EDITORIAL - The Suu Kyi story has many Phl parallels

The story of Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi should be a good life lesson for all. For it encompasses a wide variety of subjects and disciplines. The Suu Kyi narrative can be dissected as a piece on political leadership, as a matter of religion, on the subject of human rights, perhaps even as an issue on human behavior and psychology.

It is a story that puts the entire gamut of humanity on the spot, beginning with how the world lionized her as a beacon of light in the dark world of Third World oppression, capped by her heralding as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and then her triumphant ascension to power in her native land. And then the Rohingya crisis that exploded in her face and how the world came upside down for her, with everyone almost wanting to spit on her image.

Actually, there is a funny aspect to the massive backlash she is experiencing as a result of the Rohingya crisis that took almost forever for her to address and then not address enough to be pleasing. The funny part comes in not knowing whether the backlash comes from those genuinely offended by her action/non-action or those simply wanting to be counted among the offended.

The funny part is funny because it is the offspring of hypocrisy, and how bewildered her original fans may have gotten on realizing their idol was not what she was cracked up to be. Her original fans have been placed on the spot, with all the exits blocked. It would not come as a surprise if these original fans sound shriller than those simply aghast genuinely by how she addressed the crisis.

Suu Kyi was placed on a pedestal solely on the basis of one qualification -her being with the political opposition in her country. To a world where politics is several notches higher than other human concerns, that seemed to be enough, that is until now when the rest of her is slowly being revealed in all its stark and sordid unpleasantness.

But Suu Kyi is not alone in her predicament. Other leaders have been similarly disrobed, which is what usually happens when such leaders are qualified by only one faulty measure -their politics. Politics is the most unreliable of all human qualifications. In the Philippines we have had our own failures, resulting from the same folly of relying on politics as a human measure. We have made heroes and heroines of political leaders and oppositionists, only to be sadly betrayed later.