Myanmar’s government has found itself at the centre of an alleged fake news scandal surrounding its claims that Muslims are burning their own villages.
Earlier this month images emerged of a woman holding a machete as a village home in the country’s Rakhine State burned behind her.
The Buddhist man who took the photo claimed that the woman was a Rohingya Muslim burning her own house down.
A government spokesman shared the photo along with several others, one of which showed a man in a green-and-blue plaid shirt reaching up to a rooftop and appearing to pour something from a bottle.
One of the photos published with the claims that Muslims were burning down their own homes featuring a woman holding a machete. Journalists have said the woman, pictured right in the same clothes, is in fact a Hindu
‘Photos of Bengalis setting fire to their houses!’ he said, using a term for the Rohingya often used in Myanmar because it implies they are all from Bangladesh.
But reporters have alleged that the man and the woman in the photos are in fact Hindus from a nearby public school the government officials had brought them to hours earlier.
The school was filled with displaced Hindus who said their own homes had been burned by Muslims.
Myanmar’s government contends that Rohingya insurgents have been burning down their own villages in northern Rakhine as they attack both majority Buddhists and minority Hindus.
The Rohingya, meanwhile, say Myanmar security forces and Buddhist mobs have attacked them and razed their homes in a conflict that the government estimates killed close to 400 people.
The latest fighting began after Rohingya insurgents launched a series of attacks at the end of August.
They said it was an effort to protect their ethnic minority from persecution. The government insists the Rohingya are actually Bangladeshis, though many have lived in Myanmar for generations.
Another one of the images posted online shows a man in a green plaid shirt (left). He was also interviewed at the Hindu camp (right)
The attacks have triggered ‘clearance operations’ by security forces who say they are trying to root out the insurgents, and stirred up a virulent spell of Buddhist nationalism directed against the Rohingya and their perceived supporters on social media.
Even if reporters had not met the two Hindus before viewing video of the fire, the images looked dubious. The women’s hair appeared to be covered in something like tablecloths, in lieu of Muslim headwear.
After a Yangon-based news outlet, Eleven Media Group, published an article showing the burned Rohingya homes in Ka Nyin Tan last week, government spokesman Zaw Htay tweeted a link to it.
But after the images began stirring doubt Zaw Htay said the following day that government was investigating the images and would take action against those who set the fires. He also said police were interrogating the Rakhine man who took the images; the man could not be reached by phone on Monday.
It was unclear when those images were taken. But pictures recorded at the public school housing displaced Hindus clearly showed the same man and woman, in the same clothes.
The man and woman can be seen pouring liquid on to the roof of a hut before it was burned
Rohingya Muslims wait for relief near a camp in Bangladesh after fleeing from ongoing military operations in Myanmars Rakhine state
The woman – a mother of six who goes by the single name of Hazuli – said before reporters viewed the video of the fire that her family had been attacked by Rohingya. She referred to them using a derogatory word for Muslim that is commonly used in Myanmar.
‘When we were about to have our meal, the kalars entered our village and started burning our houses. They were holding machetes and spears and started shouting, ‘We will shower with the Hindu’s blood.’ So we ran away from our houses,’ she said. ‘If there are Muslims, the problems will never end, but if kalars are not here anymore, it will be more peaceful.’
Misinformation has gone both ways. Earlier this month Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek, calling for an end to ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Rakhine state, tweeted four photos allegedly from the conflict. He deleted the tweet after it was found most had nothing to do with Myanmar; one showed a Rwandan child crying.
Anti-Rohingya posters, Muslim nationalists in Myanmar tweeted a photo allegedly showing Rohingya militants conducting rifle training; the image was actually from 1971, and showed volunteers training during the nation’s war for independence.
Refugees pictured today living in makeshift camps on hills after fleeing the violence
The fighting triggered a fresh influx of refugees towards neighboring Bangladesh, though the country sealed off its border to refugees
The claim that Rohingya had set fire to their own houses had taken another hit earlier in the same government-organized trip on which journalists met the monk and the Hindu villagers.
The reporters saw Rakhine men with swords walking out of a burning Rohingya village that had been abandoned days earlier. And while they saw smoke rising skyward across the fields in several other locations, they didn’t see a single Rohingya in any of the five destroyed villages they visited.
Allegations that Rohingya are burning their homes have been made in Rakhine state by local Buddhists and government officials ever since a wave of bloody anti-Muslim rioting erupted in 2012. Well over 100,000 Rohingya fled that year, either into Myanmar displacement camps or out of the country, often via dangerous boat journeys.
Some of the Rohingya have said they believe the fires are part of the military’s effort to purge Rakhine state of Muslims
Officials rarely have offered any explanation as to why an already miserable and impoverished group of people would destroy their own homes and exhaust their meager savings to take treacherous journeys to unknown lands for lives of extreme uncertainty.
Last week, however, Myanmar’s Minister of Border Affairs, Col. Phone Tint, told journalists on the trip that Rohingya insurgents were burning villages because they are routing out informants. They ‘also want people to be afraid of them and to join them.’
Refugees who have made it to Bangladesh, however, said they believe the fires are part of the military’s effort to purge Rakhine state of Muslims.
More than 6,800 homes have been destroyed in this wave of violence, the government has said, and all but about 200 belonged to Rohingya.
That estimate, however, is from last week. A Rohingya man and a police officer reached Monday in Rakhine said that in at least one village, the fires are still burning.