Twitter CEO’s Burma tweets draw criticism
Posting about meditation retreat, Jack Dorsey forgets Rohingya
HONG KONG— Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, fresh off a silent-meditation retreat in Burma, was so smitten with his visit that he posted a series of glowing tweets about the country and its people, urging others to travel there.
But his posts Sunday were called out by many on Twitter for not mentioning the plight of the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority group that has faced a ruthless campaign of violence and persecution at the hands of Burma’s military that caused hundreds of thousands to flee.
Dorsey now faces a backlash from critics who described his travel missives — which included a description of how he used his Apple Watch in airplane mode to track his heart rate during meditation and rest — as politically tone deaf.
“Burma is an absolutely beautiful country. The people are full of joy and the food is amazing,” one tweet said. “I visited the cities of Yangon, Mandalay, and Bagan. We visited and meditated at many monasteries around the country.”
“Is this satire?” one person asked on Twitter. “Please be satire.”
The criticism of Dorsey echoes a debate that once swirled among western
travellers during the years Burma was ruled by a repressive military junta — a debate that mostly subsided after 2012 elections brought the country’s Nobel Prize-winning dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her party into office for the first time.
But today’s debate over the ethics of visiting Burma is different. First, Suu Kyi, who while a political prisoner once asked foreign tourists to boycott her country, is now the civilian leader of a government whose ruthless military campaign against the Rohingya has broad popular support from Burma’s ethnic Bamar Buddhist majority.
Before 2012, it could still be argued “that to ignore the boycott by visiting Burma, you were lending important financial support to ordinary people who were not involved in the junta and were largely innocent of any moral wrongdoing,” said Stuart McDonald, a co-founder of Travelfish, a travel website covering Southeast Asia.
“Today, that doesn’t really hold,” he said, “as the actions against specifically the Rohingya, but also the Muslim minority population in general, enjoy a degree of popular support within the general population.”
More than 720,000 Rohingya fled slaughter, rape and village burnings last year in western Burma, where many of their families had lived for generations. One result is the transformation of Suu Kyi, the country’s civilian leader, from democracy icon to an enabler of what the United Nations calls ethnic cleaning and a foe of the free press.
Burma has denied that its military committed atrocities against the Rohingya, saying it was merely responding to attacks by Rohingya militants. But UN experts said in August,
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echoing reporting by human rights groups, that top Burma generals should face trial in an international court for genocide against the Rohingya and crimes against humanity targeting other ethnic minorities.
How all of that will ultimately affect Burma’s tourism industry — which has generally boomed since 2012 — is unclear.
But year-on-year visitor arrivals of American and Canadian travellers in Burma were down nearly 15 per cent through September, and more than 26 per cent for visitors from Western Europe, according to government figures.
People working in Burma’s travel industry said in interviews Monday that they attributed the slump to concerns about the military’s treatment of the Rohingya.
After posting the tweets about his trip, Dorsey said he would be happy to answer questions about his experience in Burma, but as of late Sunday in California, he had not responded to criticism of his tweets.