The United Nations is awaiting “effective access” to the Myanmar region where 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were driven out in an army crackdown, months after agreeing with the government to aid the return of refugees, the U.N. country head said on Tuesday.

The organisation’s agencies for development and refugees – UNDP and UNHCR – signed a memorandum of understanding with Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in June to allow Rohingya who fled to Bangladesh last year to return home.

But requests for authorisations for staff to visit the conflict area have been beset by delays and authorities have offered access to a limited area, Knut Ostby, the U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator in Myanmar, told Reuters.

Ostby said the United Nations had declined to accept an offer from the government to work in a limited number of villages and would not send in experts until it had negotiated a better deal.

“They’re standing ready to go when we have effective access,” he said.

“We need to have the possibility to do a proper job.”

His comments came despite an announcement from Suu Kyi on Tuesday that her government had “granted access” to the United Nations to work in 23 villages across northern Rakhine State as part of a “pilot assessment programme”.

The United Nations wants to implement “quick impact projects” to benefit the population still there, including cash-for-work schemes and small-scale infrastructure projects.

Ostby said he did not know how the 23 villages, spread out across Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships, had been selected.

The United Nations wanted to work in villages next to one another, he said, to avoid the risk of creating “inequality among neighbouring villages”.

Government spokesman Zaw Htay said the United Nations could work within the selected areas first and then expand its operations.

“As far as I understand, UNDP is to implement pilot project within the allowed villages and extend afterwards,” Zaw Htay said. “If UNDP does not think it’s enough, they would have to discuss with the government.”

The United Nations as been mostly barred from northern Rakhine State since August last year, when the government accused U.N. agencies of supplying food to Rohingya militants.

The Rohingya, who regard themselves as native to Rakhine state, are widely considered as interlopers by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority and are denied citizenship.

The June deal between the United Nations and the government was not made public, but a draft was seen by Reuters and also leaked online last month.

Refugee leaders and human rights groups said the deal failed to give assurances that returning refugees would be granted citizenship and freedom of movement.

Ostby said the United Nations had advocated for the release of the memorandum of understanding.

“We have proposed to the government that it would be a good idea to make it public,” he said. “Having said that, we recognise that such agreements are not normally publicised in other countries.”

Irish musician and activist Bob Geldof called Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi “a hand maiden to genocide” on Monday as he returned his Freedom of the City of Dublin award in protest over his fellow recipient’s response to the repression of Rohingya Muslims.

“I don’t want to be on a very select roll of wonderful people with a killer,” Geldof told state broadcaster RTE. “Someone who is at best a handmaiden to genocide and an accomplice to murder.”

More than 600,000 Muslims from Myanmar’s Rakhine state have fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh after military operations described by the United Nations as ethnic cleansing.

Their plight has drawn outrage around the world. But Suu Kyi, long seen as a champion of human rights, has been criticised for failing to speak out against violence. There have been calls for her to be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1991.

Suu Kyi was given the Freedom of Dublin in 1999 while she was held under house arrest by Myanmar’s then military government. She received her award at a reception in Ireland in 2012, two years after her release.

“Her association with our city shames us all and we should have no truck with it, even by default. We honoured her, now she appals and shames us,” Geldof said in a statement.

The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Micheal Mac Donncha, said the city council had discussed taking away the honour and the matter was still under review. Last month she was stripped of a similar honour by the British university city of Oxford, where she was an undergraduate.

But Mac Donncha, a councillor for the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, also criticised Geldof’s gesture, saying it was ironic as Geldof held a British knighthood despite “the shameful record of British imperialism across the globe”.

The former Boomtown Rats singer was given an honorary knighted in 1986 in recognition of his charity work, including organising the 1985 Live Aid concert to help those suffering from starvation and disease in Ethiopia.

Other foreign recipients of the Freedom of Dublin include John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Irish rockers U2, who had campaigned for Suu Kyi’s release while she was a political prisoner, also voiced disappointment and said her silence was “starting to look a lot like assent”.

“Who could have predicted that if more than 600,000 people were fleeing from a brutal army for fear of their lives, the woman who many of us believed would have the clearest and loudest voice on the crisis would go quiet,” the band said in a statement.

“For these atrocities against the Rohingya people to be happening on her watch blows our minds and breaks our hearts.”

The Myanmar military says it launched the crackdown in response to attacks by Rohingya militants.