For the past three weeks, the world has watched aghast as Myanmar’s military has carried out the latest, most deadly phase of a five-year operation against the Muslim Rohingya people who number about 1.1-1.3 million.

It has been an outrageously outsized reaction by Myanmar’s notorious military, known as the Tatmadaw, to a small attack by what is, thus far, a threadbare insurgency that has taken clearer shape as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. It’s o15f little surprise that the Rohingya, who have suffered waves of persecution and terrorisation by Myanmar’s military, and Burma’s before it, for countless decades, have finally decided to fight back. That is now being used as an excuse for what the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has called a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. In forcing roughly half the Rohingya population from their homes, it’s hard to call it anything else.

At the same time, the world has been bewildered, then dismayed, as arguably the most internationally (and domestically) beloved Nobel Peace Prize Laureate since Nelson Mandela, Myanmar’s state counsellor, foreign minister and de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has remained all but silent. When she has opened her mouth, it has only been to put her foot in it by introducing red herrings such as the alleged complicity of NGOs in the insurgency. She remains unable, for largely political reasons, to utter the word Rohingya or even to make comments of any concern about the fate of the latest victims of one of the world’s most murderous militaries.