Myanmar’s minority Rohingya Muslims, among the most persecuted people on earth, and advocates of their cause were hoping President Barack Obama would not only press the issue during his visit this week — they were hoping he would simply say their name.
Yesterday, the last day of his trip, he finally did — uttering the word publicly for the first time on his three-day visit at a news conference with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
“Discrimination against the Rohingya or any other religious minority does not express the kind of country that Burma over the long term wants to be,” Obama said, in response to a reporter’s question about the status of reforms in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
Myanmar’s government views the estimated 1.3 million Rohingya — living in dire, segregated conditions in western Rakhine state — not as citizens, but as illegal migrants from Bangladesh encroaching on scarce land. For that reason, they say the Rohingya ethnicity does not exist.
Since the start of this year, Myanmar’s government has stepped up pressure on foreign officials not to use the word “Rohingya.”
During a private meeting with President Thein Sein on Thursday which focused largely on the Rohingya’s plight and a need for constitutional reforms ahead of 2015 elections, Obama used the word “Rohingya” multiple times and did so purposefully, according to a senior US official who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorised to comment.
But in his public opening statement, Obama did not specifically mention the Rohingya, referring only to the “terrible violence in Rakhine state.”
Obama signals support for Suu Kyi candidacy
The United States has signalled its willingness to let the transition to democracy take shape and has avoided specific demands. Nevertheless, Obama has told President Thein Sein that the next election, due in 2015, needs to be fair, inclusive and transparent.
Standing next to Myanmar’s democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, US President Barack Obama said yesterday that the law barring her from becoming president “doesn’t make much sense”.
It was the clearest statement Obama has made on Suu Kyi’s political future, but he stopped short of explicitly urging that changes be made to allow her to run for the presidency.
“I don’t understand a provision that would bar someone from being president because of who their children are – that doesn’t make much sense to me,” Obama told reporters outside Suu Kyi’s lakeside home in Yangon without naming her.
Suu Kyi, like Obama a Nobel laureate, is barred from contesting for president in next year’s election because her two sons are foreign nationals.
