Army apologises for faking atrocity photos

Myanmar Politics and Tatmadaw: Part I, presents itself as an account of events since August last year, when attacks by Rohingya militants became the pretext for a military campaign of arson, rape and murder.

A report last month by UN investigators said that senior Myanmar generals, including Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief, should be prosecuted for genocide.

It also criticised Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader, for failing to use her political and moral power as a heroine of the struggle for democracy to stop the violence.

At a conservative estimate at least 10,000 Rohingya civilians have been killed, and 725,000 more forced from their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine State and into neighbouring Bangladesh.

Several images are labelled as documentary photographs of the Rohingya. One, showing a man with a rake standing over a heap of dead bodies in water, is captioned ‘‘Bengalis killed local ethnics brutally’’, referring to alleged atrocities in the 1940s. In fact, it shows Bangladeshi victims of that country’s civil war in 1971. A second image, showing a column of refugees, is captioned: ‘‘Bengalis intruded into the country after the British colonialism occupied the lower part of Myanmar.’’ It is in reality an altered version of a colour image of Rwandan refugees fleeing into Tanzania that was taken in 1996. – The Times