De facto leader responds to growing international criticism by attacking ‘fake news’ about the plight of Rohingya Muslims

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Aung San Suu Kyi has blamed “terrorists” for “a huge iceberg of misinformation” about violence in western Myanmar that has forced more than 140,000 Rohingya refugees into neighbouring Bangladesh.

The de-facto leader of Myanmar is under growing pressure to halt “clearance operations” by security forces in Rakhine state. The United Nations secretary-general has warned that the operations could verge on ethnic cleansing.

Senior Myanmar officials said on Wednesday the country was lobbying powerful allies to ward off a UN security council resolution on the issue, as accusations emerged that security forces have been laying landmines along the Bangladesh border to prevent fleeing Rohingya from returning.

A post by Aung San Suu Kyi’s office on Facebook – her first statement since violence resumed in the state nearly a fortnight ago – said she had spoken with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan about the crisis.



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The government “had already started defending all the people in Rakhine in the best way possible and expressed that there should be no misinformation to create trouble between the two countries,” the statement said.

She referred to “fake news photographs” posted on Twitter by Turkey’s deputy prime minister that purported to show dead Rohingya in Myanmar, but in fact were taken elsewhere.

“That kind of fake information … was simply the tip of a huge iceberg of misinformation calculated to create a lot of problems between different communities and with the aim of promoting the interest of the terrorists,” the statement said.



The Rohingya are a Muslim minority in majority-Buddhist Myanmar, nearly all of whom live in Rakhine state. The government does not recognise them as citizens, and they are often described as “the world’s most persecuted minority”.

About 146,000 Rohingya people – an estimated 80% of them women and children – are now thought to have crossed into Bangladesh since 25 August, when militants from the ethnic Muslim group attacked dozens of security sites. Authorities responded with a crackdown that UN officials in Myanmar say may have killed up to 1,000 people.



Satellite images show evidence of arson and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have claimed their villages are being burned en masse. UN agencies have been barred from providing humanitarian aid in the state and journalists are prevented from entering.

Hindu and Buddhist villagers have also reported being targeted by Rohingya insurgents but the Muslim-minority group, who are denied citizenship and access to basic government services in Myanmar, make up the vast majority of those displaced.

Rare video footage smuggled out of Rakhine state showed strings of villages in flames over several days in late August, with fires often accompanied by the sounds of gunshot ringing through the air.

Play Video 1:36 Rare footage smuggled out of Rakhine

One survivor said military and locals, armed with swords, spears, sticks and guns had arrived in his village just after Friday prayers, shooting into the air and setting the village ablaze.



“As soon as they arrived they began to burn houses, starting with Shukur’s,” he said in footage taken in a village where the homeless survivors have taken temporary shelter.



Some people were allowed to leave to the east of the village, but not everyone escaped with their lives, he said. They had to swim to safety through shrimp farming ponds flooded by high tides, and some never made it out of their houses.



“People lost their lives in the attack. some drowned while crossing the water, some could not get out of their homes and died in the fire. Our whole village was burned down.”

In one small hamlet, a brief inspection by two soldiers lulled residents into a false sense of security.



“After walking around and checking inside the village, they left, taking a cow from a widow. We thought they would become calm but after some time they surrounded our village from all sides and started shooting at the villagers, men, women, children even infants,” said one woman featured in the footage.



She estimated that around 300 people were killed and another 55 injured, among them many small children. “We lost our husbands, our children our small babies. Some of us who could flee through the rice fields came here, everyone who remained in the village was killed.”



Video footage showed mass graves where victims had been buried by relatives, and at least one body left to rot in the fields. But there were also reports that attackers were depriving survivors even of the right to bury their relatives.



“When they went to get the bodies, the attackers drove them away with shooting, only some people could collect the dead bodies of their loved ones,” says the activist filming graves that hold between 10 and 20 bodies retrieved from a burned village.



When they returned the next morning, they found bodies had already been doused in petrol and burned, and were told the attackers “have cleared them all.”











