Aung San Suu Kyi was once an unassailable champion of Myanmar’s powerless. But the opposition leader’s refusal to speak up for a persecuted Muslim minority at the heart of a migrant crisis has cast doubt over her moral force - and even earned a gentle rebuke from fellow Nobel laureate the Dalai Lama.
Images of hungry migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh hauled from vessels to Southeast Asian shores after months at sea have spurred calls for immediate humanitarian action to be matched by moves to address the root causes of the crisis.
Countries affected by the crisis agreed at a meeting in Bangkok yesterday to set up an anti-trafficking task force and approved a wide-ranging list of recommendations to tackle the “root causes” of the crisis - although the plan was carefully worded to avoid upsetting Myanmar, which denies it is the source of the problem.
Attention has swung to one of the key departure points for the migrants, strife-torn Rakhine state in western Myanmar, where tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims live in dire displacement camps desperate to leave.
But as Myanmar’s government wavers between offering some assistance to stricken migrants and denying any responsibility for their exodus, international rights groups looking for a moral beacon have found little support from Suu Kyi.
Her absence from the discussion has been so conspicuous that the Dalai Lama has urged Suu Kyi to throw her weight behind the Rohingya.
“It’s very sad. In the Burmese (Myanmar) case I hope Aung San Suu Kyi, as a Nobel laureate, can do something,” he told The Australian newspaper the other day.
Suu Kyi spent more than 15 years locked up by the former junta for her tireless campaign for democracy in Myanmar.
Her personal sacrifice, which tore her from her young children and dying British husband, and eloquent pleas that the nation’s long-suffering population should have “freedom from fear” won her a place among the world’s most lauded peacemakers.
Yet since her release from house arrest in 2010, Suu Kyi’s role has been recast from a defiant human rights defender to a hard-nosed political actor preparing to lead her opposition party into elections later this year.
Just months away from the best chance of electoral victory of her political career, Suu Kyi faces pressure in the opposite direction, as public opinion inside Buddhist-majority Myanmar hardens against a Muslim minority widely viewed as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.  
The plight of the Rohingya, one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, has worsened dramatically since 2012 when communal bloodshed left scores dead and some 140,000 people confined in miserable camps.
The violence triggered a wave of deadly anti-Muslim unrest in Myanmar and coincided with rising Buddhist nationalism that has further entrenched animosity towards the minority.