Fabricated stories and incorrectly captioned pictures are “causing major misunderstandings about Myanmar to the rest of the world”, declared the Myanmar State Counsellor Office and the front page of the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar today.
The claim comes a few days after a video showing Myanmar police beating Rohingya villagers went viral around the world and just a day after the State Counsellor Office pledged to take action against the officers involved in the beatings.
The State Counsellor Office Information Committee statement accuses foreign media outlets and governments of using images of violence from other countries to propagate “criticism and condemnation of Myanmar by countries and rights groups across the globe”.
The report includes eight captioned images published on social media and foreign newspapers claiming to depict violence perpetrated against Muslims in Myanmar. The Information Committee has added its own captions pointing out that the images actually come from other countries or from situations not related to the Myanmar military’s clearance operations in Rakhine State.
One of the images is a still from the film Rambo IV and is captioned in Bangla: “Video of torture on Rohingyas: share it with everyone.”
As if that video was the reason more than a dozen Nobel laureates have accused the Myanmar military of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity against the Rohingya.
The use of misleading images claiming to depict human rights abuses in Rakhine State is well-documented. Last month, the Daily Mail claimed a viral video depicted the torture of a Rohingya child at the hands of a Myanmar soldier. The video was quickly removed after readers pointed out that the video actually captured the torture of a Cambodian child by a Vietnamese man. The Vietnamese man, two Cambodian men and a Dutch man had been arrested in connection to the torture video.
In 2015, Jamila Hanan, a UK-based Rohingya activist, told BBC: “There are so many genuine images of tragic scenes of the Rohingya that are genuine, there is simply no need for anyone to fabricate anything. The most tragic images are the real ones.”
However, the State Counsellor Office, headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, does not mention the accurate reports of human rights abuses against the Rohingya in its statement – not even the video it had acknowledged the previous day.
Rather than responding to the overwhelming evidence of human rights abuses in Rakhine State, Aung San Suu Kyi’s government is rebutting claims few people find convincing to begin with.
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