Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticized by three fellow Nobel laureates about the violence against the Rohingya minority in her country of Myanmar.
Nobel Peace Prize winners Tawakkol Karman, Shirin Ebadi, and Mairead Maguire called on the Myanmar leader to "wake up" to the condition of the Rohingya refugees after visiting camps in Bangladesh, where nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees have gathered, Agence France-Presse reported.
The United Nations described systematic violence against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state by Myanmar's army as possible genocide and ethnic cleansing, but has not gone as far as to call it war crimes, AFP noted.
The Nobel Prize winners, though, did not hesitate to label the alleged violence as such.
"This is clearly, clearly, clearly genocide that is going on by the Burmese government and military against the Rohingya people," Maguire said Monday, using another name for Myanmar, AFP reported.
"We refuse this genocide policy of the Burmese government. They will be taken to the ICC (International Criminal Court) and those who are committing genocide will be held responsible," Maguire continued.
Suu Kyi, daughter of Myanmar liberation movement leader Aung San, was an internationally renowned civil rights leader when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and was under house arrest by the Myanmar military from 1989 to 2010 before becoming state counsellor in 2016, according to the Nobel Peace Prize website.
The Myanmar government, though, sees the Rohingya population as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and has denied them citizenship, the BBC News reported. Protesters have charged Suu Kyi with allegations that she has failed to speak out over violence against the Rohingyas, the BBC News said.
Suu Kyi told the BBC News last October that a "climate of fear" has been creating the violence and has denied that Muslims had been subjected to ethnic cleansing.
"Muslims have been targeted but Buddhists have also been subjected to violence," Suu Kyi told BBC News. "This fear is what is leading to all this trouble.
"This is the result of our sufferings under a dictatorial regime. I think that if you live under a dictatorship for many years people do not like to trust one another - a dictatorship generates a climate of mistrust," she continued.