First trial for Aung San Suu Kyi in the Burmese capital

Published on : 06/14/2021 – 08:39

Former Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi is due to stand trial on Monday, June 14, during a first trial in the capital Naypyidaw. Arrested on the morning of February 1 and since under house arrest, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate – “in good health”, according to her lawyers, despite the weeks spent in solitary confinement – faces heterogeneous legal proceedings.

She is to be tried for illegally importing walkie-talkies, violating coronavirus restrictions and violating a telecommunications law.

“The court will hear witnesses for the prosecution. Aung San Suu Kyi will not speak today” (Monday), one of his lawyers, Khin Maung Zaw, told AFP. In a second procedure, she will appear from Tuesday for sedition alongside the former President of the Republic Win Myint.

Aged 75, she is also charged with violating a law on state secrets dating from the colonial era, but also with corruption, accused of having collected more than half a million dollars and a dozen dollars. kilos of gold in bribes. No trial date has been brought forward at this stage for these two charges, the heaviest against him.

“Absurd” accusations

Aung San Suu Kyi faces long years in prison if found guilty. Junta leader “Min Aung Hlaing is determined to lock him up for the rest of his life,” Debbie Stothard, coordinator of the Alternative ASEAN network, told AFP. “We are going to attend a spectacle procedure solely motivated by political reasons”.

The former leader was only allowed to meet with the legal team responsible for her defense on two occasions. Each meeting could not exceed about thirty minutes. “We are preparing for the worst”, commented Khin Maung Zaw, who denounces “absurd” accusations mounted from scratch in order to “keep her away from the (political) scene of the country and tarnish her image” .

To justify its passage in force, the army alleged “enormous” fraud in the legislative elections of November 2020, won overwhelmingly by the National League for Democracy (LND) of Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Burmese generals are threatening to dissolve this formation and have indicated that they want to organize new elections within two years. Almost daily demonstrations, economy paralyzed by massive strikes, resurgence of clashes between the army and rebel ethnic factions: Burma has been in turmoil since the putsch which ended a democratic parenthesis of ten years.

Fierce repression

The protest movement is bloodily suppressed by the security forces who have killed more than 860 civilians in recent months, including women and children, according to the Association for Assistance to Political Prisoners (AAPP).

Nearly 5,000 people have been taken into custody, with NGOs denouncing cases of extra-judicial executions, torture or violence against women. The head of human rights at the United Nations, Michelle Bachelet, deplored Friday the intensification of violence, adding that the junta was “entirely responsible for this crisis”.

The abuses prompted many opponents of the junta to form a People’s Defense Force (PDF), made up of civilians responding to the security forces with homemade weapons. But these civilian militias find it difficult to compete with an army endowed with very important resources.

Aung San Suu Kyi has already spent more than 15 years under house arrest under previous military dictatorships, before being released in 2010 and taking the head of the country five years later.

Long considered an icon of democracy, compared to Nelson Mandela, Gandhi or Martin Luther King, his image has been considerably tarnished in recent years following the tragedy of the Rohingya Muslims who fled in 2017 by the hundreds of thousands the abuses of the army to take refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. The fact that she has become a political prisoner again and the trials that await her could be a game-changer again.

With Reuters and AFP