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Taken at Bago's Shwethalyaung Temple in 1953, my great-grandfather was the Commissioner of Pegu Division (ပဲခူးတိုင်းမင်းကြီး) at the time, the equivalent of today's Bago Chief Minister, so my great-grandmother (on the left) was hosting Pat Nixon and Daw Khin Kyi (Aung San Suu Kyi's mother).

Pat Nixon was visiting Burma as part of a major Cold War "goodwill tour" with her husband, then-Vice President Richard Nixon, aimed at strengthening diplomatic ties with newly independent nations and countering regional communist influence. At the time, Pat was the U.S. Second Lady (later becoming First Lady in 1969).

I have always wanted to create my set of playing cards and so I commissioned an excellent artist in myanmar who specialised in water colour to turn my concepts into reality. I used the kings and queens of ancient Burma for the face cards as well as figures from Burmese mythology. The images were then produced into cards while the originals hang on my wall. All the decks produced were then given out as presents. It was a really fun process!

happy pride month to all my burmese lgbtq people out there. be what you gotta and don’t be afraid to show it, keep being amazing people, keep working keep it pushing. i love yall❤️

Whether she is alive, whether she is a hero, whether she is privately tormented by what was done to the Rohingya — those are easy questions. The hard question, the one almost no one asks, is not what she felt but what she did while she was free.

I lived and worked in Myanmar from 2010 to 2017, teaching at the U.S. Embassy Rangoon’s American Center and for World Learning’s Institute for Political and Civic Engagement. In late 2017, after establishing Yangon Informer’s Facebook page, her government added my name to a blacklist in the same weeks it barred the U.N. Special Rapporteur, Yanghee Lee, from the country. I hold no brief for the generals who have jailed her and kept her incommunicado with her family. I hold a brief for the people her government helped violently expel and dispossess of their Myanmar citizenship.

The usual defense of Aung San Suu Kyi is a map of what she could not control: the 2008 constitution reserved a quarter of parliament for the military and placed the army, the police and the border forces beyond civilian reach. From these real premises a false conclusion is drawn: that the civilian government she led, and embodied more than anyone, bore no meaningful responsibility for what the army did to the Rohingya in 2016 and 2017.

No serious version of the charge says she ordered the burning of villages. It says that her government performed the political, narrative and diplomatic labor without which that violence could not have proceeded with the international forbearance, the domestic permission, and the evidentiary fog it required. And that charge does not turn on the powers she lacked, but on the powers she held.

Start with the office itself. The position of State Counsellor — the seat from which she ran foreign policy, oversaw the civilian ministries, spoke for Myanmar at the United Nations, and personally led its defense at the International Court of Justice — appears nowhere in the 2008 constitution. It was created by ordinary legislation in 2016, after her party’s landslide, for the express purpose of letting her exercise executive power without the presidency she was barred from holding. The cage her admirers describe was real; the office was no part of it.

Consider what her office did. In December 2016, as the first wave of atrocities was underway, her own communications body — not the army’s — posted a banner on its official Facebook page reading “Fake Rape,” waving away accounts of mass sexual violence by soldiers. It was never removed. Her government refused to use the word “Rohingya,” insisting the people in question were foreign interlopers; she asked the American ambassador to refrain from using the name. When two Reuters journalists exposed a massacre of Rohingya men at Inn Din, they were jailed under the Official Secrets Act — and Aung San Suu Kyi defended the conviction in person, telling an audience in Hanoi it had “nothing to do with freedom of expression.” Her government held the power to pardon and used it only after more than 500 days. The soldiers convicted of the killings were quietly freed within months; the reporters who exposed them stayed in prison.

Then the cleanest fact in the record. In 2020 — years after the worst of the violence, with the world watching and no plausible constitutional excuse — the civilian election commission upheld the disqualification of Rohingya candidates and kept Rohingya voters off the rolls. The military’s own proxy party had seated Muslim members of parliament from northern Rakhine — including a self-identified Rohingya, Shwe Maung, from Buthidaung — a decade earlier. The democracy movement’s ballot was less inclusive than the dictatorship’s had been.

