Was he simply afraid?

Looks it.

The de facto military ruler of Burma lied in his face, denying any tiniest flicker of ethnic troubles in his country.

But that very man is behind it all.

Not once did the pope protest while visiting the country.

Not once did he use the forbidden word, "Rohingya."

‘I Ask Forgiveness,’ Pope Francis Tells Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh

On the eve of his return to Rome, Pope Francis on Friday used the word “Rohingya,” coming face-to-face with some of the persecuted Muslims whose plight had cast a long shadow over his visit to Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Critics had been asking why a pontiff who so often condemned injustice against the downtrodden had stayed silent earlier in the week, when he made his first visit to Myanmar, a country in which Rohingya Muslims have been raped, killed or driven into exile in Bangladesh by a brutal military campaign of repression.

. . . .

“In the name of everyone, of those who have persecuted you, of those who have done you harm, above all for the indifference of the world, I ask forgiveness. 

Forgiveness,” the pope said in emotional and apparently unscripted remarks, as the survivors stood around him. 

He did not address his own recent silence.

The Rohingya are stateless Muslims from western Myanmar who, according to the United Nations, the United States and many human rights groups, have been the targets of ethnic cleansing. 

More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled across the border to Bangladesh, where they live in desperate, sprawling refugee camps in areas like Cox’s Bazar, where the group that met the pope had earlier sought shelter.

Francis had in the past, from the Vatican, denounced the “persecution of our Rohingya brothers,” but during his visit Monday to Thursday in Myanmar, diplomatic considerations and a fear of prompting a military crackdown on the Christian minority had kept the usually outspoken pope from uttering the term Rohingya or directly addressing the humanitarian disaster.

That uncharacteristic silence prompted criticism and frustration from those who had grown accustomed to considering the pope as a moral compass in a world that had gone adrift. 

The Vatican found itself refuting the notion that the pope had relinquished the moral authority that imbued his office with influence.

But as soon as the pope left Myanmar, where the Vatican hinted that he had raised the issue with the military commander, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, and the country’s de facto leader, the tarnished Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, he was more willing to broach the issue.

On Thursday night, at an event with Bangladesh’s president, he crept up to the word Rohingya, talking about Rakhine State where massacres, systematic rape and burning of villages have occurred.

Pope’s Avoids Politics in Myanmar but Can’t Quiet Questions on Rohingya

In his last full day in Myanmar, Pope Francis sought to pivot away from politics and the disappointment over his decision to avoid mentioning the persecuted Rohingya Muslims and to find safer ground in Catholic liturgy and interreligious dialogue.

But even as the pope removed his shoes to meet with monks in a pagoda and celebrated Mass at a colonial-era racetrack, his decision not to directly address one of the world’s most acute humanitarian disasters cast a pall over what the Vatican sought to portray as a historic visit of bridge-building with a fledgling democracy.

. . . .

Myanmar presented the pope with a treacherous diplomatic tight wire. 

The world expected a global figure who has championed the downtrodden to speak out for the more than 600,000 Rohingya who have fled to Bangladesh from Rakhine State in Myanmar to escape a military campaign of murder, rape and arson. 

But local bishops urged him to avoid addressing the issue out of concern that it could aggravate the problem and endanger the small Christian minority.