Hope fades: how human rights groups lost faith in Aung San Suu Kyi

The portrait by Shepard Fairey depicts Aung San Suu Kyi haloed by a sunburst and surrounded by the phrases “Freedom to lead”, “Support human rights”, and “Democracy in Burma”. Created shortly after the street artist famously depicted Barack Obama, it went on sale in 2009 to help raise funds for rights groups petitioning Myanmar’s then-ruling generals to release her from house arrest.

“At the time, Fairey’s image of Obama had really made him incredibly popular, so many people were excited that his iconic portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi would help popularise the cause of democracy and human rights in Myanmar,” says Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch (HRW).

He said HRW encouraged Fairey to create the poster because staff “felt that she was an inspirational person who really stood for treating people with dignity and supporting human rights”.

Nine years later, Myanmar’s military stands accused by UN investigators of genocide against Rohingya Muslims, almost a million of whom have fled the country to escape campaigns of murder, rape, and arson over the past two years. They accused Aung San Suu Kyi herself of having “contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes”.

In the past year, a major British trade union, the London School of Economics, the US Holocaust Museum, Dublin and at least four UK cities have withdrawn major honours from Aung San Suu Kyi while condemning her failure to protect the Rohingya minority.

Inside Myanmar, however, she remains nearly as popular as ever, seen as a bulwark against both military encroachment into politics and international condemnation.

“I still have a framed copy of the portrait signed by Shepard Fairey. It was a birthday present from my wife,” says Simon Billenness, a former executive director of the US Campaign for Myanmar (USCB).

As he was preparing for a Skype meeting with other rights activists last year, Billenness removed the portrait from his wall.

“I didn’t want it seen in the background,” he says. “To me, it now represents the hopes that we projected onto Aung San Suu Kyi. The portrait is certainly not representative of her performance in power.”

Another organisation that raised funds through Fairey’s poster was the Human Rights Action Centre, whose founder, Jack Healey, is best known for mobilising celebrities to promote awareness of human rights issues. He tells The Guardian: “There have been no sales of the Aung San Suu Kyi poster in years. We gave most of the ones we had away for free.”

At HRW, on a copy of the poster in its New York office, a staff member attached a note to the end of the phrase “Freedom to lead” saying “or not”.

“Everyone who saw it immediately laughed and then wondered whether they should be crying instead,” says Robertson. “Working on human rights issues requires a sense of humour even in the worst situations, so that put-down of Aung San Suu Kyi for her failure of leadership on human rights really resonated.”

The poster and the note hang in HRW’s Asia division office, while in New York, Robertson says, “there are a couple hundred more copies gathering dust”.

This reaction to Aung San Suu Kyi’s iconography is countered at home. In October 2017, shortly after Myanmar’s heaviest assault on the Rohingya began, a handful of painters gathered in a Yangon gallery to paint portraits of the leader they call “Mother Suu”. They were protesting against the removal of a different portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi from an Oxford University building a week earlier.

In February, Yangon’s regional government hung a towering portrait of her at a construction site overlooking a park where political protests are commonly held, and sometimes crushed.

A spokesperson for Fairey said he would be unable to comment because of scheduling constraints. When Esquire asked him in 2015 whether Barack Obama had lived up to the “Hope” poster, Fairey said: “Not even close.”