than half the country is beyond the army’s control. The civil war that started in 2021 rages unabated, prompting new air strikes in recent days on rebel-held areas, even those such as Sagaing, west of Mandalay, which were crippled in the earthquake.

Why should Hlaing care? On account of a little factor called karma.

Myanmar is one of the most devoutly Buddhist nation on earth; the generals’ regular attendance at temples and monasteries is their way of attempting to buy off the forces of divine disfavour. The earthquake, of which the death toll is estimated to top 10,000, is the latest sign that it’s not working.

In 2007, the army waded in to crush the mass revolt of monks, killing many of them – an onslaught rapidly followed by Cyclone Nargis, which killed more than 130,000 in the south of the country.

To Western scientists, the cyclone’s cause was meteorological; to superstitious Myanmar Buddhists, it was caused by the army’s reckless killing of monks. It was karmic payback.

And it’s happened again. The earthquake struck only hours after the pomp and ceremony of the 80th Armed Forces Day. Many in Myanmar will have seen it as an unmistakable sign that the regime is doomed. Desperate measures, the generals may decide, will now be required to cling to power.