IT is hard to view the damning UN report into the military-led genocide against Myanmar’s Muslin Rohingya community with anything other than profound anger. And that anger is all the greater for the fact that until now the international community has largely stood by and let this barbarism happen.

Long before the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar was set up in March 2017, it was blatantly clear that appalling crimes were being committed in Rakhine province by civilian Buddhist fanatics with, at the very least, the open connivance of the police and army. When the authorities forced the Rohingya into concentration camps “for their own protection”, the military’s mask dropped. Such a brutal expedient was first developed by the British in the Boer War in South Africa a century ago and taken up in Germany with murderous enthusiasm by Hitler’s Nazis. The excuse of the Burmese military, as with the British, was they faced an armed insurrection and needed to isolate the local population to rob the rebels of support and hiding places. The UN report makes clear there was such an armed insurgency but it does not spell out the fact that those Rohingya who had taken up arms were fighting back against the horrific campaign of violence that was already being mounted against them.

And the UN pulls no punches when it says that the full-blown campaign of murder, rape, torture and destruction of whole communities embarked upon by the Myanmar military amounted to genocide. That butchery has forced at least 700,000 Rohingya from their homes into neighboring Bangladesh to languish miserably in vast refugee camps.

Now that the UN has spoken so decisively and called for the prosecution, at least of six top Myanmar generals, including Commander-in-Chief Ming Aung Hlaing, the international community really cannot continue to look the other way. China is likely to block a Security Council referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) so it probably will be for the UN to set up its own commission enquiry as it did in Syria which found the Assad regime guilty of multiple war crimes.

But the guilt goes far wider than thuggish local generals and fanatical Buddhist bigots; the entire international community was responsible for allowing this genocide to happen. It validated with considerable enthusiasm the supposed return of Myanmar to civilian rule after years of brutal military dictatorship. That enthusiasm was all the greater for the considerable commercial opportunities that opened up to international business in rebuilding a rundown and technically backward country which offered substantial natural resources in return. The cover for this headlong rush to make big profits was the fact that the country was supposedly now led by Nobel Peace Laureate Aung Sang Suu Kyi.

But the new constitution, imposed by the outgoing generals, enforced a dominant role for the military in internal affairs. The outside world embraced the fictive hope that Suu Kyi would be able to draw the military’s teeth and introduce real civilian rule. But for all her fine words about peace and equality under the law, the much-lauded heroine of the international liberal establishment has turned out to have feet of clay. Indeed by her very inaction against the generals that she is supposed to command, Suu Kyi has actually made herself an accomplice in the Rohingya genocide.