The National Unity Government (NUG) of Myanmar, an alliance of pro-democracy forces in the country opposed to the military junta, which took power in February, still naturally gravitates around the leadership of the National League for Democracy (NLD), and their longtime leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. The future of the NUG will be very precarious indeed if it allows itself to be entirely dependent on old leaders and the old party structures.

On June 10, the junta announced corruption charges against Suu Kyi, carrying a potential penalty of up to 15 years. Such a move against Suu Kyi was expected because if the NUG somehow manages to depose the junta and restore democracy to the country, Suu Kyi will be released from prison and instated in high office, one way or another.  

It is, however, surprising that the junta took five months to concoct the corruption charges against Suu Kyi. Whatever is happening in Myanmar politics is very much expected.

This arrest also highlights an important aspect of Myanmar’s politics that the NUG should not ignore. If the democracy movement is to succeed in Myanmar, it cannot be over-reliant on just Suu Kyi and her inner circle, and it cannot be reliant on just the NLD. Such a situation will always enable the military to snuff out any challenge to their power.

When the military executed its coup in February, it swiftly detained the leadership of the civilian government and NLD cadres. Following the coup, the international community expressed its fears that the democracy movement would be quickly choked off. Fortunately, we were wrong.

This popular movement has led to the emergence of several new leaders from diverse backgrounds.

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim

Members of all classes, communities and religions in the country rose against the coup and since then the protests against the military action continue.

This popular movement has led to the emergence of several new leaders from diverse backgrounds, all committed to building a democratic country together.

Many of those local leaders were, very wisely, co-opted into the NUG structure, so that the NUG is indeed the broadest and most democratic political organization that Myanmar has had since at least the 1960s.

But the Burmese remain the largest ethnic group in the country, with a disproportionate influence over culture and politics. The NLD remains the pro-democracy party representing the interests of just the Burmese. And Suu Kyi remains immovable as the center of gravity around which the NLD moves.

The NLD should cultivate a new generation of leaders who can take over when Suu Kyi and her entourage are detained. And the NUG needs to promote fresh new faces who can garner sympathy and support among the international community.

After her five years in power, Suu Kyi is an irreparably tarnished figure on the global stage. The Rohingya genocide happened under her watch, and when pressed on the issue she always sided with the perpetrators, never with the victims. After a lifetime of fighting for democracy, she did virtually nothing to broaden and deepen the democratic institutions, the culture and the politics of Myanmar, and seemed content simply to have her party in power in collaboration with the military.

We know that the NUG stands for so much more. And in just two months of its existence, they have moved the political needle in Myanmar farther than Suu Kyi would have dared even at the peak of her popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Think just of the commitments made by the NUG to the Rohingya. That would have been impossible without the truly broad and democratic representation that the NUG embodies. If the NUG is to be all that it wants to be, and if it is to succeed, it must be able to move beyond Suu Kyi — it must not allow the mistakes and people of the past to drag down the future of Myanmar. And it needs to empower and promote younger, more effective, leadership.

• Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is a director at the Center for Global Policy and author of “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide” (Hurst, 2017). Twitter: @AzeemIbrahim