For years she could not leave her home. Her supporters feared arrest if they so much as spoke her name - Aung San Suu Kyi. So they called her "The Lady."

After 15 years of imprisonment she was released. Myanmar chose a new political system, based not on complete democracy but many of its attributes. Suu Kyi became her country's political leader and so famous she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

Now, brutally, she has discovered the unpleasant limits of her good intentions and power. The reason: the conflict between Muslims and Buddhists in the northwestern state of Rakhine.

Myanmar's Buddhists do not like the Muslim Rohingyas, refuse to give them citizenship, and blame them for entering the country illegally from Bangladesh. About 500,000 Rohingyas have fled back home in recent weeks according to reports from Bangladesh.

I feel sorry for Suu Kyi as she is caught between demands from her millions of Buddhist supporters to be tough on the Muslims and demands from Europe and America that she stop what they call "ethnic cleansing."

If she was to do what the West asks, her support would collapse in Myanmar. She's in an impossible situation.

A few years ago I made an adventurous journey to Rakhine and visited many Muslim villagers in this backward and inaccessible borderland. I could see with my own eyes it's not just religion that divides them. Their ways of life are also very different - as there are many (at least eight) races making up the population.

Before the 500,000 Rohingyas recently left there were an estimated 1.2 million in Rakhine, but that's a tiny percentage of Myanmar's 52 million citizens, of whom 85 percent are Buddhists.

The truth is that Myanmar is a country created by the British in the 19th century - they called it the Union of Burma as it was made up of many small kingdoms. The British encouraged the Rohingyas to settle in Rakhine and even in those days they were not popular with the locals.

Indians were also encouraged to settle. As far as the British were concerned, Greater India included Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. As often with Muslims around the world (even in Europe and America) they have failed to integrate in Myanmar and continued to live a way of life fundamentally different from the rest of the population.

If you visit a British town like Bradford you can see the same problem, with its overwhelmingly Muslim population hardly integrated at all into society.

The places I visited in Arakan are breathtakingly beautiful with century- old temples based on Hindu and Buddhist influences.

It is perhaps not surprising that staunchly Buddhist Burmese do not find Rohingyas to be acceptable to their way of life. Even though many of them have been there for a long time, no attempts have been made for them to assimilate into the Burmese way of life especially when it is against Islam for any Muslim to convert to another religion.

It is no doubt a problem that is difficult to resolve, especially when the military, with its high stake in the unity of the country, is most reluctant to deal with the Muslim minority.

I suppose it is understandable that Western nations have criticized Suu Kyi but at the same time I sympathize with the dilemma she faces.

It takes a lot of courage to leave Myanmar for Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world with a low ranking of 139 in the United Nation's Human Development Index. The only solution is for the Rohingyas to integrate, but that seems most unlikely.

Suu Kyi faces an impossible situation.

Cheng Huan is a senior counsel and an author who practices in Hong Kong