Two years after Rohingya Muslims were executed, raped and forced out of their homes, the jungle has reclaimed entire villages. The sites of massacres have been replaced by security bases. The Myanmar government insists the ethnic cleansing never happened. It wanted to prove it to us by taking us to Rakhine state, the epicentre of the violence against the Rohingya.

In this 2017 photo, a Rohingya Muslim woman, Rukaya Begum, who crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh, holds her son Mahbubur Rehman, left and her daughter Rehana Bibi, after the government moved them to newly allocated refugee camp areas, near Kutupalong, Bangladesh. Credit:AP

Perhaps government officials believe their own propaganda. Perhaps they thought there was nothing left for us to see. But there was always something, no matter how hard they tried to obliterate reality.

Nearly everywhere our convoy went, someone was with us. A minder, a guard or a state media television crew, they all did their part to try to feed us the official story. Our first stop was an internment camp for Rohingya in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state. About 120,000 Rohingya have been stuck here since 2012. They have been erased from the official narrative. Myanmar claims most Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Go home, the government says.

But these Rohingya are evidence of the long Muslim heritage here. Doctors, lawyers and former politicians live forgotten in ghettos, like Jews once did in Nazi Germany. The government minders and armed guards with us pointed out the garbage that, without social services, piles up in the camps. "So dirty," one said. "They are like that."