MYANMAR’S de facto ruler Aung San Suu Kyi has decided to skip this week’s UN General Assembly session to deal with the Rohingya crisis. Of course, nobody expected Suu Kyi who doubles as her country’s foreign minister to travel to New York for two good reasons.

One, her response to the crisis has drawn worldwide condemnation. Her words and actions, according to many, amount to complicity in the crimes against the Rohingya. A petition on Change.org to strip Suu Kyi of her Nobel Peace Prize has reached almost half a million signatures. The second reason is a corollary of the first: Her unwillingness to listen to pleas from the world community to do something immediately to alleviate the suffering of a people described as the world’s most persecuted minority.

An estimated 400,000 Rohingya have crossed into Bangladesh in the past three weeks to escape a surge of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, home to the Muslim minority for centuries. Until recently, Rohingya were only illegal immigrants. Now they are a lethal combination of criminals, illegal immigrants, terrorists, and the most dangerous kind of threat to Myanmar’s security. Even Suu Kyi has appropriated this dangerous and dehumanizing language used by the most extremist of Buddhists. For example, she claimed that “terrorists” were to blame for the violence and referred to “fake news photographs” posted online that were said to depict atrocities happening in Rakhine but had actually taken place elsewhere.

The latest wave of anti-Rohingya violence began with Aug. 25 militant attacks on 30 police posts and an army base that killed 12 security officers. The government responded to the attack with a vengeance, killing hundreds of Rohingya civilians and burning their villages. A similar attack last year too drew harsh reprisals.

But the mass exodus of Rohingya to Bangladesh and other neighboring countries did not begin last month. This has occurred at least three times in the past 50 years: In 1977-78, in 1991-2 and in 2012 when hundreds of thousands fled across the borders following attacks by Buddhists.

What makes the latest attacks worse than in previous years is the fact that it looks like a program designed to force everyone to flee.

“It is a little unreasonable to expect us to solve the issue in 18 months,” Suu Kyi told the Delhi-based network Asian News International. “The situation in Rakhine”, she said, “has been such since many decades. It goes back to pre-colonial times.”

The question is whether she did anything to rectify the situation after her National League for Democracy (NLD) came to power following the Nov. 8, 2015 parliamentary elections. The answer is in the negative. She knew the Rohingya have suffered years of discrimination and have been denied citizenship in Myanmar since 1982. They have no access to education or health care and their freedom of movement is severely restricted. But she has been mostly silent on their plight, refusing even to call them by that name. Worse still, she deliberately bypassed Muslim candidates ahead of the November election. Not one of the NLD’s 1,151 candidates standing for regional and national elections was Muslim.

The NLD admits it struck them off following pressure from the increasingly powerful ultranationalist Buddhist movement. And Suu Kyi condones all the violence against the Rohingya lest she antagonizes an even more powerful military.

If the political price of her ascension to the highest office in Myanmar was her silence, as Desmont Tutu, a fellow laureate suspects, she seems to be paying an even bigger price to retain that power. Today, Rohingya are the victims with Suu Kyi, the military and the Buddhist majority on one side. Given her willingness to compromise, the equation can change any time. The question is whether enough Buddhists realize that a day may come when they find themselves on one side and Sui Kyi and the military on the other.