If the Myanmar military is rendering the country's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi powerless, then she should step down, Nobel Peace laureate and economist Muhammad Yunus said in an interview with Aljazeera recently.

"I'll put 100% of the blame on her because she is the leader…" Muhammad Yunus told Aljazeera while reacting to a query about allegation that Suu Kyi is powerless and her country's military is in charge behind the ongoing persecution on Rohingyas in the Rakhine state of Myanmar.

READ more: Rohingya crisis a great test for UN

Yunus said Suu kyi is verbally defending the atrocity and violence taking place against the Rohingya population of her country. 

"She takes all the blame herself, so there is no way you can part it with the military or anybody else." He said adding that Suu Kyi has to fix the Rohingya crisis by herself.

"If she cannot say what she should say then she is no leader… leader is supposed to stand by their own people," Yunus said at the interview.

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Pointing Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate said, "You have to stand up, you have to protect your image that you built over years as a defender of human rights, defender of democracy… what happened to all those values you have promoted?"

Asked whether Suu Kyi deserves the Nobel Prize, Yunus said that he is sure that the committee would never give her the prize if she had all these stories in front of it.

Some 589,000 Rohingya people -- about 60 percent of them children -- have crossed into Bangladesh since August 25 to join nearly 400,000 of their fellow countrymen who fled violence in Myanmar in phases over the years. 

The UN and other aid groups are struggling to mobilise fund for the emergency reliefs.