FAKE PHOTOS IN ARMY BOOK ON ROHINGYA

It casts minority group as interlopers from Bangladesh

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 said the image showed Buddhists murdered by Rohingya — members of a Muslim minority the book refers to as “Bengalis” to imply they are illegals.

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

It is one of three images that appear 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 Rakhine.

In fact, 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.

Government spokesman Zaw Htay and a military spokesman could not be reached for comment on the authenticity of the images.

Information Ministry permanent secretary U Myo Myint Maung declined to comment, saying he had not read the book.

The 117-page Myanmar Politics and the Tatmadaw: Part I relates the army’s narrative of August last year, when some 700,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine to Bangladesh, according to United Nations agencies, triggering reports of mass killings, rape and arson.

Tatmadaw is the official name of Myanmar’s military.

Much of the content is sourced to the military’s “True News” information unit, which, since the start of the crisis, has distributed news giving the army’s perspective, mostly via Facebook.

In the book, the military denied the allegations of abuses, blaming the violence on “Bengali terrorists” it said were intent on carving out a Rohingya state named Arkistan.

The book seeks to trace the history of the Rohingya, who regard themselves as native to western Myanmar, casting them as interlopers from Bangladesh.

REUTERS PIC (Top) An image depicting the bodies of Bengalis being retrieved following their massacre in Dhaka in 1971. The same image (bottom) as it appears in the Myanmar army’s book on the Rohingya, describing it as the brutal killing of the local ethnic people by Bengalis in Myanmar.