AUNG San Suu Kyi has been fighting the election in Myanmar with the repeated refrain that the issue of religion should be left out of the campaign. This is proving a double-edged sword. At the question and answer sessions at the end of her rallies she is often accused of favoring Muslims in a country that is predominantly Buddhist. This produces an angry response from "The Lady", as she is known, that such questions violate Myanmar's law and constitution because they incite religious prejudice and tension. Yet she herself has raised the issue passively by the fact that her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) has fielded no Muslim candidates, even though Islam is the religion of some five percent of Burmese. This is, of itself, a mute submission to the violent Buddhist gangs who since 2013 have been attacking the Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine province. The Rohingya of course are still denied citizenship by the shadowy military regime that has long ruled the country, so none of them could stand. But there are other Muslim communities in Myanmar from which at least one candidate could be drawn. The presence of such a person on the electoral list, would have been proof of Suu Kyi's insistence that religion is not part of Myanmar's politics. As a Nobel Peace Laureate, "The Lady" is clearly aware of her international image. Thus she has squeezed in one campaign rally in Rakhine. The crowd of supporters included Rohingya Muslims, even though of course, as non-citizens in their own country, they do not have a vote. It was also instructive that Buddhist NLD supporters had no problem with Rohingya decked out in the party's red colors, cheering along beside them. These are the moderate Buddhists who themselves have been attacked by extremist thugs led by Buddhist monks. There are hints from NLD briefers that Suu Kyi and the party leaders have deliberately kept the Rohingya issue out of the campaign to avoid stirring up the Buddhist extremists. But once the election has been won, "The Lady" will tackle the problem head-on and reverse the horrific injustices that have been inflicted on this Muslim community. The party is concerned that the shadowy, but still powerful military behind former general president Thein Sein will still try and use Buddhist extremists to wreck the election and rob the NLD of what it believes is its certain victory. There were even concerns that Suu Kyi's Rakhine rally would trigger fresh violence that could be blamed on her. The fact that it did not rather demonstrates that the NLD's timidity is misplaced. Diplomats may be cabling home from Myanmar that Suu Kyi is playing a clever game, but to the most of the outside world, her refusal to condemn the treatment of the country's Muslims looks like a mistake. There is still a lot of campaigning to go before the Nov. 8 vote and the military, who ignored the NLD's overwhelming victory in the 1990 election, may yet have a ploy to embarrass and undermine "The Lady", whom they have already barred by a constitutional amendment from standing for the presidency, because her late husband was a foreigner. Doubtless hoping that once her party wins power, this can be changed, Suu Kyi has made little fuss about the military's maneuver. And that maybe is her trouble. She makes too little fuss.
