Suu Kyi needs to show more leadership over Rohingya crisis

IN 2010, a brave lady who had suffered years of incarceration - albeit at her grand home at the edge of the water in Yangon - was fast becoming an icon for the downtrodden everywhere. Hers was not a brutal or violent captivity, but a slow, mind-dulling water drip of isolation designed to silence her and break her will. Or so the military junta thought.

That year, in July, Aung San Suu Kyi published a book, edited by her late British husband (denied entry to Myanmar despite creeping cancer) called, simply: Freedom from Fear. If that was not enough to stir hearts and minds, it also carried a moving foreword by Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu, the archbishop declaring his delight at the author's commitment to "dialogue and reconciliation".

Fast-forward to the present as the world watches aghast at the tragedy playing out in the all but abandoned Rakhine State tenuously clinging to the west coast of Burma. Myanmar's lady of the lake has unflinchingly looked the other way as the army clamps down on freedoms, cuts off press access, and mobs wreak havoc on Muslim Rohingyas - the violence seemingly sanctioned by hardline nationalist Buddhist Ma Ba Tha monks more bent on shaping politics than pagodas. Purity of religion (and by extension, race) is their exclusivist theme, which pits them directly against a perceived "Islamic invasion". As gruesome reports of widespread looting, arson, rape and murder rise, it is worth quoting Ms Suu Kyi's book of seminal writings now.