Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday pledged to hold rights violators to account and to resettle some of the 410,000 Muslims who have fled army operations in her country.

But she offered no concrete solutions to stop what the UN calls ‘ethnic cleansing’. Amnesty International said the Nobel peace prizewinner was ‘burying her head in the sand’ by ignoring army abuses.

Communal violence has torn through Rakhine state since Rohingya militants staged deadly attacks on police posts on August 25. Hundreds have been killed and hundreds of thousands of Muslim Rohingya driven out of mainly Buddhist Myanmar into Bangladesh.

Suu Kyi has been strongly criticised by the international community for failing to speak up publicly for the stateless Rohingya or to urge restraint on the military.

In a 30-minute televised speech Tuesday she reached out to her critics, deploying the soaring rhetoric that once made her a darling of the global rights community.

In an address timed to pre-empt likely censure at the UN General Assembly in New York, she said Myanmar stood ready ‘at any time’ to repatriate refugees in accordance with a ‘verification’ process agreed with Bangladesh in the early 1990s.

In less than a month just under half of Rakhine’s one-million-strong Rohingya minority has poured into Bangladesh, where they now languish in one of the world’s largest refugee camps.

Those ‘verified as refugees’ will be ‘accepted without any problems and with full assurance of their security and access to humanitarian aid’, Suu Kyi said.

It was not immediately clear how many Rohingya would qualify to return.

But the subject of their claims to live in Myanmar is at the heart of a toxic debate about the Muslim group, who are denied citizenship by the state and considered to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Myanmar’s government has previously said it will not take back people linked with ‘terrorists’ and suggested that many of those who fled had set fire to their own villages before leaving.

Suu Kyi’s pledge to repatriate the refugees ‘is new and significant’, said Richard Horsey, an independent analyst based in Myanmar, explaining it would in principle allow for the return of those who can prove residence in Myanmar—rather than citizenship.

‘However, there continues to be a live crisis in the north of Rakhine,’ he said.

Burning Villages

Rights monitors and fleeing Rohingya say the army and Rakhine Buddhist vigilantes have mounted a campaign of arson aimed at driving out the Muslim population.

Myanmar rejects that, saying its security forces are carrying out operations to defend against the insurgents of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which has claimed responsibility for attacks on the security forces since October.

The government has declared ARSA a terrorist organisation and accused it of setting the fires and attacking civilians.

Referring to Suu Kyi's assertion that army clearance operations had ceased, Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch asked: ‘If that is true, then who is burning all the villages we've seen in the past two weeks?’

He said satellite images showed about half of all Rohingya villages had been torched and it was time that Suu Kyi, the government and military faced the fact that the security forces ‘don't follow a code of conduct and shoot and kill who they want’ and burn villages.

Amnesty International said there was ‘overwhelming evidence’ the security forces were engaged in ethnic cleansing.

‘While it was positive to hear Aung San Suu Kyi condemn human rights violations in Rakhine state, she is still silent about the role of the security forces,’ the group said.

While foreign critics raised doubts, thousands of Suu Kyi's cheering supporters gathered in the main city of Yangon and other towns to watch her speech broadcast on big screens.

'Single Spark'

The ambassador of China, which vies with the United States for influence in Myanmar, welcomed Suu Kyi's speech saying it would improve understanding. Russia's ambassador said there was no evidence of ethnic cleaning.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Patrick Murphy also attended the address.

Suu Kyi, 72, said her government had been making every effort to promote harmony between the Muslim and largely Buddhist ethnic Rakhine communities.

A government official in Rakhine State did not seem to share Suu Kyi's optimism about relations between the two communities.

‘They have no trust for each other,’ the state's secretary, Tin Maung Swe, told Reuters, adding tension was high.

‘The situation is ready to explode. It just needs a single spark.’

Suu Kyi said her government was committed to recommendations made by an advisory team led by former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan.

Annan's panel recommended last month a review of a citizenship law that makes a link between citizenship and ethnicity and leaves most Rohingya stateless.

On the return of refugees, Suu Kyi said Myanmar was ready to start a verification process.

‘Those who have been verified as refugees from this country will be accepted without any problem,’ she said.