The British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, will make a delicate visit to Myanmar on Friday to try to press Aung San Suu Kyi to end the persecution of religious minorities and allow aid workers full access to areas of conflict.
The two-day trip, the most high-profile UK visit to the country since David Cameron visited in 2012, is highly sensitive because the British government has been reluctant to blame Myanmar’s de-facto leader and Nobel peace prizewinner for the persecution of the Rohingya people.
A military crackdown in Rakhine province has cast a pall over the government of Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent much of the past two decades under house arrest before winning elections in November 2015 that ended decades of military rule.
Myanmar’s armed forces, the Tatmadaw, retain significant power and Johnson will also be looking to raise the Rohingya issue with the army’s commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing. Under the country’s constitution, which was drafted by the Tatmadaw, the military controls the three most powerful government ministries: home, defence and border affairs.
The UN estimates that 66,000 members of the predominantly Muslim Rohingya community have fled to Bangladesh since October.
Johnson is due to travel to Yangon and the country’s capital, Naypyidaw.
The UK Foreign Office minister Alok Sharma said on Tuesday that the military was largely responsible for the human rights abuses in Rakhine. “Clearly it is the army that is acting in the areas where there are humanitarian issues,” he told the House of Commons.