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Aung San Suu Kyi arrives for a meeting with Vietnam's President Tran Dai Quang at the Presidential Palace at the sideline of the World Economic Forum on ASEAN in Hanoi, Sept. 12, 2018.KHAM/AFP/Getty Images

Ko Ko Latt is a Muslim business leader in Yangon, a hotelier who has devoted his time and resources to promoting political representation of a religion under fire in heavily Buddhist Myanmar.

The country’s violent expulsion of more than 725,000 people, most of them Muslim Rohingya, has been labelled a genocide by Canada, where parliament on Thursday unanimously voted to revoke the honorary citizenship of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader. It was a move meant to add to the international pressure on, and shaming of, a Nobel Peace laureate accused of doing little to stop military attacks on Rohingya.

But Mr. Ko Ko Latt wasn’t cheering.

“It’s not going to affect anything in Myanmar,” he said Friday. “Nothing will happen.”

The brutal treatment of the Rohingya in Myanmar has deeply marred the image of Ms. Suu Kyi, who has, since her election in 2015, been stripped of honours she once accumulated for holding fast to democratic ideals against dictatorship.

Last year, the city council in Oxford, where she studied and graduated, revoked the Freedom of the City of Oxford award she had received in 1997. Fellow Nobel laureates have publicly criticized Ms. Suu Kyi. Those who once lauded her courage have savaged what they have called her complicity in ethnic cleansing. Canada, which has also sanctioned Myanmar military leaders, is now further adding to Ms. Suu Kyi’s international indignities, as the international community seeks to express outrage and the highest forms of condemnation.

But it is a measure of the complexity of resolving the Rohingya displacement that those steps have done little to affect Ms. Suu Kyi’s standing at home, where “she’s still popular. There’s no question about that,” said Bertil Lintner, a journalist and author who has written extensively about Myanmar.

The military campaign against the Rohingya has been conducted against a background of broad Buddhist resentment and fear of Muslims.

Myanmar’s armed forces have also maintained their independence despite ceding some powers to the nascent democratic leadership led by Ms. Suu Kyi. The military controls important ministries and a quarter of seats in parliament. It also enjoys a warm relationship with China.

Ms. Suu Kyi “has absolutely no control over the military,” Mr. Lintner said. “She is not responsible for what has happened in Rakhine state with the Rohingya. The military is entirely autonomous.”

For western countries, that means “the capacity of putting pressure on the Burmese military is zero,” said Mr. Lintner, who is researching Chinese strategic interests in Myanmar as part of a new book. “You can, of course, make statements – and that’s not bad. But you have to accept the fact that it’s not going to have any impact.”

Ms. Suu Kyi’s past has nonetheless given her a significant international profile, and she has been criticized for failing to use her moral standing to oppose military actions – or even to acknowledge the existence of the Rohingya, a people seen by many in Myanmar as Bangladeshi invaders.

Stripping Ms. Suu Kyi of honorary citizenship is “some sort of feel-good thing. It’s not going to help anyone,” Mr. Lintner said.

Ms. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party did not respond to requests for comment. Tin Mar Aung, who has long been one of Ms. Suu Kyi’s closest associates, said in a brief phone call that she had not heard about the Canadian decision and was no longer working with Ms. Suu Kyi.

Among some Myanmar democracy activists, meanwhile, Ms. Suu Kyi continues to be seen as the country’s best hope to maintain its partial democracy, which has enabled greater freedoms than those experienced under lengthy military rule.

The Canadian government should not act out against Ms. Suu Kyi if it “wants to achieve the Myanmar democracy transition,” said Aye Kyaw, a former political prisoner who is now executive director of the Open Myanmar Initiative, a democracy-promotion organization.

Revoking honorary citizenship, he said, will damage Ms. Suu Kyi’s dignity and hurt the “reform, reconstruction and national reconciliation process in Myanmar.”

Others, however, have seen their faith in Ms. Suu Kyi begin to erode, at least in her power as an icon. Mr. Ko Ko Latt, for example, sees her as a politician whose ascent to power has led her away from her roots.

“She was previously a public figure, and people here loved her. Everybody supported her,” he said.

“Previously, she listened to the peoples’ voices,” he said. He had hopes that she could accomplish what other Myanmar leaders could not. But, he said, “now, she is not listening any more. … She is isolated.”

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