Myanmar Army uses fake photos for book

YANGON: The grainy black-andwhite photo, printed in a new book on the Rohingya crisis authored by Myanmar’s Army, shows a man standing over two bodies, wielding a farming tool. “Bengalis killed local ethnics brutally,” reads the caption.

The photo appears in a section of the book covering ethnic riots in Myanmar in the 1940s. The text says the image shows Buddhists murdered by Rohingya — members of a Muslim minority referred to as “Bengalis” to imply they are illegal immigrants.

But a Reuters examination of the photograph shows it was actually taken during Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war, when hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis were killed by Pakistani troops.

It is one of three images in the book, published in July by the army’s department of public relations and psychological warfare, that have been misrepresented as archival pictures from the western state of Rakhine.

In fact, Reuters found that two of the photos originally were taken in Bangladesh and Tanzania. A third was falsely labelled as depicting Rohingya entering Myanmar from Bangladesh, when in reality it showed migrants leaving the country.

The government spokesman and a military spokesman could not be reached for comment.

U Myo Myint Maung, permanent secretary at the ministry of information, declined to comment, saying he had not read the book. REUTERS