"The Rohingya, who have been described by the UN as the most persecuted minority in the world, experienced a glimmer of hope last week, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a remarkable ruling that those members of the community remaining in Myanmar currently face a credible threat of genocide. This was the first time that a genocide case has been brought before the ICJ by a signatory county — in this case, The Gambia. The case before the ICJ took an unexpected turn in November, when Aung San Suu Kyi, the long-time pro-democracy icon and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and currently the most powerful person in the civilian government in Myanmar, announced that she would defend Myanmar against the charges of genocide in person before the court in The Hague. For a while, Suu Kyi’s former friends and allies in the international community sought to make sense of what was happening to the Rohingya by casting her as a prisoner of fate to the military establishment, which still controls most of the reins of power in the country. But as Suu Kyi became an increasingly prominent apologist for the army, and even adopted the language of those clamoring for the genocide by denying the very identity of the Rohingya and casting them as foreign “Bengalis,” we have increasingly run out of doubt to give her the benefit of. All possible doubt was finally dispelled when she appeared before the ICJ, casually admitting that war crimes had taken place, but that what had happened could not be genocide because there was no genocidal intent. She made this case while still refusing to utter the word “Rohingya” and insisting that she was talking about “Bengalis” — an “other” she should not be expected to be responsible for..."