The West betrays people of Burma by keeping silence on Su Kyi's arrest?

The voices of those who know how to help Burma are all but extinguished by a virus called the “war on terror”.

When I phoned Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s home in Rangoon recently, I imagined the path to her door that looks down on Inya Lake. Through ragged palms, a trip-wire is visible, a reminder that this is the prison of a woman whose party was elected by a landslide in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by men in ludicrous uniforms.

Now her silence is complete. This week, the Burmese junta renewed her house arrest, beginning the 13th year. As far as I know, a doctor has not been allowed to visit her since January, and her house was badly damaged in the cyclone.

And yet the United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, could not bring himself to utter her name on his recent, groveling tour of Burma. It is as if her fate and that of her courageous supporters, who last week beckoned torture and worse merely by unfurling the banners of her National League for Democracy, have become an embarrassment for those who claim to represent the “international community”.

Why? Where are the voices of those in governments and their related institutions who know how to help Burma? Where are the honest brokers who once eased the oppressed away from their shadows, the true and talented peacemakers who see societies not in terms of their usefulness to “interests”, but as victims of it?