Aung San Suu Kyi called for new laws to protect Myanmar's fractious ethnic minority groups in her first speech to Parliament, highlighting one of the most challenging issues for the country as it opens up to the outside world.
Investors and diplomats have been waiting to see what Ms. Suu Kyi would do now that she is serving in office as leader of Myanmar's opposition, after spending much of the past two decades under a house arrest imposed by the country's former military junta. Ms. Suu Kyi was released in late 2010 and elected to Parliament in April, after Myanmar's military regime handed power to a nominally civilian government. The new leadership has unveiled a series economic and social reforms resulting in a rollback of Western economic sanctions.
Some investors feared Ms. Suu Kyi's push to clean up the country's business environment would make it harder for foreigners to do business there. She frustrated some Western leaders—and pleased human-rights advocates—when she suggested in June that foreigners should refrain from doing business with Myanmar's state oil-and-gas firm until it took steps to improve its transparency. During the years of Myanmar's military regime, she was a staunch backer of sanctions that barred Western companies from doing business there.
But Ms. Suu Kyi for the most part has signaled support for Western investment in recent months, and she has offered cautious backing for a move by the Obama administration this month to suspend some of the U.S.'s most restrictive sanctions.
By focusing on the country's ethnic divisions in her first parliamentary address, Ms. Suu Kyi is helping steer attention toward an issue that continues to bedevil the country's new reformist government—and that has led to rare criticism of Ms. Suu Kyi. Myanmar has long suffered from intense ethnic divides that at times have threatened to pull the country apart, with more than a half-dozen ethnic groups claiming unfair treatment by the country's dominant Burman ethnic group.
At least one group, the Kachin, continues to wage a low-level war against the government, while violence in western Myanmar last month between Rakhine Buddhists and Muslim Rohingyas left at least 78 people dead and led to a government crackdown in the region. The Rohingya conflict, in particular, has unnerved investors and upset rights advocates who fear the violence could escalate, and push Myanmar's military to reassert some of the control it gave up over the past year.
Human-rights groups, meanwhile, have criticized Ms. Suu Kyi for failing to speak out more in favor of the Rohingyas, who most people in Myanmar consider illegal settlers from Bangladesh.
Rising from her seat at the back of Myanmar's Parliament, Ms. Suu Kyi called for an end to discrimination against ethnic minorities as part of the "emergence of a genuine democratic country," the Associated Press reported Wednesday. She urged the government to pass "necessary laws or amend laws to protect the rights of ethnic nationalities," and said protecting minority rights required more than just maintaining ethnic languages and cultures.
"The high poverty rates in ethnic states clearly indicate that development in ethnic regions is not satisfactory and ethnic conflicts in these regions have not ceased," she said. She didn't mention the recent violence in the Rohingya area.
The challenge for Ms. Suu Kyi—and for the government overall—is that the country's ethnic divisions defy easy solutions, even as popular expectations regarding Ms. Suu Kyi's power to bring about change run high. The administration of President Thein Sein has reached cease-fires with some restive minority groups, but peace with the Kachin has remained elusive, and other groups have at times threatened to restart conflicts. Such an effort could entail more-radical change than the country's government is willing to accept, some analysts believe. Leaders have focused recently on trying to steer more economic development into ethnic areas, but many investors remain wary of sinking money into regions where conflicts could flare up.
Many of the groups occupy areas crucial for the country's economic plans because they are home to large portions of Myanmar's rich natural resources, including natural gas and mined commodities.
"Expectations of the people are very, very high. I'm not sure anybody can meet such high expectations," said Aung Thura, chief executive of Thura Swiss Ltd., a Myanmar research outfit, about Ms. Suu Kyi.
Some supporters of Ms. Suu Kyi have called for her to revive talk of a so-called Panglong agreement that would grant ethnic groups more extensive power-sharing in Myanmar's political system, or even the right to secede. The name comes from a previous agreement engineered by her father, independence hero Gen. Aung San, in the 1940s that sought to give more autonomy to ethnic groups. The deal became moot after Myanmar's military took over in a 1962 coup.
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