Suu Kyi to UN: Stay Out of Myanmar

Aung San Suu Kyi, once the darling of the human rights world, is rejecting calls for a UN probe into the persecution of Rohingyas in Myanmar, reports : 

Last month, the U.N. appointed experts to lead a fact-finding mission to investigate widespread allegations of killings, rape and torture by security forces against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority who have faced discrimination in largely Buddhist Myanmar for generations.

Myanmar has rejected the mission.

“It would have created greater hostility between the different communities,” Suu Kyi told reporters in Stockholm after a meeting with Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven.

“We did not feel it was in keeping with the needs of the region in which we are trying to establish harmony and understanding, and to remove the fears that have kept the two communities apart for so long.”

Suu Kyi’s decision is sure to be greeted by outrage from the usual suspects in the human rights community, who longed for a golden age of humanitarian enlightenment after the Nobel Peace Prize winner took office. As WRM explained in December, those hopes always rested on a kind of human rights fairy tale: “Aung San Suu Kyi was the beautiful princess guarded by the evil dragon of a military junta; the Western human rights community was the golden hero who freed the princess so that Burma could live happily ever after, with Rohingyas and Buddhist monks reconciling under the spell of Western liberal ideology.”

Of course, things are rarely so simple in practice. Suu Kyi understands full well that her continued effectiveness and/or survival as a political leader depends on good relations with the army. Hence her reluctance to press them over the Rohingya issue. She also knows that siding with the Rohingya over Burmese nationalists would be political suicide. Most Buddhist Burmese do not pity the Rohingya as a persecuted minority but resent them as a foreign entity only allowed in under British imperial rule. That judgment may seem backwards to Western eyes, but it is a deeply ingrained political reality that any leader of Myanmar must deal with.

Western human rights NGOs, alas, prefer not to understand these dynamics, choosing instead to grandstand from afar and chastise their fallen idol for failing to meet their lofty expectations. But given the complex political minefield she is trying to navigate, Suu Kyi probably is right that an intrusive UN probe would only inflame the situation more.

None of this will offer much comfort to the Rohingya people, who are indeed suffering immensely. But the tragic situation in Myanmar does offer useful lessons for the rest of us: history rarely moves in a straightforward line toward progress, and in multiethnic states divided by bitter historical legacies, democracy rarely means liberty and justice for all.