Produced by Myanmar’s army, a new book on the Rohingya crisis contains numerous misrepresented photographs, including one image that incorrectly claims to be members of the Muslim minority killing Buddhists.
The 177-page Myanmar Politics and the Tatmadaw: Part I features the army’s narrative on the military crackdown which was recently described as genocide by United Nations investigators.
Much of the book’s content is sourced from the military’s “True News” information unit, which since the beginning of the crisis has distributed the army’s version of events, mostly in Facebookposts.
However, an investigation by the Reuters press agency found many of the photographs contained within the publication had been completely removed from their original context.
One, which depicts a man holding a farming tool standing over two bodies, is captioned: “Bengalis killed local ethnics brutally,”.
However, the photograph was actually taken in Dhaka during Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war, when hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis were killed by Pakistani troops.
A member of staff at Innwa, one of the biggest bookshops in the city, said the 50 copies the store ordered had sold out, but there was no plan to order more.
“Not many people came looking for it,” added the bookseller, who declined to be named.
Source: Independent
