Myanmar's Suu Kyi to miss UN trip amid Rohingya crisis

Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi will not attend the United Nations General Assembly this week, her spokesman said today, as the Nobel laureate faces a barrage of criticism over her failure to speak up for Rohingya Muslims fleeing Rakhine state in huge numbers.
A crackdown by Myanmar's army, launched in response to Rohingya militant attacks on August 25, has sent some 379,000 Rohingya refugees scrambling across the border to Bangladesh in less than three weeks.
The violence has incubated a humanitarian crisis on both sides of the border and piled intense global pressure on Suu Kyi to condemn the army campaign, which the UN has described as having all the hallmarks of "ethnic cleansing".

Bangladesh is struggling to provide relief for exhausted and hungry refugees -- some 60 percent of whom are children -- while nearly 30,000 ethnic Rakhine Buddhists as well as Hindus have been displaced inside Myanmar.
Nine thousand more refugees poured into Bangladesh today, as authorities clambered to build a new camp for tens of thousands of arrivals who have no shelter.
Suu Kyi, Myanmar's first civilian leader in decades, has no control over the powerful military, which ran the country for 50 years before allowing free elections in 2015.

There is also scant sympathy among Myanmar's Buddhist majority for the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim group branded "Bengalis" -- shorthand for illegal immigrants.

But outside of her country Suu Kyi's reputation as a defender of the oppressed is in ruins over the Rohingya crisis.
Rights groups have pilloried the former democracy activist for failing to speak out against the army campaign, which has left hundreds dead.
Rohingya refugees have told chilling accounts of soldiers firing on civilians and razing entire villages in northern Rakhine state with the help of Buddhist mobs.