In the early hours of 25 August 2017, an armed group called Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) launched a series of coordinated attacks against several police stations in the remote northern region of Arakan state, in Western Burma. Those attacks gave the Burmese military a convenient excuse to complete once and for all what its Commander in Chief, Min Aung Hlaing, described at the time as the “unfinished job” of getting rid of the unwelcome presence in Arakan of the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim minority in a Buddhist-majority country that has been persecuted for decades under the false assumptions of being “illegal immigrants” from what is now Bangladesh.
During the weeks after the attacks by ARSA, the Burmese military killed thousands, raped countless Rohingya women and razed to the ground dozens of villages, pushing more than 700,000 Rohingya to neighbouring Bangladesh in what was the largest and swiftest exodus since the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda a quarter of a century ago. Those atrocities elicited the accusation of genocide by The Gambia on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in the International Tribunal of Justice, and no other than the Nobel Peace Prize Aung San Suu Kyi decided to lead the defense, in the preliminary sessions held in December in The Hague, of the Burmese military and a civilian government she heads and which has closed ranks with the army when it comes to the Rohingya.