Western condemnation of Myanmar’s military campaign against Rohingya Muslims – as well as less noticed offensives in northern Kachin and Shan states – was at high volume this week at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
On Monday, the UN’s Fact Finding Mission (FFM) on Myanmar presented its interim oral report to the council, citing overwhelming evidence of crimes against humanity perpetrated by Myanmar security forces that have driven an estimated 700,000 Rohingya from Rakhine state into Bangladesh.
The FFM’s chair, former Indonesian Attorney General Marzuki Darusman said, “We have seen unsettling photographs and satellite images of Rohingya villages flattened to the ground by bulldozers, erasing all remaining traces of the life and community that once was, not to mention destroying possible crime scene evidence.”
He added: “Any denial of the seriousness of the situation in Rakhine, the reported human rights violations, and the suffering of the victims is untenable.”
The government has refused access to the three-member FFM and their team of UN investigators, compelling them to collect evidence in Bangladesh and Thailand instead.
The UN Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, has been similarly barred from visiting the country since last December when the government said it would no longer cooperate with her.
Lee released her highly detailed report to the council days ago, echoing the FFM’s assessment on the scale of the violence and lack of accountability.
She proposed the formation of a three-year long office to be based in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh to gather evidence, and for the UN system also to be investigated for its role in the crisis.
Citing concerns over the rise of fighting in Kachin, Shan and Karen states, the collapse of the nationwide peace process and government intimidation of civil society, she said “the repressive practices of previous military governments were returning as the norm once more.”
A report by Amnesty International released on the same day the FFM and Yanghee Lee presented in Geneva outlined in graphic detail the use of bulldozers to erase evacuated villages in Rakhine’s Maungdaw township and to construct what the group called ‘military bases’ on the cleared land.
The use of earthmovers to erase traces of villages and construct resettlement sites or security facilities also reeks of the sanitizing of all traces of violence.
Just days before, Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) released a mortality survey report that estimates between August 25 and September 24 last year, 9,400 people were killed in the military’s “clearance” operations, with an estimated 6,700 dying from violence.
The government’s dismissal of all these reports are as chillingly inept as they are ruthlessly obtuse. According to state mouthpiece media, there is a flurry of building activity in Rakhine state, with new roads, electricity projects and Japan-funded school construction.
State media also regularly touts the Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development’s (UEHRD) public private partnership activities and the deployment of a new batch of national ‘youth volunteers’ to distribute aid to all Rakhine’s communities.
What this official narrative studiously ignores is the military campaign that drove 700,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh, or any acknowledgement of the scale or systematic nature of the crimes documented, apart from the grudging admission that some troops were involved in a massacre uncovered by Reuters news service.
That admission, however, has not resulted in the dropping of charges against the two Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo now detained under the Official Secrets Act, which allows for 14-year prison sentences. Details of the police set-up operation that led to their arrests revealed in court proceedings has made a mockery of the trumped-up charges.
A Myanmar government team present in Geneva gave their version of events, consistent with months of thoroughly unconvincing official rebuttals of the Rakhine revelations.
The delegation, led by UEHRD chief Aung Tun Thet, National Security Advisor and Union Minister Thaung Tun and Myanmar Permanent Representative to the UN Htin Lynn and a clutch of MPs, countered the criticism by staging an event called “Understanding Myanmar: Efforts for Reconciliation and Peace.”
The presentation said: “With regard to Rakhine, it is only natural that there will be critics and doubting Thomases (sic)…our efforts to bring peace and development were on track until August 2017, when violence was triggered by the attacks on security forces by terrorists.
“Regrettably, the attacks and the subsequent mass displacement of people changed the situation and negatively affected the perception and attitude of the international community on the situation in Myanmar.
“We take the allegations of human rights violations seriously and will take action against offenders whenever there is clear evidence. Far from being indifferent to the situation, we care deeply for all people affected, including those who have fled to Bangladesh, due to recent incidents in Rakhine.”
These airy, if not spurious, sentiments are deeply rooted in an official culture of denial, and cannot be given any credibility while authorities continue to restrict access to the sites of violence to UN investigators, the media, and long promised but not delivered international humanitarian aid experts.
