Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is visiting the UK's Northern Ireland to study the process of peace and reconciliation. The Nobel Peace Laureate is looking to see if there are lessons to be learnt from the end of the confrontation between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the British province that can be applied to Burma's Muslim minority and the violence against them by members of the dominant Buddhist community. The most disgusting evidence of this oppression has been the assaults on the Rohingya community that have left thousands of dead and injured and caused 200,000 Muslims to flee their homes and livelihoods. The attractive and charismatic Burmese opposition leader has inherited the international mantle of Nelson Mandela in that she is fawned on by press and politicians alike and assumed to be the embodiment of all that is noble and brave. Suu Kyi is undoubtedly courageous and her political triumph after years of imprisonment by Burma's military junta has been based on an insistence that reform can only come about through peaceful means. She explicitly forbade her supporters from violent confrontations on the streets with the military. And her plan has worked brilliantly. However, her judgement is less sure when it comes to Burma's significant Muslim minority. In a BBC radio interview yesterday, she was asked why she had not been more forceful in condemning the Buddhist violence against the Rohingya which has since spread to other Burmese Muslim communities. She was also asked why she had not been critical of a government report into the savagery that had effectively whitewashed the police and security forces. The normally fluent Burmese politician was for a moment clearly thrown by this incisive type of questioning. At one point she said that the violence was not all one-sided. There had been attacks on Buddhists by Muslims. But the interviewer said that such attacks had been insignificant compared with the assaults by the Buddhists. Suu Kyi was clearly quite unprepared for this sort of well-researched quizzing and though she kept her composure, she did not come out of the interview well. British listeners will also be puzzled that she has chosen to look at Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army was fighting to reunify the northern part of Ireland with the south. It drew its strength from a Roman Catholic community fed up with years of being treated as second-class citizens by the Protestant majority. By contrast Burma's Muslims are not seeking to break away, nor indeed have they been in revolt. They just wish to live their lives and practice their religion in peace. For Suu Kyi to suggest that they in any way initiated the cycle of violence is almost certainly an untruth. For sure Rohingya Muslims found what weapons they could to defend themselves and their communities, and there may have been preemptive attacks on Buddhist thugs. However, what there certainly was not was a campaign of deliberate assaults on Buddhists by Muslims. And there was one question that the BBC interviewer did not ask Suu Kyi. At the heart of the oppression of Burma's Rohingya community lies the refusal of the Burmese government to admit that they are Burmese citizens whose community has been established in the country for at least a century. This imposed inferior status has marginalized them and made them easy prey for Buddhist bigots.
