Setback for Burma - Telegraph This year Burma has come in from the cold. The election of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to parliament in April has been followed by her triumphant tours of Britain and America, President Thein Sein's visit to the United Nations in New York, the easing of sanctions and a flood of foreign tourists and potential investors. All the more shocking, then, are the images of houses destroyed by fire in the western state of Rakhine, where more than 80 people have been killed and at least 22,000, mostly from the Muslim Rohingya minority, displaced in the latest outbreak of communal violence. Ethnically, Burma is extraordinarily diverse and it has been one of the conditions of a further improvement in relations with the West that the government should ensure that its peoples can live peaceably together. That will require more forthright leadership from Mr Sein and his ministers, who have been slow to acknowledge the gravity of what has been happening in Rakhine. The security forces must intervene more effectively to protect the Rohingya, whose origins are in neighbouring Bangladesh, and steps taken to rectify their anomalous status as illegal immigrants. Buddhist opinion across the country is for their deportation. Both the president and Miss Suu Kyi have yet to mount a convincing case against this call for ethnic cleansing. The Rohingya are by no means the country's only embattled minority. In the north, for instance, fighting continues between the army and Kachin rebels. Mr Sein faces a daunting task in overcoming the legacy of brutal military rule but any democracy worth the name should protect its minorities. On this point, foreign pressure must be maintained.