UN’s Rohingya genocide claim baffles Myanmar
Yangon – Baffled, hurt or indignant, many inside Myanmar are struggling to digest a week of opprobrium heaped on their country by the UN and even Facebook over the treatment of the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim group whose plight elicits little sympathy in the Buddhist-majority nation.
Last year’s military crackdown ostensibly on Rohingya militants pushed out some 700 000 of the minority in violence that horrified the world. But in Myanmar, the army was widely cheered for its defence of the country from “Bengali” interlopers – as the Rohingya are falsely cast.
A UN report on Monday pulled few punches in calling for the army chief’s prosecution for genocide against the Rohingya and singled out Myanmar’s democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to speak up for the group.
Yet the public response has been muted on an issue warped by Islamophobic rhetoric and the rehashed history peddled by the military.
Ship owner Kyaw Kyaw, 47, said: “I have sympathy for the victims but defending our country from terrorism is more important,” he added, parroting the official line that the army’s “clearance operations” were justified to root out Rohingya militants.
Most people still rely for information on state media, Facebook or a fledgling independent media that toes the government line on the Rohingya. There are signs politics is again becoming taboo, as patriotism and mistrust of a still-powerful army dull criticism and a siege mentality builds up.
Suu Kyi, still a heroine at home, articulated the mood: “We who are living through the transition in Myanmar view it differently from those outside who will remain untouched by its outcome,” she said this week in a speech.
The UN’s call for prosecution of the military top brass was buttressed by Facebook, which pulled down the profile of army chief Min Aung Hlaing, 17 other accounts of top generals and 52 pages followed by almost 12 million people to prevent them using the site to “further inflame ethnic and religious tensions”.