When she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest in Myanmar.
Unable to leave the lakeside villa in Yangon, Suu Kyi’s late husband and two sons accepted the prize on her behalf in Oslo. The country’s erstwhile military junta had confined her following her return home in 1988 after completion of her studies abroad, to lead the opposition against it.
“I stand before you here today to accept on behalf of my mother, Aung San Suu Kyi, this greatest of prizes, the Nobel Prize for Peace,” her then 18-year-old elder son, Alexander Aris, read out. “Because circumstances do not permit my mother to be here in person, I will do my best to convey the sentiments, I believe, she would express.”
On June 16, 2012, Suu Kyi herself stood at Oslo City Hall to accept the peace prize. “When I joined the democracy movement in Burma it never occurred to me that I might ever be the recipient of any prize or honor,” she said. “The prize we were working for was a free, secure and just society where our people might be able to realise their full potential. The honour lay in our endeavour.”
Five years on, as the violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine province spirals out of control, the Nobel laureate is amidst her biggest crisis since her party won power in a landslide in the landmark 2015 elections. Around 150,000 Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority, have fled Myanmar in the last two weeks, trying to escape the crossfire between the military and a brewing insurgency.
For the most part, Suu Kyi, whose official designation is state counselor, has remained either silent or entirely unwilling to provide any public support to the Rohingya. On Sept. 06, she blamed “false information” and a “huge iceberg of misinformation” for worsening the chaos in Rakhine. The international community, including fellow laureate Malala Yousafzai, have chastised the Myanmar leader for her inaction, with some even calling for the Nobel committee to rescind her prize.
The most damning criticism of Suu Kyi may, however, be her own words—delivered during the two Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speeches (underlined sections are our emphasis):
When the Nobel committee awarded the Peace Prize to me, they were recognising that the oppressed and the isolated in Burma were also a part of the world; they were recognising the oneness of humanity. So for me, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize means personally extending my concerns for democracy and human rights beyond national borders. The Nobel Peace Prize opened up a door in my heart.
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