THE HAGUE — “Intercommunal violence.” Action against “insurgents or terrorists.” Possible — only possible — use of “disproportionate force.” But not genocide.

A day after Daw Aung San Suu Kyi listened impassively to searing testimony about the horrors inflicted upon the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, she took the podium on Wednesday at the United Nations’ highest court to defend her homeland against accusations of genocide, arguing that there had been no orchestrated campaign of persecution.

Her statement at the International Court of Justice in The Hague capped a jarring turnabout, decades in the making, for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, from champion of human rights and democracy to apparent apologist for brutality. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her ramrod resistance to the former military dictatorship that held her under house arrest for 15 years.

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi did not directly address the atrocities by Myanmar’s military and associated mobs that were described the day before — summary killings, babies thrown to their deaths, mass rapes, whole villages burned to cinders — all amply documented by the United Nations and human rights groups. Thousands of Rohingya have been killed and three quarters of a million driven into a squalid exile in neighboring Bangladesh.