MYANMAR’S SHAME

The satellites first detected the villages going up in flames on Aug. 25. One by one, entire townships across western Myanmar were burning, just hours after Muslim militants attacked national army posts in the Asian country’s Rakhine state. Soon a new crush of refugees was pouring into neighboring Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group in majority-Buddhist Myanmar, were fleeing the army’s apparent retaliation. Refugees told aid workers that the military had set fire to their homes and planted land mines on their escape routes. Myanmar’s soldiers, they said, were shooting Rohingya women and children as they fled.

This was not the first time the Myanmar army had attacked the Rohingya, but the scale was far greater than ever before. More than 200 villages burned over the next three weeks. More than 420,000 Rohingya flooded refugee camps, and nearly two-thirds were children. Humanitarian aid agencies UNICEF and Médecins Sans Frontières were denied access to conflict areas. The U.N. human-rights chief called the crisis “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

In Myanmar, one voice remained notably silent. Human-rights icon and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, now the de facto leader of Myanmar’s civilian government, did not condemn the atrocities. Fellow laureates were quick to point out the contradiction. Pakistani human-rights activist Malala Yousafzai said “the world is waiting” for her to speak out. South African clergyman Desmond Tutu prayed that Suu Kyi would be “courageous and resilient again.” Instead, Suu Kyi blamed “a misinformation campaign” and announced she would no longer attend the U.N. General Assembly in late September.

Finally, 25 days after the first village was burned, Suu Kyi addressed the world. In a televised global address from Myanmar’s capital, in front of army officials and foreign diplomats, Suu