HANOI, Vietnam — Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader, on Thursday sidestepped widespread accusations that her country’s military had unleashed ethnic cleansing on Rohingya Muslims, a campaign so brutal that the United Nations has recommended that top commanders be tried for genocide.

“There are, of course, ways in which, with hindsight, we might think that the situation could have been handled better, but we believe that for the sake of long-term stability and security, we have to be fair to all sides,” Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said in a rare appearance at an international forum, in Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital.

Since August of last year, more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to neighboring Bangladesh amid a frenzy of executions, rapes and village burnings in the north of Rakhine State in Myanmar. International human rights groups have extensively documented the way Myanmar’s military organized the bloodshed, in which at least 10,000 people were killed, according to a United Nations estimate.

But Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi declined to criticize what she delicately referred to as “the military aspect” in her talk at the World Economic Forum on Asean. Instead, she chastised the international community for not focusing on violence carried out by armed Rohingya militants against members of other ethnic and religious groups in Rakhine.