As the old saying goes, those who try to ride a tiger end up inside it. So it is with Aung San Suu Kyi, de facto leader of Myanmar. Once a human rights hero, then an apparently willing collaborator with the army in the persecution of the mostly Muslim Rohingya minority, now Ms Suu Kyi is under arrest.
After years of resistance to dictatorial military regimes, she came to a cosy arrangement with them a few years ago: she would put an acceptable face on what was in essence still a military regime. Now the generals have concluded that they have no further use for her, they have turned on her and gobbled her up. It was easy. They have declared her election victory last year void, and have taken power in a traditional coup d’etat.
Myanmar, after a brief and unhappy experiment with a kind of licensed democracy, has reverted to type, and Ms Suu Kyi presumably finds herself once more under house arrest, as she was for 15 years before her release in 2010 and she went on to win the free elections in 2015. Warily, the army allowed her to become state counsellor and foreign minister, in effect president of the country. Now they have casually deposed her. Perhaps she is under house arrest; perhaps she will even be pushed into exile once again.
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