Myanmar’s military dictator Min Aung Hlaing has said he has been “extremely lenient” towards detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, falling short of suggesting her release in a rare interview.
The 81-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate has been in detention along with other democratically elected leaders of her government, which was overthrown in a military coup in February 2021.
Min Aung Hlaing, the junta leader who led the coup, became president of the country following elections widely condemned by rights groups as a sham.
She has had no contact outside of the country since a letter to her son two and a half years ago.
Ms Suu Kyi was sentenced to a total of 35 years in prison during military trials on a series of charges that she has rejected as fabricated and politically motivated.
Following a series of amnesties amid international pressure for her release, Ms Suu Kyi is still left with 13 years to serve, effectively meaning she could spend her life in jail.
“I have been extremely lenient toward her,” Min Aung Hlaing said in an interview with Time magazine.
“We made every possible effort to prevent the situation from reaching this point,” he said, referring to the political crisis leading up to the coup.
He said a potential amnesty for Ms Suu Kyi “depends on her”, though he suggested that could change if “grounds for reconsideration emerge on our part”, Time reported on Wednesday.
Min Aung Hlaing repeated his allegations of rampant fraud during the 2020 elections, in which Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a second landslide victory.
He called it “one of the most disgraceful elections in democratic history”, even as local and international observers called the election largely free and fair.
It marked Min Aung Hlaing’s first interview with a western news media outlet.
It is rare for Myanmar’s military leadership to engage with western entities, which have been critical of the junta over alleged human rights violations and attacks on minority communities that led to a mass exodus of Rohingya refugees in 2017.
More than 700,000 Rohingya refugees were forced to flee across the border into Bangladesh after the military launched a crackdown under counterterrorism “clearance operations” that saw hundreds of villages burned and nearly 10,000 ethnic minority people killed, according to a UN fact-finding mission.
The interview has evidently angered Myanmar’s military leadership, which has issued a strongly worded condemnation of Time’s article.
The Myanmar government said the interview was not presented in the original question-and-answer format in which it was conducted, but rather as an article, according to a press statement.
“The published article did not accurately reflect the responses given during the actual interview. It also included unfavourable and inappropriate commentary, interviews with other individuals, and various analyses that were not part of the original interview,” it said.
Kim Aris, the son of Ms Suu Kyi, made a fresh appeal for her freedom in a new letter addressed to Min Aung Hlaing.
He hand-delivered the document to the Myanmar embassy in London on Tuesday.
“Still the military junta hold my mother Aung San Suu Kyi,” Mr Aris told The Independent.
“She symbolises freedom and democracy in a country taken over by and run by the rule of military law. The world cannot allow democracy to be snuffed out and for my mother not to be freed.
“At her age it is the equivalent of execution to keep her hidden and locked up.”
The Independent released an award-winning documentary on the plight of the controversial former leader of Myanmar in December 2024, Cancelled: The Rise and Fall of Aung San Suu Kyi.
Ms Suu Kyi won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1991 for being Burma’s “symbol of freedom”. Her son, Mr Aris, accepted the award on her behalf as she was under house arrest at the time.
