How DVB Rehabilitates Aung San Suu Kyi
Aung San Suu Kyi, Forever Frozen in 1991
No, this is not going to be an article about Alan Clements or his mate Fergus Harlow - DVB’s in-house Suu Kyi propagandists. Today, I want to focus on this morning’s news item about Aung San Suu Kyi.
As a news piece, the write-up under the heading “ICRC meets with Aung San Suu Kyi in Naypyidaw” is appropriate only if the outlet has already decided to preserve Aung San Suu Kyi’s heroic image. As straight news, it is almost hero-worship.
The problem is not reporting her imprisonment, isolation or health concerns. These are obviously all relevant. It is the cumulative framing.
So we have the description. “Burma’s jailed State Counsellor.” What does this do? It treats her former office almost as a continuing title. Then we have “Nobel Peace Prize laureate.” Of course, it is undeniable that she received this prize. Still, in the news piece, it supplies heroic moral prestige without explaining how completely that reputation collapsed over the Rohingya genocide.
Then we come to the really insidious bits.
The junta, the article says, replaced her “civilian-led NLD administration.” Really? Does that not sanitise a government that defended the military at The Hague, denied rape, denied atrocities and excluded the Rohingya politically? In the same sentence, the “replaced … with a regime” phrasing creates an overly neat democracy-versus-dictatorship contrast. This is a false binary. And we all know it. The coup was unlawful and brutal, but the preceding government - ASSK’s government - was neither fully civilian nor rights-respecting. Ask any self-respecting NLD-er, and they will keep banging on about how the military controlled everything. And it is all very convenient - claim total military control when excusing the genocide, yet claim full "civilian democratic legitimacy" when condemning the coup.
Finally, the second paragraph turns the ICRC visit into another instalment of the imprisoned-democratic-icon narrative.
Even a short news item need not rehash these loaded phrases. But once it invokes the Nobel Prize and her supposed civilian democratic legitimacy, omitting the reason she became a reviled and trashed leader is an editorial choice. It ain’t neutrality!
This isn’t just about DVB, of course. Across international reporting, standard background boilerplate repetition of phrases like those mentioned above does a lot of ideological work. By failing to contextualise those titles and phrases with her active complicity in the Rohingya genocide, most visibly her defence of the military at the International Court of Justice, such news items default to an uncritical "heroic icon" archetype.
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