Myanmar's leader Aung San Suu Kyi has arrived on her first visit to northern Rakhine state, which has seen most of its Rohingya Muslim population forced out by an army campaign.
She is expected to visit two of the main areas of violence during her unannounced one-day visit to the area.
Ms Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who leads Myanmar's pro-democracy party, has been criticised by the international community for failing to use her moral power to speak up in defence of the Rohingya.
Some 600,000 of the stateless minority have fled to Bangladesh since late August carrying accounts of murder, rape and arson at the hands of the Myanmar's army, after militant raids sparked a ferocious military crackdown.
The UN has said that crackdown is tantamount to ethnic cleansing, while pressure has mounted on Myanmar to provide security for the Rohingya and allow people to return home.
It is her first trip in office to northern Rakhine, which has hosted the worst of the communal violence that has cut through Rakhine State since 2012, severely damaging Myanmar's global reputation.
It was not clear if Ms Suu Kyi would visit some of the hundreds of Rohinyga villages torched by the army, or if she would be taken to see remaining clusters of the Muslim group, who are living in fear and hunger surrounded by hostile neighbours.
The Rohingya who have fled have packed into makeshift camps on a poor, already overcrowded slip of border land inside Bangladesh.
Aid groups say the risk of major outbreaks of disease is high while they struggle to deliver food and basic supplies to the unprecedented number of refugees.
Thousands of others are believed to still be camped on a beach near Maungdaw awaiting boats to Bangladesh in increasingly parlous conditions.
The Rohingya are denied citizenship in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and widely dismissed as illegal "Bengali" immigrants.
Observers say Ms Suu Kyi has chosen not to criticise the army in fear of a backlash from a powerful institution that controls all security matters.
The plight of the Rohingya also garners little sympathy inside Myanmar, making any defence of the minority a politically unpopular cause amid surging Buddhist nationalist sentiment.
Ms Suu Kyi heads a committee charged with rebuilding Rakhine and repatriating Rohingya from Bangladesh who meet strict criteria for re-entry to Myanmar.
