The outcome of Burma's election looks to be an overwhelming victory for the National League for Democracy led by Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. In her first foreign interview given to the BBC, Suu Kyi or " the Lady" as she is widely known, was asked about ending the persecution of Burma's Muslim minority, which includes most conspicuously the disenfranchised Rohingya of Rakhine state. The BBC introduction to the interview asserted that one of Suu Kyi most significant commitments related to the Rohingyas. Unfortunately, this was an overstatement. The interviewer mentioned the Rohingya in his question but Suu Kyi was not specific in her response. She said everyone should be concerned about hatred which only led to violence which destroyed societies. It was not going to be easy to stop prejudice and hatred because they could not be easily removed. She did, however, go on to insist that she would protect everyone in the country because that was the duty of the government. Maybe Suu Kyi deserves the benefit of the doubt. She is still not certain that the massive victory of the NLD will lead to power. The military could yet march out of its barracks and as in 1990 once again abandon its humiliating attempt at democracy. It was perhaps notable that the congratulations of the current president, former general Thein Sein, were conveyed through a spokesman. The president himself did not take the opportunity to make the remarks in person. Such a performance might have been made through gritted teeth. The military-backed Union Solidarity Development Party (USDP) which won the deeply-flawed election five years ago, appears to have been trounced. It seems that its candidates may have held on to only five percent of the seats. As it is, the military will still have an uncontested quarter of the 664 seats in the new parliament and will maintain control of the defense and interior ministries. Suu Kyi's caution may be the greater because she has already been rebuffed in her call for an early meeting with the USDP and other parties for talks on national reconciliation. The response has been that no such encounter will take place until the final results are in and the election organizers are giving no clear date of when that will be. The role of the radical Buddhist monks of Ma Ba Tha movement represents a clear danger to the democratic process. Even though by some projections the NLD has won up to 90 percent of the popular vote, these Buddhist bigots, one of whose rallies drew tens of thousands of supporters, many of them monks, show little sign of the peacefulness that is supposedly fundamental to their religion. Among their many unacceptable demands is that Muslims be forbidden from taking more than one wife, as a way of restricting the growth of the Muslim population. Suu Kyi has every reason to expect that her government will face many dangers, ranging from military obstruction to fanatical attacks on the streets. Given that security will remain in the hands of the military, Buddhist militants could prove hard to control. And the Lady remains committed to non-violence. All this said, the Muslim world would be more confident in her promised justice for all Burmese if she had chosen to field even a single Muslim candidate on the NLD slate. That she did not remains a cause for concern.
