A new book on the Rohingya crisis written by Myanmar military propagandists uses fake photographs and a chilling rewriting of history in what appears to be an attempt to justify the killing of thousands of Rohingyaover the last year in attacks by the army that the UN has condemned as genocide.
The 117-page book, published in July by the army’s department of public relations and psychological warfare, includes what it calls “documentary photos”. A Reuters investigation reveals that the provenance of three of the eight historical photographs contained in the book were faked.
The book purports they were taken in the western state of Rakhine, when in fact one was taken in Bangladesh, one in Tanzania and a third is falsely labelled as depicting Rohingya entering Myanmar from Bangladesh, when in reality it shows them attempting to leave.
One of the photographs shows a man standing over two bodies, wielding a farming tool. The text says the image shows Buddhists murdered by Rohingya during ethnic riots in the 1940s. But a Reuters examination of the photograph shows it was actually taken during Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war when hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis were killed by Pakistani troops.
