"No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim": Aung San Suu Kyi's Rohingya problem
Updated by Max Fisher on March 28, 2016, 9:00 a.m. ET
@Max_Fisher max@vox.com


In October 2013, one of the most celebrated political dissidents in the world sat down for an interview with BBC presenter Mishal Husain, and it didn't go great.

Aung San Suu Kyi was, at that point, still in the process of transitioning from a Nobel Peace Prize–winning political prisoner of Myanmar's military government — she was kept under house arrest until 2010 — to the country's de facto leader. After being freed as part of her country's opening, her political party won a number of seats in limited 2012 parliamentary elections.

Later, in November 2015, her political party would win a landslide in the country's first real elections in decades. While she herself is barred from becoming president, she picked a close ally and is widely considered the real power behind the newly democratic government.

Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=82115.0

At the risk of sounding like I am defending her (I am not), it's worth putting her comment in the context of how identity is discussed in her country versus in ours.

In British or American society, such a comment is considered unacceptable, both for reducing the BBC's Mishal Husain to her religion and for implying that being "interviewed by a Muslim" is different from being interviewed by any other kind of journalist.

In Myanmar, and in many countries where sectarian politics are more pronounced and discussed more openly, it is common to assume that people will act primarily as members of their ethnoreligious group.

Indeed, a journalist friend from Myanmar will often identify himself, in questions, as a member of the Karen ethnic minority, signaling that he is writing on behalf of Karen interests. I have seen, in Yangon, Aung San Suu Kyi questioned by a journalist who identified himself as Muslim and clearly considered that salient to his coverage and question.

That's not to condone this system, but rather to note that, within this context, Aung Sang Suu Kyi's comment becomes, while not more defensible, more comprehensible. She is accustomed to seeing journalists as representatives of their ethnoreligious communities, (wrongly) concluded that this explained Husain's questions on Rohingya, and chastised her staff for not preparing her.

In my trip to Myanmar, even in meetings with high-minded, Western-educated democracy activists — people who had sacrificed years of their lives fighting the military regime for civil rights — I heard, with disturbing frequency, people describe the Rohingya as untrustworthy foreigners who had to be controlled or expelled for the good of the nation.

This problem, in other words, is deeply rooted in Myanmar society, which is only just beginning to emerge from decades of military dictatorship, with all the paranoia and hard-line nationalism that brings.

And that naturally leads some observers to wonder whether Aung San Suu Kyi believes that she needs to take a please-nobody middle-ground position on the Rohingya issue; that it's only by indulging anti-Rohingya fears that Myanmar's Buddhists will consider her credible on the issue and thus heed her calls for calm.

Another common interpretation is that Aung San Suu Kyi has simply made a cold political calculation to avoid the Rohingya issue, which would be politically costly and distract from other issues such as reforming the country's economy and eroding the military's still-significant hold on power.

As a third possibility, many observers, with reason, suspect that she is simply personally unsympathetic or even hostile toward the Rohingya and their plight.

"I thought it was worth including in the book because it just feeds into the ambiguity of her position regarding this issue," Peter Popham, the journalist whose book reports this new quote, told the Telegraph.

"One has great admiration for her and her life story and courage, but nobody believes anymore that she is a person without any faults and without her own prejudices and limitations."

she's the nearest thing to royalty in the context of burma, maybe that's why.  to expect empathy from her for the rohingya is to expect overnight miracles.