Exclusive on Aung San Suu Kyi
Leaked footage and prison logs reveal ousted Myanmar leader’s life in detention.
Hello On Myanmar crew,
This Thursday, Aung San Suu Kyi turns 80 in military custody.
Before getting into our scoop, here’s the bare-bones backstory for newcomers: Suu Kyi rose to prominence during Myanmar’s (then Burma’s) 1988 pro-democracy uprising – one that ultimately failed but made her a symbol of peaceful resistance. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while locked under house arrest. After years in detention, she emerged to guide the democratic transition, leading her National League for Democracy to landslide victories in 2015 and 2020.
Then came February 1, 2021. The day parliament was set to convene, the military jailed her instead.
My colleague Tin Htet Paing and I obtained detailed logs of her daily prison routine and rare courtroom footage of her with ousted president Win Myint. The story went live in the Guardian today.
Suu Kyi has become one of the most complicated figures of our time.
Her international standing collapsed when she defended Myanmar against genocide allegations at the International Court of Justice over military atrocities against the Rohingya Muslim minority. It was a shocking moment. The same human rights icon who’d endured nearly 15 years of house arrest stood, of her own volition, defending the persecution of one of the world’s most vulnerable peoples. I explore that tension in this post.
Inside Myanmar and among the diaspora, she remains massively beloved. The daughter of independence hero Aung San, the face of Myanmar democracy. To many, her imprisonment represents another profound sacrifice in a lifetime of them.
British news outlet The Independent has campaigned to rehabilitate her image lately, including releasing a documentary. As the country crumbles under military rule while she languishes in prison without proper care, rehabilitation becomes easier to imagine.
But whatever you think of her, imprisoning anyone on bogus charges is wrong – as is the detention of Win Myint and thousands more political prisoners.
Could she still change the game if released? What if she called on the resistance to lay down arms – would they listen? Or maybe she remains locked up precisely because she won’t make that call.
The prison logs reveal she’s been reading junta newspapers. Though filled with propaganda, these dailies contain detailed rebuttals to exiled media reporting on military atrocities. That matters because it shows us what she knows about the civil war tearing the country apart.
Sean Turnell, an Australian economist who served as her adviser and was imprisoned in Myanmar before his release in November 2022, told me that he was also given state newspapers in jail.
“We read between the lines about what the regime was saying, and those jails leaked like a sieve,” he said. “It wasn’t that hard to get the peak global stories and then think through the implications for us. Most certainly she knows the scale of the uprising.”
Tomorrow, paid subscribers get the full minute-by-minute prison activity logs and unclipped videos of Suu Kyi. I’ll also send more insights and reflections from her son, Kim Aris, too.