Could she, short of the military red lines that surround her, have expressed her indignation at the immense suffering of Rohingya civilians, and condemned the arson and killing that sent hundreds of thousands of terrified human beings on their way? Perhaps. But that would demand that she believes this is the essence of the story. It’s unclear that she does; she’s suspicious of the Rohingya claims and what she sees as manipulation of the media. It would also demand that she deem the political risk tolerable in a country that overwhelmingly supports her in her stance. Certainly she did not order the slaughter. Nor did she have the constitutional powers to stop it.

What is clear is that Aung San Suu Kyi’s reticence has favored obfuscation. It has left the field open for a ferocious Facebook war over recent events. The Rohingya and Buddhists inhabit separate realities. There are no agreed facts, even basic ones. This is the contemporary post-truth condition. As the Annan report notes, “narratives are often exclusive and irreconcilable.”

In Rakhine State, where all hell broke loose last August, the poverty is etched in drawn faces with staring eyes. The streets of its capital, Sittwe, a little over an hour’s flight from Yangon, are dusty and depleted. Its beach is overrun with stray dogs and crows feeding on garbage. As the town goes, so goes all of Rakhine, now one of the poorest parts of Myanmar, itself a very poor country. The violence that ripped through the northern part of the state was a disaster foretold.

There was an earlier eruption, in 2012, when intercommunal violence between Rakhine Buddhists and Muslims left close to 200 people dead and about 120,000 people marooned in camps. There they have rotted for five years. Government promises have yielded nothing. The camps are closed off. Former Rohingya districts in town have been emptied, a shocking exercise in ghettoization.

I spoke by phone with Saed Mohamed, a 31-year-old teacher confined since 2012 in a camp. “The government has cheated us so many times,” he told me. “I have lost my trust in Aung San Suu Kyi. She is still lying. She never talks about our Rohingya suffering. She talks of peace and community, but her government has done nothing for reconciliation.”

Rakhine, also called Arakan, was an independent kingdom before falling under Burmese control in the late 18th century. Long neglect from the central government, the fruit of mutual suspicion, has spawned a Rakhine Buddhist independence movement, whose military wing is the Arakan Army. “We are suffering from 70 years of oppression from the government,” Htun Aung Kyaw, the general secretary of the Arakan National Party, whose objective is self-determination for the region, told me.

The steady influx over a long period of Bengali Muslims, encouraged by the British Empire to provide cheap labor, exacerbated Rakhine Buddhist resentments. The Muslim community has grown to about one-third of Rakhine’s population of more than 3.1 million and, over time, its self-identification as “Rohingya” has become steadily more universal.