So it has come to this.

Six Burmese generals accused last week of “genocidal intent” against the Rohingya people by members of a United Nations fact-finding panel are walking free today.

But a Burmese court has jailed two Reuters journalists for doing their jobs by — wait for it — simply investigating the slaughter of that country’s Muslim minority.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were sentenced to seven years in prison on Monday after a judge found them guilty of illegally possessing government documents. Experts, including Canada’s special envoy to Burma, Bob Rae, say they were framed by security forces.

This is a terrible blow for both freedom of expression and the fight against the state violence being inflicted on the Rohingya.

The two are intertwined. As Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said when the journalists were first arrested: “For true democracy to flourish, fundamental freedoms such as freedom of the press must be respected.”

But the real outrage is that despite the journalists’ brave efforts to shine a light on the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, the slaughter of the innocents continues unabated.

Indeed, in the last year, the UN estimates that at least 10,000 Rohingya have been murdered in violent army operations, while nearly 725,000 have fled Burma, also known as Myanmar, to squalid refugee camps across the border in neighbouring Bangladesh.

To say the survivors in the camps have been though hell is an understatement.

Cate Blanchett, the actor and UN goodwill ambassador for refugees, told the UN Security Council last week that she heard “gut-wrenching accounts” of torture, rape, and people seeing loved ones killed before their eyes, including children thrown into fires.

But who is in prison? Not those responsible for what the UN panel called a “forseeable and planned catastrophe,” but those who tried to draw it to the attention of the world.

If the jailing of journalists while accused generals go free isn’t hypocritical enough, this ethnic cleansing is taking place in a country whose elected civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is a Nobel Peace Prize winner and one of only six people to have been made an honorary citizen of Canada.

Where does she stand on the massacre of her own citizens? Nowhere. She is silent, except when she is denying the evidence from satellite images of razed villages and the testimony of survivors, calling it all an “iceberg of misinformation” being propagated by “terrorists.”

No wonder some, such as Amnesty International and Irwin Cotler, the renowned human rights lawyer and former federal minister, are calling on the Trudeau government to revoke Suu Kyi’s honorary Canadian citizenship.

And so it should. Symbols matter. Her name is among a select group, after all, that includes freedom fighters such as Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.

A year ago, the Trudeau government was arguing — and the Star supported its position at that time — that it could use its close relationship with Suu Kyi to push her to show some of the courage and humanity that led to her world-wide acclaim.

But that effort has proven to be for naught. In fact, the UN panel has concluded that she, along with other leaders in that country, “contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes” by failing to use their positions to stop them.

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As if to underscore that finding, after the UN report was released last week Suu Kyi was silent on the issue in a public appearance. Instead, she chose to talk — we are not making this up — about poetry and literature.

Canada has rightly joined the international chorus calling for the immediate release of the two jailed journalists. It should further demonstrate its outrage over the slaughter of the Rohingya by revoking Suu Kyi’s honorary, but undeserved, Canadian citizenship.

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