Rohingya fall victim to fake news

QUESTIONS RAISED ON WHO IS BURNING MYANMAR VILLAGES

• Pointing to the ashes of a destroyed village that was once home to dozens of Rohingya Muslim families, the abbot of a nearby Buddhist monastery insisted he knew who had set it ablaze. It was the Rohingya themselves, he said, and there was photographic evidence to prove it.

“I even tried to stop them,” the abbot, Zawtika, told reporters who visited violencetorn Rakhine state last week after an explosion of communal violence that has so far compelled a staggering 313,000 Rohingya to flee into Bangladesh. “I told them not to do that, but it seemed like they wanted to.”

Shortly afterward, a Buddhist resident who is close to the monk, a man named Maung Maung Htwe, shared photos he said he had taken on his mobile phone that showed several people setting fire to the buildings.

The alleged perpetrators could be clearly seen — too clearly for anyone trying to advance the lie that Rohingya were responsible.

Journalists recognized two of the people in the photos as Hindus from a nearby school the government officials had brought them to hours earlier. The school was filled with displaced Hindus who said their own homes had been burned by Muslims. An Associated Press reporter interviewed one of them.

Like the monk, the country’s government contends that Rohingya insurgents have been burning down their own villages in northern Rakhine as they attacked both majority Buddhists and minority Hindus. The Rohingya, meanwhile, say Myanmar security forces and Buddhist mobs have attacked them and razed their homes in a conflict that the government estimates killed close to 400 people.

Myanmar’s de facto leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, was under growing international pressure Monday after the UN’s top human rights official accused her government of “textbook ethnic cleansing” and the Dalai Lama criticized Buddhist attacks on the Rohingya.

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said Myanmar seemed to be carrying out a “systematic attack” on civilians — designed to expel the mainly Muslim minority from the predominantly Buddhist country.

“Because Myanmar has refused access to human rights investigators, the current situation cannot yet be fully assessed, but the situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” Zeid told the UN Human Rights Council.

The latest fighting began after Rohingya insurgents launched a series of attacks Aug. 25 that they have portrayed as an effort to protect their ethnic minority from persecution. The government insists the Rohingya are actually Bangladeshis, though many have lived in Myanmar for generations.

The attacks have triggered “clearance operations” by security forces who say they are trying to root out the insurgents, and stirred up a virulent spell of Buddhist nationalism directed against the Rohingya on social media.

The violence has also sparked a war pitting the truth against so-called “fake news,” with Myanmar’s government and its supporters taking a page right out of U.S. President Donald Trump’s war on the media.

Even if reporters had not met the two Hindus before viewing video of the fire, the images looked dubious. The women’s hair appeared to be covered in something like tablecloths, in lieu of Muslim headwear.

After a Myanmar-based news outlet, Eleven Media Group, published an article showing the burned Rohingya homes in Ka Nyin Tan last week, government spokesman Zaw Htay tweeted a link to it. “Photos of Bengalis setting fire to their houses!” he said, using a term for the Rohingya often used in Myanmar because it implies they are all from Bangladesh.

After the images began stirring doubt, however, Zaw Htay said the following day that the government was investigating the images and would take action against those who set the fires.

The images showed several people torching the thatched roof of one home. In one of the images, a man in a green-and-blue plaid shirt reaches up to a rooftop, appearing to pour something from a bottle. In another, a woman in an orange-andwhite shirt wields a machete.

It was unclear when those images were taken. But pictures recorded at the public school housing displaced Hindus clearly showed the same man and woman, in the same clothes.

The woman — a mother of six who goes by Hazuli — said before reporters viewed the video of the fire that her family had been attacked by Rohingya. She referred to them using a derogatory word for Muslims — kalars.

“When we were about to have our meal, the kalars entered our village and started burning our houses. They were holding machetes and spears and started shouting, ‘We will shower with the Hindu’s blood.’ So we ran away from our houses,” she said. “If there are Muslims, the problems will never end, but if kalars are not here anymore, it will be more peaceful.”

THE SITUATION SEEMS A TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE OF ETHNIC CLEANSING.