Bangkok Post
WRITER: BY HANNAH BEECH, NEW YORK TIMESPUBLISHED : 1 MAY 2021
University students take part in a march against the military coup in Yangon on April 11. (New York Times Photo)
The Myanmar military’s disinformation was crude but effective.
Army propagandists claimed an ethnic group called the Rohingya was burning down its own villages and wanted to swamp Buddhist-majority Myanmar with Islamic hordes. The Rohingya were spinning tall tales, the military said in 2017, about soldiers committing mass rape and murder.
The truth — that troops were waging genocidal operations against Myanmar’s ethnic minorities — was perhaps too shocking for some members of the country’s Bamar ethnic majority to contemplate.