Why is Daw Aung San Suu Kyi ignoring her country’s most vulnerable people?
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As Myanmar’s new government gets down to business, one thing is increasingly clear – there won’t be much to look forward to for the country’s 1 million or so Rohingya people.
The West has rejoiced at the election of a new government dominated by the National League for Democracy and headed, in effect, by the party’s leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. But for the Muslims of western Rakhine State Myanmar’s new era is already turning out to be a disappointment. There is almost certainly worse to come.The Rohingya have endured decades of harassment, marginalisation and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Myanmar’s old military regimes (and the local Rakhine people), amounting, some argue, to genocide. Everyone knew that Myanmar’s new leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has also been ambivalent toward their plight. She has refused to even call them by their own name, for fear of offending the country’s often-Islamophobic Buddhist majority in the run-up to last November’s general election, which she won by a landslide. But surely Myanmar’s first civilian government since the 1960s would be better than the murderous, kleptocratic rule of the generals? [/su_column] [/su_row]
May be not. First came the news, in mid-May, that Myanmar’s foreign ministry – now headed by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi – had asked the American embassy not to use the term “Rohingya” on the spurious grounds that it was “controversial” and “not supportive in solving the problem that is happening in Rakhine State”. The request was utterly disingenuous. The Rakhine people might indeed prefer to call the Rohingya “Bengalis” – implying that they are illegal immigrants from what is now Bangladesh – but this is an essential part of the exclusion of the Rohingya from the mainstream of Myanmar life that constitutes the problem in the first place.
Prompted by the visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi returned to the theme on May 22, saying that her government would be firm about not using “emotive terms” like “Rohingya” or “Bengali”. Yet, as has been pointed out, she has never asked anyone – chauvinist Buddhist monks, soldiers or legislators – to refrain from using the term “Bengali”.