On Dec. 13, Myanmar’s Ministry of Information released a photograph of two handcuffed men who had been arrested for simply doing their job. They were Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, two journalists who work for Reuters and who were arrested on the order of Myanmar’s president, Htin Kyaw, a day earlier on the outskirts of Yangon where they’d gone to meet two policemen from Rakhine State. They haven’t been seen or heard from since.

They were trying to find the truth about what is going on in Rakhine State, from which some 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled since a military crackdown began in August. As evidence piles up of ethnic cleansing so brutal it could well qualify as genocide, truth is the last thing the government wants known. The day after the journalists’ arrest, Doctors Without Borders released a report estimating that 6,700 Rohingya, including 730 children under the age of 5, were killed during the first month of the military’s operation, putting the lie to the army’s astounding claim last month that its troops had not killed a single civilian.