Thousands of Rohingya Muslims trapped by hostile Buddhists in northwestern Myanmar have enough food and will not be granted the safe passage from two remote villages.
The Rohingya villagers said they wanted to leave but needed government protection from ethnic Rakhine Buddhists who had threatened to kill them.
They also said they were running short of food since August 25, when Rohingya militants launched deadly attacks in Rakhine state, provoking a fierce crackdown by the Myanmar military.
At least 420,000 Rohingya have since fled into neighbouring Bangladesh to escape what a senior United Nations official has called a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing".
Tin Maung Swe, secretary of the Rakhine state government, said requests from the two villages for safe passage had been denied, since they had enough rice and were protected by a nearby police outpost.
Residents of Ah Nauk Pyin, one of the two Rohingya villages, said they hoped to move to the relative safety of a camp outside Sittwe, the nearby state capital.
About 90,000 Rohingya displaced by a previous bout of violence in 2012 are confined to camps in Rakhine in squalid conditions.
In a nationally televised speech on Tuesday, Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi vowed to punish the perpetrators of human rights violations in Rakhine, but did not address UN accusations of ethnic cleansing by the military.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate said that many Muslims had not fled and urged foreign diplomats to study why certain areas of Rakhine state had "managed to keep the peace".
"We can arrange for you to visit these areas and to ask them for yourself why they have not fled ... even at a time when everything around them seems to be in a state or turmoil," she said.
Britain said it has suspended its training programme for military in Myanmar due to the violence and called on the army to protect all civilians and allow aid through.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari at the UN likened the violence to genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, urging a halt to the "ongoing ethnic cleansing" and safe return of refugees.
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