The Myanmar junta tightens its grip on Aung San Suu Kyi: the former leader overthrown by the February 2021 coup was sentenced on Monday to an additional six years in prison during a river trial, denounced as policy by the international community.
The 77-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, who had previously been sentenced to a total of 11 years in prison, was found guilty of four corruption charges. A decision which constitutes “an affront to justice”, estimated a spokesperson for the American State Department.
Appeared in good health at the military court, according to a source close to the case, she did not comment after the reading of the judgment.
Arrested during the February 1, 2021 military coup that ended a decade of democratic transition in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi was placed in solitary confinement in a Naypyidaw prison at the end of June.
It is in this prison in the capital that his trial continues, which began more than a year ago, behind closed doors, his lawyers being prohibited from speaking to the press and international organizations.
It is targeted by a multitude of offenses: violation of a law on state secrets dating from the colonial era, electoral fraud, sedition, corruption, etc. She faces decades in prison.
At the end of April, the Nobel laureate was sentenced to five years in prison under the anti-corruption law, for having received 600,000 dollars and more than eleven kilos of gold in bribes from the former minister responsible for the region. from Yangon.
Disputed figure
She had previously been tried for illegally importing and possessing walkie-talkies, violating coronavirus restrictions and inciting public disorder.
“Deaf to national and international indignation, the trials to punish Suu Kyi and her relatives aim to erase the democratic past” of Myanmar, reacted to AFP political analyst David Mathieson.
“Their intention is clear to everyone, except for the international community”, whose sanctions are considered too light by some observers, he continued.
Many voices denounce a judicial harassment motivated, according to them, by political considerations aimed at putting in touch definitively the daughter of the hero of independence and big winner of the elections of 2015 and 2020.
Several of his relatives have been sentenced to heavy sentences: 75 years in prison for a former minister, 20 years for one of his collaborators. A former member of his party sentenced to death, Phyo Zeya Thaw, was executed at the end of July.
Others went into exile or went into hiding. Some of these ousted elected officials formed a parallel “national unity government” (NUG) in an effort to undermine the legitimacy of the junta. But it does not control any territory, and has not been recognized by any foreign government.
Aung San Suu Kyi remains a very popular figure in Myanmar, even if her international image has been damaged by her inability to defend the Muslim minority of the Rohingyas, victims of abuses by the army in 2016 and 2017 – a “genocide” according to Washington .
Electoral “simulacrum” in 2023?
The ASEAN special envoy for Myanmar, mandated to find a way out of the crisis, was not allowed to meet her during his most recent visit, at the end of June.
Many opponents of the military regime also believe that their fight must go beyond the Nobel Prize to try to end the grip of the generals on Myanmar’s politics and economy. Militias have taken up arms against the junta in several regions of the country, going against the principle of non-violence advocated by Aung San Suu Kyi.
The army in power defends its plan to organize elections in the summer of 2023. The United States has already rejected this “simulacrum” of elections which can not be “neither free nor fair under current conditions” , according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The junta, increasingly isolated on the international scene, took power by force under the pretext of alleged fraud in the elections of the previous year, won in a landslide by the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, ending a decade of democratic transition.
The putsch plunged the country into chaos. Nearly 2,100 civilians were killed by security forces and more than 15,000 arrested, according to a local NGO.