The United Nations International Court of Justice ordered Myanmar on Thursday to “do everything possible” to prevent a possible genocide against the Muslim minority of the Rohingya.

The country must take a series of emergency measures within four months to protect the approximately 600,000 Rohingya living there. Myanmar must also ensure that the army does not prosecute the Rohingya.

The judgment is initially only a preliminary decision, but it is seen as an important signal.

The African country of Gambia had filed a complaint with the Supreme Court of Justice in The Hague based on the Genocide Convention and a UN report.

According to that report, Myanmar soldiers have killed thousands of people since 2016, destroyed villages, raped women and children, and forced more than 700,000 people to flee their homes.

Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto head of state of Myanmar, personally went to The Hague in mid-December to defend her country there. She admitted that in certain cases, the army would indeed have acted “disproportionately.”

However, she immediately added that the “conflict” with the Rohingya in the western province of Rakhine, which has a lot of resources, is “very complex and not easy to fathom.” For that reason, the genocide complaint of Gambia called them ‘misleading’.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1991) personally traveled to The Hague to actively defend the Myanmar army, aroused a great deal of international surprise. The same army kept her under house arrest for years.