Myanmar has been laying landmines across parts of its border with Bangladesh in recent days, government sources in Dhaka have told Reuters. The sources speculated that mines have been placed to prevent Rohingya refugees from returning to Rakhine state.

Bangladesh is reportedly preparing to lodge a protest against the placement of the mines so close to the border, but a Myanmar military source told the agency the explosives had been in place since the 1990s.

Q&A Who are the Rohingya and what happened to them in Myanmar? Show Hide Described as the world’s most persecuted people, 1.1 million Rohingya people live in Myanmar. They live predominately in Rakhine state, where they have co-existed uneasily alongside Buddhists for decades. Rohingya people say they are descendants of Muslims, perhaps Persian and Arab traders, who came to Myanmar generations ago. Unlike the Buddhist community, they speak a language similar to the Bengali dialect of Chittagong in Bangladesh. The Rohingya are reviled by many in Myanmar as illegal immigrants and suffer from systematic discrimination. The Myanmar government treats them as stateless people, denying them citizenship. Stringent restrictions have been placed on Rohingya people’s freedom of movement, access to medical assistance, education and other basic services. Violence broke out in northern Rakhine state in August 2017, when militants attacked government forces. In response, security forces supported by Buddhist militia launched a “clearance operation” that ultimately killed at least 1,000 people and forced more than 600,000 to flee their homes. The UN’s top human rights official said the military’s response was "clearly disproportionate” to insurgent attacks and warned that Myanmar’s treatment of its Rohingya minority appears to be a "textbook example” of ethnic cleansing. When Aung San Suu Kyi rose to power there were high hopes that the Nobel peace prize winner would help heal Myanmar's entrenched ethnic divides. But she has been accused of standing by while violence is committed against the Rohingya. In 2019, judges at the international criminal court authorised a full-scale investigation into the allegations of mass persecution and crimes against humanity. On 10 December 2019, the international court of justice in The Hague opened a case alleging genocide brought by the Gambia. Rebecca Ratcliffe Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP

Myanmar National Security Adviser Thaung Tun told a press conference in the capital, Naypyitaw, that the country was lobbying China and Russia, both permanent members of the Security Council, to block any potential UN resolution on the crisis.

“We are negotiating with some friendly countries not to take it to the Security Council,” Tun said. “China is our friend and we have a similar friendly relationship with Russia so it will not be possible for that issue to go forward.”

Tun also accused international media, including the Guardian, of misrepresenting the violence, naming specific journalists and publications and pointed to several “fabricated” stories he said were “published with the intent to deceive the public”.

The UN chief, Antonio Guterres, issued a rare letter on Wednesday appealing to Myanmar authorities to “put an end to this violence that, in my opinion, is creating a situation that can destabilise the region”.



Asked if the violence could be described as ethnic cleansing, Guterres told journalists on Tuesday: “We are facing a risk, I hope we don’t get there.”

His intervention was part of a chorus of appeals by world leaders for Aung San Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel peace prize winner, to exercise influence over the military leaders that controlled the government for decades until 2015.

The British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, said in a statement earlier this week: “Aung San Suu Kyi is rightly regarded as one of the most inspiring figures of our age but the treatment of the Rohingya is alas besmirching the reputation of Burma.”

Aung San Suu Kyi on Wednesday met the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose government is competing with China for influence in the south-east Asian state.



The Modi government says it is setting up a taskforce to identify the estimated 40,000 Rohingya believed to be taking refuge in India. A cabinet minister, Kiren Rijiju, said on Tuesday that Rohingya people in India were “illegal immigrants and need to be deported as per law”.

Who are the Rohingya and what is happening in Myanmar? Read more

Human rights lawyers in Delhi are challenging the government plan and the supreme court this week ordered the Indian government to explain its position by 11 September.

After the meeting Modi issued a statement saying he shared the Myanmar’s government’s “concerns about extremist violence in Rakhine state and the violence against security forces and also how innocent lives have been affected”.

“We hope that all stakeholders together can find a way out in which unity and territorial integrity of Myanmar is respected,” the statement said.

Poppy McPherson contributed to this report from Yangon