It’s especially hard to take seriously the government’s commitments to reconstruction in Rakhine when in reality they are bulldozing areas in operations that are more clearly meant to destroy evidence of rights abuses than rehabilitate violence-affected communities. The official narrative is that this is being done to prepare for Rohingya repatriation, but its more clearly akin to Area 51 for military atrocity crimes.
UN rights experts also called out the role social media has played in spreading violent hate speech against the Rohingya and Muslims in general, and the government’s reliance on Facebook to pour scorn on allegations of widespread official abuses against ethnic and religious minorities.
Marzuki told reporters in Geneva that Facebook in particular has “substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict, if you will, within the public. (In) Myanmar…social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media.” Yanghee Lee, meanwhile, deplored Facebook simply as a “beast.”
The sudden deluge of technology and unfiltered information on a country that had been isolated from almost anything but crude state propaganda has collided with the post-2012 communal violence in Rakhine, growing Buddhist ultra-nationalism and rising Islamophobia.
Much of the hate speech on Facebook has been directed at the Rohingya as an existential threat to the nation’s Buddhist majority, turning the social media platform into a zombie virus of Myanmar’s democratic transition after decades of stifling military misrule.
Twitter is less used in Myanmar, and then mostly among Western analysts, Rohingya activists, journalists, aid workers and even pro-Myanmar military bots. The media savvy Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) insurgent group also uses the platform to release its recent proliferation of public statements and threats of retaliation.
But Twitter has also been implicated in the spreading of fake photos, news and video footage of the Rakhine crisis, including by wayward rights campaigners and in one notorious case the deputy foreign minister of Turkey.
Much of the hate speech on Facebook has been directed at the Rohingya as an existential threat to the nation’s Buddhist majority, turning the social media platform into a zombie virus of Myanmar’s democratic transition after decades of stifling military misrule
A recently released study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published in Science magazine on Twitter’s role in spreading false information claims that fake news reports are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true ones.
Still, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s claim that there is an “iceberg of misinformation” over the Rakhine crisis was an unconvincing attempt at diverting attention from the scale of the refugee crisis and widespread reports of gross rights abuses.
But inside Myanmar the perception that so many Western reporting mistakes go uncorrected is fueling the rise of xenophobic nationalism, or at least growing animus towards the West in general and the UN in particular.
Meanwhile, the government’s actions to deny the ferocity and scale of the Rakhine crisis is being waged on the ground with bulldozers, at the UN in stage-managed presentations of denial, and on the hate-filled pages of Facebook and other social media that keeps the Myanmar public misinformed.
David Scott Mathieson is a Yangon-based independent analyst
More power to Myanmar. They are learning from the history of India, and how Muslims once become majority starts dividing states just like Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Look what’s happening in Assam, India…. the bangladeshi Muslims are annihilating local tribal people and culture.
What’s next in the relentless and concerted campaign against Myanmar? Sanctions? Regime change?
Nurun Nabi If they convert to Buddhism and speak Burmese I doubt if they would be molested. That is if no more enter Myanmar. Question is why are they not converting to Buddhism?
Then Why are you killing and rape them.?
Fully agree withThein Maung’d comment !
"When money (petro$$) speaks the truth is silent and the perpetrators becomes the innocent."
Two items stand out in the above article : Facebook and Yanghee Lee.
It appears that UN is okay when jihadists are being recruited using FB and social media. But they have a problem when their one sided pro islamic narrative is contradicted.
The Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) has called for the removal of Yanghee Lee as UN Special Rapporteur due to serious violations of the UN Human Rights Council’s Resolution 5/2 ‘Code of Conduct for Special Procedures Mandate-holders of the Human Rights Council- article 3 General Principles of conduct.’ .
Thus, the above false international media narrative have simply relayed accusations of genocide made by the very organisations committing atrocities, namely the Bengali muslims (migrated from overpopulated muslim Bangladesh and known falsely as rohingya) and jihadists from Pakistan, Chechnya and Malaysia.
The intolerant pleading for tolerance. Fake news or false accusations are typical of muslims practicing deceit as taught in Koran – namely TAQIYYA (to lie to protect one’s self from persecution, emotional harm or physical harm, real or perceived) and KITMAN (to spread misinformation – especially to benefit Islam and to aid its spread). The Qur’an openly states many times that Allah is the "best deceiver". Taqiyya is employed in disguising one’s beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies.