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By : Gwynne Dyer

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:: “I’m just a politician,” Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi told the BBC last week. “I’m no Mother Teresa.” Fair enough: She has a country to run and an army to hold at bay. But she is no Nelson Mandela either, and that has deeply disappointed some people (including fellow holders of the Nobel Peace Prize) who expected better of her.

The issue that most upsets them is her refusal to take a firm stand on the mistreatment of the Rohingya minority, Muslims of Bengali descent who live in Rakhine state in southwestern Myanmar. Since an outbreak of communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in the state in 2013, the army has treated the Rohingya with great brutality, and at least 100,000 have fled into neighboring Bangladesh for safety.

The repression has been particularly bad in the past year, with many Rohingya in the northern part of the state raped or murdered by the army. Foreign critics have begun to describe the events in Rakhine as ethnic cleansing. “I think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening,” Suu Kyi told the BBC, and a new wave of foreign outrage swept over her.

It is not too strong an expression at all. There is great prejudice among Myanmar’s Buddhists against the country’s 4 percent Muslim minority, and especially against the Rohingya. It is the one issue on which most of the population agrees with the generals, not with Suu Kyi — and she has no control over how the army behaves.

After decades of house arrest and years of campaigning, “the lady” (as she is known in Myanmar) finally took power from the army last year. But the army-written constitution gives the solders complete control of all “security matters,” and does not even permit her to be president (it was written specifically to ban Myanmar citizens with foreign relatives, such as her British-born sons, from becoming president).

There is great prejudice among Myanmar’s Buddhists against the country’s 4 percent Muslim minority, and especially against the Rohingya. It is the one issue on which most of the population agrees with the generals.

Gwynne Dyer

So the “state counsellor,” as she is officially known, is in power, but not very securely. The army could decide to take power back at any moment, though it would probably face massive popular resistance if it did. For that reason, she does not go out of her way to pick fights with the generals.

Even when the BBC asked her whether the army’s actions in Rakhine were aggressive, she refused to agree. Instead, she produced the kind of diversionary talk that the Sean Spicers of the world spout under pressure: “I think there’s a lot of hostility (in Rakhine). It’s Muslims killing Muslims as well, if they think that they are collaborating with authorities… It’s people on different sides of a divide.”

No it is not. It is the army torturing and murdering Muslims almost at random in northern Rakhine in retaliation for a terrorist attack on police outposts that happened months ago, and the victims had nothing to do with it. Most local Buddhists support the attacks on Muslims, but it is men in uniform who carry them out.

Suu Kyi did not order the soldiers to commit these crimes, and she cannot order them to stop. She cannot even publicly condemn them because the army might turn against her, and because most Buddhists in Myanmar probably approve of the army’s actions.

Myanmar Buddhists are paranoid about the perils of a Muslim takeover. It is ridiculous given the tiny size of the Muslim minority, but there is real fear about what happened centuries ago to other once-Buddhist, now-Muslim countries from Afghanistan to Indonesia. If Suu Kyi ignores that ugly fact, she risks handing the country back to the army.

Mandela had it easy by comparison. Like her, he gained his status as a secular saint by steadfastly demanding democracy through decades of imprisonment, but when he became South Africa’s first freely elected president in 1994 he really had the power. There was no fear that the apartheid regime might come back and evict him. He made wise decisions, gave up the presidency after one term, and died still a saint.

Suu Kyi has no such luck. She has miraculously persuaded a clique of greedy, autocratic, hyper-nationalist generals to surrender most of its political power voluntarily. But it was a deal in which she had to guarantee them freedom of action in their own domain, although she intends to rewrite the constitution when she can.

She is undoubtedly doing what she can to limit the army’s cruelty in Rakhine, but she is not going to throw away Myanmar’s first chance of real democracy after almost 60 years of military rule by going public about it. It is not sainthood, but it qualifies as wise political leadership.

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Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

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Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in the Column section are their own and do not reflect RiyadhVision’s point-of-view.

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