For the past three days, supermodel Gigi Hadid has been visiting Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, with a UNICEF delegation, drawing millions of eyes to the crisis through her Instagram and Twitter profiles. While most commenters have praised the model for using her popularity to promote the cause of some of the world’s most persecuted children, some Myanmar social media users are questioning her reasons for being there.
In the caption to an Instagram photo taken in the Jamtoli refugee camp, Hadid described the medical, psychological, and education services UNICEF has been providing to some of the 1.3 million refugees in the district. Commenters from Bangladesh thanked her for visiting, and people around the world left comments praising her “beauty with a heart, with a purpose.”
On Twitter, she replied to a question from a follower who asked “Are those children from India?” with a surprisingly detailed and accurate explanation of who the Rohingya are, where they’re from, and how they got to Bangladesh.
The Rohingyas are originally from what is now northern Rakhine State, Myanmar, formerly known as Arakan, Burma. They’ve all fled the violence, walking dozens of days through terrain, water, starvation + traumatic experiences to get to the Refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. https://t.co/swVQRTn9Wa
— Gigi Hadid (@GiGiHadid) August 17, 2018
“Thanks, and all the best in spreading love and happiness wherever you go,” the follower replied.
In Myanmar, however, some people don’t think Hadid is spreading love and happiness. One such person is Win Min Than, a Yangon-based entrepreneur and influencer with 145,000 followers on Facebook. In a post yesterday, she accused the model of exploiting Myanmar’s suffering.
Commenters then chimed in with theories of a an international conspiracy to ignore Myanmar’s suffering at the hands of Rohingya militants.
The Myanmar government and military claim that the flight of 700,000 Rohingya from Myanmar into Bangladesh was triggered by Myanmar’s response to a series of attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on security outposts. However, rights groups have posited that the mass expulsion of Rohingya was premeditated and planned weeks before the militant attacks.
Rakhine-truther and once-dethroned pageant queen Shwe Eain Si also chimed in using her newly won platform as Miss Golden Land Myanmar, saying that “there’s no such ethnic group as Rohingya in our country.”
“Government officers, as well as Rakhine and Hindu communities have been killed, wounded and traumatized by them, and Ms. Hadid conveniently forgot to mention it. While I would appreciate her efforts of engaging in humanitarian and charitable works, I also find myself hard to see fairness since she chose the term Rohingya, that represents a movement that has all along been so much against peaceful coexistence of different communities,” the beauty queen wrote in a Facebook post.
On Aug. 18, Hadid began responding to some of the criticism:
😑 you can never win …
I know my intentions & am very grateful to @UNICEFUSA for giving me the opportunity to come here & learn so I can spread awareness. Although this crisis is a year old (this week) & has been forgotten by the media, they still need our support & positivity! https://t.co/IDQXVN92FZ— Gigi Hadid (@GiGiHadid) August 18, 2018
In the days since, she has continued encouraging her tens of millions to donate to UNICEF’s efforts in the Rohingya camps and has even thanked a fan who made a small donation.
This is not the first time the model’s stance on a controversial political issue has drawn ire from people who take the opposite position. In May, she tweeted in support of the Palestinian protesters in Gaza who came under fire from Israeli forces. After a pro-Israel advocacy organization implied on Twitter that her comment was antisemitic, she resolved to “start keeping my opinions to myself.”
It looks like she eventually decided that sticking up for persecuted people was more important than avoiding online criticism.
Reader Interactions