Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday went on trial in Myanmar accused of taking more than half a million dollars in bribes. If convicted, she can expect to spend an additional 15 years in prison. This is on top of the 11-year sentence she has already received for importing walkie-talkies for her security team, as well as a raft of other offenses. Her legal team is under a gagging order so is unable to discuss the merits of her defense and how it intends to play these additional charges. The military is clearly keen to ensure that Suu Kyi, 76, spends the rest of her remaining years in prison and is willing and able to generate a slew of charges against her at will. However, this does not alter the fundamental political reality of the ongoing struggle for democracy in the country. For one, everyone understands that the imprisonment of Suu Kyi is politically motivated. This will not dent her standing among the pro-democracy movement. But much more importantly, Suu Kyi is no longer a necessary part of the pro-democracy coalition and it even seems that the movement is finally beginning to outgrow her. Since the formation of the national unity government, the organization of the pro-democracy movement is no longer directed by, or reliant on, Suu Kyi and her small cadre of lieutenants at the top of the National League for Democracy party. For the first time in its history, the movement is genuinely driven from the bottom up by a diverse range of constituents, largely based in the local communities that are bearing the brunt of the military’s ongoing crackdowns. Non-Burmese minority ethnic groups are equal parts of this new struggle for a secular democracy in Myanmar. And they perhaps even have an advantage in the pro-democracy resistance due to their long experience of facing and resisting the abuses of the military in their local areas. The NLD remains a kind of central nexus in the broader movement, yes, but even it is changing as younger voices are coming to the fore. We can pinpoint the moment when the democracy movement changed to June 3, 2021, when the national unity government issued a statement inviting “Rohingyas to join hands with us and others to participate in the Spring Revolution against the military dictatorship in all possible ways.” The Rohingya genocide of 2016-17 is perhaps the defining event of Suu Kyi’s tenure in government. Not only did the Nobel Peace Prize laureate fail to speak up for the human rights of a group of her fellow compatriots while the military was conducting their “clearance operations,” she instead spared no effort in supporting and providing cover to the military as its operations expelled more than 700,000 Rohingyas from the country of their birth. She used her international standing to mollify the response of the international community and of UN agencies, she consistently defended the actions of the military in the international press, and she even defended the actions of the military in the genocide case brought against the country at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Suu Kyi and some of the old guard of the NLD were morally, and perhaps even practically, implicated in the genocide. And this old core of the NLD originally resisted international calls on the national unity government to include the Rohingya in the struggle for democracy. For the first time in its history, the movement is genuinely driven from the bottom up by a diverse range of constituents. Dr. Azeem Ibrahim But by last June something new had emerged out of the national unity government: A vision for a democratic future in Myanmar that is not predicated on ethnic Burmese and nationalist Buddhist domination, but which includes everyone, even the most historically maligned and marginalized minority groups. This is very unlike the vision for democracy espoused by the NLD for more than three decades and is driven by a new generation of leaders from all across the country’s multitude of constituencies. If democracy is to have a future in Myanmar, it is this new generation that will bring it to the country. And if they succeed, it is this young generation that will be rightly recognized as the founders of the new dawn in the country, while Suu Kyi will quietly fade into history as a brief, failed experiment in collaborationism with tyrants. Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is a director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington, D.C. and research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College. Twitter: @AzeemIbrahim Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point of view