Although global media outlets like the Economist have made the case that the Rohingya of Burma are the “most persecuted people in the world” for several years at this point, their plight has yet to fully register around the world.

Besides the fact that the genocide involves a poverty-stricken and stateless ethnic people with no political voice, the world’s lack of knowledge about the Rohingya also stems from the fact that Myanmar State Councillor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has offered cover for the brutality of her military through her lack of action and her dismissal of the carnage going on under her rule.

As Hannah Beech wrote in the New Yorker, “[Suu Kyi] has described the Rohingya insurgents as ‘terrorists’ and dismissed the worldwide condemnation, saying that international outlets have created ‘a huge iceberg of misinformation.’ Her office has accused the Rohingya of setting fire to their own homes in order to provoke an outcry.”