Burma leader Aung San Suu Kyi has banned officials from using oppressed Muslims' communal name, Rohingya, in an attempt to ease tensions between the country's majority Buddhists and minority Muslims.

In an Orwellian move, Burma's Information Ministry has instead instructed officials to call Rohingyas "people who believe in Islam in Rakhine state".

Ms Suu Kyi said: "All we are asking is that people should be aware of the difficulties that we are facing."

It is not clear how eliminating a name reference will ease tensions or solve long-running differences.

But the decision has cast Ms Suu Kyi in the role of villain for the first time since she took effective control of the country in March.

And the woman so often referred to as "the lady" does not like it one bit.

The Burmese leader said the world needed to give her "space to sort out" the nation's ills.

Rohingya 'deprived of nationality', UN report says

There is no coincidence in the timing.

On Monday, the top UN human rights official on Burma, Yanghee Lee, issued a report saying the Rohingya had been deprived of nationality and had undergone systematic discrimination and severe restrictions on movements.

They have also suffered executions and torture that together may amount to crimes against humanity, the report said.

Ms Suu Kyi has at least been consistent in picking winners and siding with her own kind — ethnic Burman, Buddhists who are the majority.

It has been four years since deadly riots fuelled by a violent, nationalist Buddhist agenda gripped Burma and 100,000 Rohingya Muslims were confined to squalid displacement camps in Rakhine state.

Sticking with the majority view, in 2012, Ms Suu Kyi declared she did not know if the Rohingya could be regarded as Burmese citizens.

Then during an interview with the BBC's Mishal Husain, Ms Suu Kyi refused to condemn violence against the Rohingya.

She denied Muslims had been subject to ethnic cleansing, insisting the tensions were due to a "climate of fear" caused by "a worldwide perception that global Muslim power is very great".

Now she runs Burma, Ms Suu Kyi seems unwilling to stand up to the hard-right Buddhist nationalist movement.

She is even less likely to speak out in support of those detained when she is running a Government that will not even use their name.