Aung San Suu Kyi, Union Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, attends the opening of Myanmar's first round of oral observations at the International Court of Justice in 2019. She has since been jailed by the generals she defended at the ICJ. UN Photo/ICJ-CIJ/Frank van Beek

By Guy Dinmore
YANGON, Myanmar, and CHIANGMAI, Thailand , Jan 16 2026 (IPS)

Held incommunicado in grim prison conditions for nearly five years, Aung San Suu Kyi quite possibly does not even know that this week the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opened a landmark case charging Myanmar with committing genocide against its Rohingya minority a decade ago.

If news did filter through from the world outside her cell, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and ousted leader of Myanmar’s elected government would surely be reflecting on how it was that the generals she steadfastly defended in The Hague in preliminary hearings in 2019 are now her jailers.

The case before the ICJ, brought by Gambia, levels charges of genocide against Myanmar dating to the offensive in 2016-17 by military forces and Buddhist militia against the mostly Moslem Rohingya minority. Thousands were killed, villages torched and women raped, culminating in over 700,000 refugees forced across the border into Bangladesh.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s reputation was already badly tarnished in the west even before she went to The Hague. In 2017 Oxford University’s St Hugh’s College, her alma mater, had removed her portrait from public view, and in 2018 Amnesty International joined numerous institutions and cities revoking awards they had bestowed, dismayed that she had not even used her moral authority as head of government to condemn the violence. Her 1991 Nobel prize remained intact—there were no rules to revoke it.

Separately, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court last November requested an arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing for alleged crimes against humanity committed against the Rohingya.

To add salt to those wounds, her leading of Myanmar’s legal team to the ICJ may in fact have sealed her fate with the generals rather than preserve their difficult power-sharing arrangement.

“At that point her credibility was shattered and she lost the West,” commented a veteran analyst in Yangon. “It was at that point that the military decided to move against her and started plotting their coup,” he said, explaining how Senior General Min Aung Hlaing calculated that the international community would not rally behind her.

Aung San Suu Kyi turned 80 in prison last June and this week marks a total of some 20 years she has spent behind bars or under house arrest since her return to Myanmar from Britain in 1988. She has not seen her lawyers for two years and is serving sentences amounting to 27 years following an array of charges, including corruption, that her followers dismiss as fabricated.

Largely forgotten or deemed as irrelevant outside her country, in Myanmar “Mother Suu” remains widely popular, even revered—at least among the Buddhist Bamar majority—and her fate still has a bearing on the course of the country’s future.

Although the junta’s staging of phased elections, now underway in areas it controls, is dismissed by many in Myanmar as a total sham, people dare to hope that General Min Aung Hlaing, possibly the next president, might release Aung San Suu Kyi and the deposed president Win Myint, among other political prisoners. The expectation is that the military’s proxy party might make some form of gesture after the nominally civilian government takes office in April.

But resistance fighters and members of the parallel National Unity Government (NUG) operating in areas beyond junta control remain skeptical.

“The release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi remains tightly constrained by the current balance of power. For Min Aung Hlaing, her freedom would fundamentally undermine the regime’s authority, giving him strong incentives to keep her isolated as long as the military remains ‘in control,’” David Gum Awng, NUG deputy foreign minister, told IPS outside Myanmar.

The “credible pathway forward,” he said, is to seize the capital Nay Pyi Taw, where Aung San Suu Kyi is believed to be incarcerated, and dismantle the military regime while reaching a broad political agreement or coalition among resistance forces.

“This would demand tremendous collective effort, large-scale coordination, and a much stronger political and military alliance and pact,” he added, referring to the NUG’s struggle to forge agreements among disparate ethnic armed groups that have been resisting successive military regimes and sometimes fighting between themselves for decades.

A former military captain, who defected to join civilian resistance groups outside Myanmar, told IPS that he liked “Mother Suu” and that his whole family had voted for her National League for Democracy in the 2020 elections when her government was re-elected by a landslide only for the generals to annul the results in their 2021 coup.

“But now it’s very hard for her to be a leader. We don’t see any changes happening. Ming Aung Hlaing will detain her for as long as possible. I worked with him and know his personality and based on that, he won’t release her. He is a vindictive man,” the former soldier said.

For the younger generation who paid a heavy price in mass street protests crushed by the military in early 2021 and then fled to join resistance forces springing up across the country, it seems time to move on from the era of Aung San Suu Kyi.

“It is time for a new leader. She is old. Gen Z will not listen to her,” was the comment of one hotel worker who also praised her legacy.

The NUG and the new generation are starting to acknowledge the historic abuses and wrongs committed by successive Myanmar leaders against the mostly stateless Rohingya community.

Some are following news of the ICJ hearings this week and openly say Aung San Suu Kyi’s role in 2019 in defending the military against charges of genocide was morally wrong and that she had ended up weakening her own position.

“She’s not there to defend them now,” commented one young man who was forced to flee Myanmar as the military hunted down his father, a prominent activist.

People who have known her for years seem to disagree over what really motivated Aung San Suu Kyi in taking that fateful step in The Hague.

Was it pride in defending her country as the daughter of Aung San, independence hero and founder of the modern military? Or did she wrongly calculate it was her only way forward while trying to introduce political and economic reforms that would curb the power of the generals?  Or was she simply like one of them—a Buddhist nationalist of the Bamar majority who remained skeptical about real federalism and saw the Rohingya as migrants who did not “belong” in Myanmar and were a threat to its dominant religion?

In a country where one powerful force remains committed to a past that is rejected by a large majority of its people, such questions over the shape of Myanmar’s future remain highly relevant, as does the fate of one woman.

IPS UN Bureau Report