"It took 21 years for Myanmar's now de-facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi to finally accept her Nobel peace prize after many years under house arrest. During her acceptance speech, she talked about how "wherever suffering is ignored, there will be the seeds of conflict, for suffering degrades and embitters and enrages". For the Rohingya people of her country, these were prescient words. Last week, Suu Kyi found herself at the International Court of Justice at The Hague defending her country from accusations of genocide. The hearing against Myanmar, made by the tiny African nation of Gambia, centres on the more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims forced to flee to Bangladesh in 2017 after systematic "clearance operations" led by the military. Its case relies on a UN fact-finding mission, which described soldiers in the Myanmar state of Rakhine firing indiscriminately into houses and fields, houses set on fire with people locked inside, mass rapes, and children thrown into rivers and onto fires. The military operation flared after many years of tension between the state’s two largest groups, the Rakhine Buddhists and the Rohingya Muslims. The Rohingya minority have long suffered discrimination in the form of severe travel restrictions, limited access to education and Myanmar's unwillingness to give them citizenship, in effect making them stateless. When the Rohingya's frustrations led them to attack a military base in 2017, the response from Myanmar was devastating..."