Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Wednesday rejected accusations of genocide committed against her country’s Muslim Rohingya minority as “incomplete and misleading”, and said the case should not be heard by the U.N.’s highest court, Reuters reports.
The Nobel Peace laureate, speaking during three days of hearings at the International Court of Justice, challenged allegations in a lawsuit brought by Gambia last month accusing Myanmar of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Suu Kyi, once feted in the West as a heroine of democracy, spoke for about 30 minutes at the courtroom in The Hague in defense of the actions of the Myanmar military that for years had kept her under house arrest.
She said a military-led “clearance operation” in western Rakhine State launched in August 2017 was a counterterrorism response to coordinated Rohingya militant attacks against dozens of police stations.
More than 730,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar to Bangladesh after the military launched its crackdown. United Nations investigators have said 10,000 people may have been killed.
