"Rohingya civilians.” That’s the phrase conspicuously absent from Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi’s 3,500-word statement to the International Court of Justice on Wednesday. The omission is no accident. Suu Kyi’s highly anticipated ICJ appearance was to answer to The Gambia’s official complaint of Myanmar’s violations of the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention, linked to the extreme military abuses against Muslim Rohingya civilians. Yet her judicial defense strategy studiously avoided any mention of civilian suffering. Instead, Suu Kyi – the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate – peddled the Myanmar military‘s long-discredited narrative that its activities in northern Rakhine state in August 2017 constituted legitimate “clearance operations” in response to attacks on police posts, allegedly perpetrated by an insurgent group. According to Suu Kyi, what transpired was merely “an internal armed conflict started by coordinated and comprehensive attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, to which Myanmar’s Defense Services responded.”Unfortunately for Suu Kyi, that narrative is at odds with voluminous evidence compiled by the United Nations’ Independent International Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), and other rights monitors. That documentation demonstrates a vicious, widespread, and systematic targeting of Rohingya civilians by security forces in a weeks-long violence spree that began on August 25, 2017. That’s when security forces attacked hundreds of Rohingya villages, massacring thousands of their residents, gang-raping thousands more, and burning their homes to the ground..."