Aung San Suu Kyi to Address U.N. High Court.
VAUSE: In a few hours, the once respected and admired Nobel Peace Prize winner whose name was often mentioned alongside the likes of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi will stand before the International Court of Justice, defend her government, her generals and her military against charges of genocide. The case began on Tuesday with graphic accounts of rape and murder carried out by Myanmar's military against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State. And through it all Aung San Suu Kyi seemed impassive. There's been international condemnation of Suu Kyi's decision to defend Myanmar's generals, but it has put boosted her popularity at home. Thousands of her supporters rallied in Yangon on Tuesday. Yanghee Lee is the U.N. special rapporteur on Myanmar. And she is with us live from Seoul in South Korea. Thank you, ma'am, for being with us. Back in December of 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest. Her two sons, her husband accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf. Here's part of the reason why the committee chose her. In the good fight for peace and reconciliation, we are dependent on persons who set examples, persons who can symbolize what we are seeking and mobilize the best in us. Aung San Suu Kyi is just such a person That was 1991. In a few hours, she coming to defend her military against genocide. Defend them against well-documented accounts of systematic rape, mass murder and terror directed at the Rohingya Muslim for no other reason than the fact they were Rohingya. I mean I guess, you know, you can't fool all the people all the time but she came pretty close.</s>YANGHEE LEE, U.N. SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR ON MYANMAR: Absolutely. Absolutely. We have to be aware that there are effectively Aung San Suu Kyis in Myanmar. One Aung San Suu Kyi prior to 2015 elections and another Aung San Suu Kyi post-2015 elections. The one we are seeing in the Hague is the Aung San Suu Kyi post-2015.</s>VAUSE: Yes. I mean the main line of defense coming from Myanmar and Suu Kyi is this claim the military was just responding to a threat of domestic terrorism. And even if that is true, even if that's the case, there's still no legal or moral or ethical justification to the response by Myanmar's military. And not just in that instance with the Rohingya. It continues to carry out, you know, genocide as a tactic.</s>LEE: Absolutely. And I had conveyed that to her when I met her for the last time in the 2017. And she was not very eager to listen to what I had to say, or for that matter for whatever other people had to say. But today is a historic moment -- the past day and the next day. The neck (ph) of the following three days will be a historic moment for the Rohingya, for any possibility of accountability or justice for the atrocities that were committed in Myanmar.</s>VAUSE: I want to get to that in the moment, but when you interact with Aung San Suu Kyi, I'm just interested in how she deals with bad news because, you know, there is some belief that she genuinely believes the military has done nothing wrong. There is a report in the "Washington Post" which says she is taken to regarding factual reports about the 2016, 2017 ethnic cleansing campaign, directed at the Rohingya Muslims as a militant conspiracy theory targeting to undermine her and the country and perhaps so closely I should say. When confronted with critical challenge, she flies into a fit of anger saying these are all fabricated allegations. So you know, if she doesn't believe her military has carried out these atrocities, that has to be a conscious choice, right because the facts</s>LEE: Yes. And I think it is a conscious choice made by her. And I remember reading her before the elections, when she was just a parliamentarian, and hoping to become the leader of Myanmar. After her election she has been singing a different song from a different song sheet. And at the very end, she was telling me, when I was pushing her for the truth about Rakhine and how she needs to go to Rakhine to see what's really happened on the ground. She repeated the phrase that she's repeated to others, whereby she would say if you continue this U.N. narrative, you may not get any access to the country. That is when I was really appalled, so I really do feel that she feels that the military, that her dear late father had formed can do no wrong. But this is so different from what she had said in her -- that you can see in her video tapes about how the military has used rape as a tool in conflict. And so this is so different where she denies the fact that the technical or the security forces would ever rape or torture women and men and children.</s>VAUSE: She's making this appearance before the International Court of Justice with the full blessing of the military, which is notable in a number of ways, but it also seems that I think they're setting her up as a patsy, as the fall guy for genocide.</s>LEE: You know, I'm really saddened to see her leading this delegation. Normally an attorney general or a minister of defense would be in a perfect position to do this. You know, I've had enormous respect for Aung San Suu Kyi and this way she cannot erase the truth that she has been complicit with the genocide. And she is also responsible for genocide. Now she has no opportunity of turning around and slapping the military.</s>VAUSE: Very quickly. There seems to be two reasons why this matters, because genocide is still taking place as a tactic in Myanmar. And then there's the issue of international investment and foreign aid. Aung San Suu Kyi she is the face of Myanmar. That she is why investors put their money there. Why the international community helps out with financial aid. They need to be aware of what they are getting.</s>LEE: Absolutely. And I have repeatedly asked for the international community to reconsider investing in all the activities that the military has done and their businesses related associates and friends of the military, whereby the conflict is escalating and where they have really abused and violated human rights of, not just the Rohingya, but the Rakhine, the Kachin, the Chin and the Mon and the Cayenne (ph) and Karen Community. All of the ethnic minorities states that the military has been heavily involved in extractive industries and power industries.</s>VAUSE: Yanghee Lee, the U.N. special rapporteur on Myanmar -- thank you so much for being with us. We appreciate it. Thank you for watching CNN NEWSROOM. I'm john Vause. "WORLD SPORT" is next.