4/5/22, 3:23 PM Hate speech, atrocities and fake news: the crisis in Myanmar | Financial Times Phil Robertson, Human Rights Watch As Myanmar’s transition towards democracy was beginning in 2012, the opening up of the internet — where the majority of citizens now get their news — allowed old grievances to reignite and spread fast. The rape and murder of a Buddhist woman by Rohingya men that year caused rioting that killed about 200 people. Zaw Htay — then spokesman for President Thein Sein and now for the Aung San Suu Kyi administration — was accused of fanning the flames by posting incendiary pictures on Facebook, which most people in the country now access as a primary news source on their mobile phones. According to the Yangon-based tech innovation lab Phandeeyar, Myanmar now has more active Sim cards than people, and 90 per cent of the population live within range of mobile broadband. Communal violence flared again in Rakhine last August, when militants who call themselves the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, attacked police posts and an army base, killing 12 and prompting the Burmese military’s ferocious crackdown. In December, Médecins Sans Frontières estimated that at least 6,700 Rohingya had died from violence in the month following the ARSA attacks. While journalists are still barred from northern Rakhine, the Associated Press recently pieced together evidence of at least five mass graves there; Aung San Suu Kyi’s office dispatched a ground team to the scene and declared the report was “not true”. A spokeswoman for the AP said the agency stood behind its reporting. “Can we work here, or are we supporting apartheid?” one foreign diplomat in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, asked me in an unusually frank moment recently. The UK, US and EU have taken some steps to censure and isolate the military but are loath to cut off Myanmar’s government or reimpose economic sanctions, for fear of hurting ordinary people or derailing what they see as a delicate democratic experiment. But the ground is shifting in Myanmar, as pressure, harassment and even the full weight of the law are brought to bear on journalists. One evening last December, two young reporters for Reuters’ Yangon bureau, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were invited to a restaurant by police officers who handed them documents. They were arrested outside. The following day the information ministry said that they had been charged under the Official Secrets Act for having “illegally acquired information with the intention to share it with foreign media”. They are currently in Insein prison, where thousands of dissidents, including journalists and current government officials, served time in the days of military rule. https://www.ft.com/content/2003d54e-169a-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44 5/19