Uncommon footage of Aung San Suu Kyi inside a Myanmar courtroom and detailed information of her every day jail routine have been seen by the Guardian, providing a glimpse into the lifetime of the nation’s ousted civilian chief as she nears her eightieth birthday.
For the reason that navy seized energy in February 2021, little has been seen or heard of Aung San Suu Kyi, who led Myanmar for six years earlier than her arrest. She is held in solitary confinement with entry to the surface world strictly managed and solely uncommon supervised visits from her authorized staff.
The movies, dated August and December 2022, present Aung San Suu Kyi showing in a makeshift courtroom with deposed president Win Myint throughout military-run corruption trials that had been condemned by the UN, US and EU as politically motivated. The instances contributed to her 33-year jail sentence.
The footage and logs – proven to the Guardian by navy defector group Folks’s Embrace – make clear her situation and routine, amid considerations from her household and supporters that her well being has critically deteriorated and her life could also be in danger.
The logs cowl a handful of days in January and February 2024 and element a regimented life inside a specifically constructed detention facility in Naypyidaw, the capital, wherein she stays remoted from the surface world and the violent civil battle engulfing her nation.
A Myanmar jail supply, unaffiliated with the group, who final noticed her in early 2024 confirmed the fabric.
“Her voice and way of walking remained unchanged,” stated the supply. “She has stopped wearing flowers in her hair – partly because she doesn’t want to.”
Medical considerations
The information increase considerations about Aung San Suu Kyi’s well being and element the medicines she receives for a spread of points.
Dr Aung Kyaw, 30, a former political prisoner jailed for treating anti-coup protesters, described her care as “rudimentary and basic”.
“It addresses only the symptoms, not the root causes,” he stated, including that poor diet, lack of daylight, and the danger of dehydration and heatstroke throughout central Myanmar’s sweltering summer season might worsen her well being. The information present that on at the least in the future the temperature in her room reached 31C.
He added she may be particularly weak to Covid-19, tuberculosis and pores and skin infections, that are frequent in Myanmar’s prisons.
“The health implications of keeping someone who’s almost 80 in confined space and isolation, and cutting her connection with family and friends, can have a very heavy toll on her physical and mental health.”
Meditation, studying, isolation
Logs present her days as starting at 4.30am and ending about 8.30pm. She meditates for over an hour every morning and walks across the room for night train, utilizing Buddhist prayer beads all through the day.
In a single entry, she is recorded having a lunch of “two spoons of rice, chicken, fish balls soup, two pieces of chocolate, and a piece of dragon fruit” – her largest meal of the day.
Meals normally are sparse: “two half-fried eggs” for breakfast; small parts of rice, meat or fish for lunch; soup and bread for dinner.
Aung San Suu Kyi receives junta-controlled newspapers, offering some consciousness of the civil battle engulfing the nation since 2021.
Inside days of her detention, peaceable protests erupted throughout Myanmar, however had been violently suppressed by the navy. Of their wake emerged civilian resistance teams, some backed by ethnic armies which have fought for borderland autonomy for many years. The battle has claimed 1000’s of lives, with the navy accused of widespread atrocities.
Aung San Suu Kyi has spent many years below some type of navy detention; from 1989 to 2010 she was below home arrest at her household’s lakeside Yangon dwelling due to her outspoken opposition to the navy junta ruling Myanmar at the moment.
Throughout that interval she maintained hyperlinks with the surface world by way of radios on which she listened to the BBC World Service and Voice of America. In her present detention, Aung San Suu Kyi shouldn’t be afforded the identical privileges, nevertheless in line with the supply her authorized staff has managed to fulfil a few of her requests for English-language books and French novels. The logs present she spends hours studying on daily basis.
Her son, Kim Aris, stated his final contact along with her was a letter “over two years ago” centered on “family matters”.
“We know the military would censor everything. We don’t talk about anything political. I was filling her in with how my children are, and enquiring after her health, similar to what she does when she writes to me.”
He stated he would really feel “so much happier” if she had been in her Yangon dwelling, the place she had entry to a physician and a few contact with the surface world. Since its coup, the navy has made a number of unsuccessful makes an attempt to public sale the property.
“I am extremely concerned,” Aris stated. “A lot of the world seems to think she’s under house arrest, and that’s just not the case. I don’t even know if she’s alive or not – there’s no way to confirm that.”
Aris, who has been elevating humanitarian funds for Myanmar, plans to run 80 kilometres over eight days forward of her eightieth birthday on 19 June.
“She never wanted me to get involved in politics, but there are ways we can help,” he stated. “I’ve never seen the situation in Burma this bad. It’s getting worse every day for everybody there.”
The UN reported in January 2025 that almost half of Myanmar’s inhabitants was dwelling under the poverty line, with important companies crumbling and the economic system in disarray.
In June 2022, Aung San Suu Kyi’s authorized staff ordered a birthday cake that includes her {photograph}, in line with a supply accustomed to the event. A small celebration was held after a court docket listening to, the place she shared the cake with court docket employees and guards.
Sean Turnell, an Australian economist who served as her adviser and was imprisoned in Myanmar earlier than his launch in November 2022, stated she refused air con as a result of it was not obtainable to different inmates.
“They don’t mind us [high-profile prisoners] suffering, but they don’t want us to die,” he stated. “It’s a dangerous game they’re playing.”
He was sentenced in the identical prefabricated courtroom proven within the movies, he stated, positioned close to the jail employees buildings inside the compound in Naypyidaw.
Turnell recalled when he final noticed her after two years in detention she had “lost a hell of a lot of weight”, although her spirit remained “undiminished.”
In April 2024, a junta spokesperson stated Aung San Suu Kyi and Win Myint had been moved to an unspecified web site as a result of excessive warmth – a declare the supply believes might point out switch to a navy compound.
‘Wait it out’
On the navy’s strategy to Aung San Suu Kyi, Turnell stated the junta seems content material to “wait it out” – however warned of penalties if she had been to die in custody.
“There would be incredible anger in Burma,” he stated, including that her loss of life might push non-aligned individuals into resistance.
Inside Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi stays a revered determine – the daughter of independence hero Aung San and a logo of the nation’s pro-democracy wrestle.
But her worldwide standing collapsed after 2017, when she defended Myanmar in opposition to genocide allegations on the worldwide court docket of justice over navy atrocities in opposition to the Rohingya Muslim minority. Almost one million Rohingya fled Myanmar to refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh.
Democracy activist Nilar Thein, widow of dissident Ko Jimmy whose execution by the junta in 2022 brought on worldwide outrage, stated the navy fears Aung San Suu Kyi “because they know she would expose their wrongdoings” and “reinvigorate the resistance”.
However, she added, the motion was not depending on Aung San Suu Kyi’s launch.
“This is a popular uprising driven by the people themselves,” she stated. “And it will continue to move forward.”
The fees in opposition to the Nobel laureate – incitement, electoral fraud and corruption – have been dismissed by rights teams as a sham. In August 2023, the junta issued a partial pardon, lowering her sentence to 27 years – which means she can be launched aged 105.
She is one in every of greater than 29,200 individuals detained because the 2021 coup, in line with monitoring group the Help Affiliation of Political Prisoners.
The junta didn’t reply to a request for remark.
