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During her recent visit to Britain for the start of the winter parliamentary session, Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi received a warm welcome and was praised for refusing to intervene with the military and her own political party’s escalation of the violence against Muslims. But this goodwill has slowly dissipated after a U.N. agency said that Myanmar had committed genocide against the Rohingya minority and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson openly criticized Suu Kyi and said that her government had failed to bring about a positive change for the country.
On Thursday, Suu Kyi became embroiled in yet another controversy after authorities in the northwestern state of Rakhine said that she would serve a two-year prison sentence for violating a ceasefire agreement for peace signed in 2011. She was found guilty of failing to report an incident where troops arrested civilians for a raid on a police station. Police said that they found six empty plastic bottles and rice in her house and claimed that they stopped talking to Suu Kyi until the deal was restored.
Suu Kyi has long been criticized for her failure to demand an end to the violence against the Rohingya. Underlining the scale of the problem, some 250,000 people have been displaced and more than 684,000 fled to Bangladesh since violence began in August.
Read the full story at The Guardian.
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