EARLIER this month, in a column in a state-owned newspaper entitled “The Truth behind the Northern Rakhine Issue”, a retired general decided to rebut the “absolute absurdities” he had read in the international media. He dismissed as slurs the sorts of reports produced by the UN, international NGOs, a host of foreign governments and this newspaper, among others, describing a brutal campaign by the Burmese army that has pushed at least 500,000 members of the Rohingya minority into neighbouring Bangladesh. Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s leader, has also spoken of “a huge iceberg of misinformation”. The Burmese media have done little to challenge that view.
The local press dwells on the attacks by Rohingya insurgents on police and army posts, and on the relatively small number of assaults on Buddhists and Hindus, while ignoring or glossing over the persecution of the Rohingyas, who are Muslim. It does not help that many Rakhine, the Buddhist ethnic group with whom the...Continue reading
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