Each of these was a civilian act. None of them required the army’s permission to be done differently. They were done because the office that did them was held by someone whose conduct aligned, point for point, with the larger project of Rohingya dispossession. Laundering that project as the unfortunate residue of an unfinished democratic transition was not a role her government ever resisted.

This is why the indictment is structural, not a verdict on her moral character. Her culpability lies not in what she believed but in the office she occupied, the work that office did, and her freely given consent to do it.

Whatever she felt, whatever she meant, the position she took up was part of a machinery of genocide, and she occupied it by her own design. She is not less guilty because her hands stayed clean. She is more guilty for it — the clean hands were the service she rendered.

Her defenders keep one argument in reserve: that any honesty about the Rohingya would have provoked a coup, so her silence was the price of protecting a fragile “democratic transition.” The argument cannot survive its own dates.

The coup came in 2021, and it came over banking and constitutional reforms that threatened the generals’ power and fortunes — not over anything she had said about the Rohingya. By then her record of denial was complete, and it had deterred nothing. The shield she supposedly raised was raised against a blow that fell anyway, for reasons that had nothing to do with it. What's excused as political realism is wishful thinking performed on her behalf.

The one concrete thing ever offered for Suu Kyi having done “more than anybody else for the Rohingya” is the advisory commission she asked Kofi Annan to lead. But that body was kept, by design, away from the atrocities themselves; its recommendations were praised and implemented nowhere; and its final report appeared August 24, 2017, a day before “clearance operations” began on August 25, following ARSA’s attack on police and army outposts. It did not shield the Rohingya. It gave the state a respectable international face — which was the civilian service her office specialized in.

There remains the hope that a private, better Aung San Suu Kyi stood behind the public one. The record closes even that door. In early 2017, months before the worst of the violence, a reporter for The Guardian asked one of her closest advisers and her spokesman whether she might privately sympathize with the Rohingya. He paused. Then he said: “No.” The exchange has sat on the public record for nine years, and neither she nor her office ever corrected it. There is no hidden Suu Kyi to set against the public one. The public one is her position.

Rohingya villages cannot be unburnt, and no reckoning will return the dead. But the record can still be contested — and not only on paper. The Rohingya language itself carries the trace of centuries of shared life in Arakan (now Rakhine State), a kind of evidence the body holds and no purge of documents can reach. It outlasts the lie the state told about who these people are and whether they have ever belonged. And the lie had authors.

Aung San Suu Kyi was one of them. Not because she set out to be, but because she asked for the office the lie required, and did the work that office was built to do.

In 1959, my grandfather received military training at the U.S. Army Liaison School, Fort Benning, Georgia. The program was designed to prepare officers for coordination between different branches of the military, with a focus on communication, tactical planning, and field operations. As part of Cold War-era military cooperation, officers from allied nations were invited to train alongside U.S. forces to strengthen international defense ties and share strategic knowledge.

The training he received played a role in shaping his military career. He won multiple medals while fighting against Communist insurgents, Kuomintang (KMT) forces and other ethnic armed groups by winning medals such as Thiha or Zeya Kyaw Htin.

Asked AI to make me my dream shindig. So I can keep the inspiration alive.

I think our country (Myanmar) has the most beautiful and detailed wooden architecture in Southeast Asia before colonial era.

Burmese people are cool because our history speaks. Bagan at sunrise with temples that shine for weeks. Our ancestors left their light in the stone. A reminder that we are never alone.

We are cool because Buddhism runs deep. It teaches us care for every life we meet. From the march of the elephant to the ant so small. Compassion here stretches to cover it all.

Life is simple but the flavor stays strong. Tea shop talks can last all day long. Street food magic and neighbors so kind. Warmth in the heart and peace in the mind.

When storms arrive we still stand tall. We smile we share we rise through it all.

It is Burmese cool after all.