SHAMLAPUR, Bangladesh — Among Westerners, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is often mentioned as a paragon of liberty, in the same breath as Mandela and Gandhi, thanks to her decades-long campaign against Myanmar’s kleptocratic military junta. But to the Rohingya, the Muslim minority now fleeing Myanmar (formerly Burma) by the tens of thousands, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the country’s political leader is the embodiment of evil.

Abdul Kalam is one of the Rohingya. A 33-year-old farmer, he was shot in the leg on Aug. 27 by Burmese soldiers as he fled his home in the coastal village of Maungdaw with his wife, children and neighbors. From his hospital bed in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where he was being cradled by his wife, Mr. Abdul Kalam told me: “Aung San Suu Kyi has done nothing for our village. When she was campaigning for her election, the Rohingya supported her, even though we can’t vote.” He added: “Suu Kyi opened fire on us. If she knocks on our door, then we know what we’ll do.”

Mr. Abdul Kalam is one of countless exhausted and terrified Rohingya who have stumbled out of Myanmar into Bangladesh through the monsoon-lashed rice paddies that line the frontier. They are fleeing a crackdown being carried out by the Myanmar military that bears all the hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing. They carry with them all they have left: their surviving children, their wounded, the last of their belongings and fresh memories of the killing fields of their homeland. This is the Myanmar of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who, in her capacity as state counselor since 2015, plays a role in overseeing the country’s military.

The Rohingya I’ve spoken with describe attacks that have been planned meticulously. One woman recalled the missiles that were fired into her village in Maungdaw in late August. After the projectiles hit, she said, soldiers arrived and “doused the homes with petrol and set them alight.” She and her young son are now staying with family in Shamlapur, a fishing village in southeastern Bangladesh populated by Rohingya who fled similar horrors in the early 1990s.