Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has come down heavily on Myanmar for using fake pictures in a book published recently on the Rohingya crisis.
“What they have done is simply heinous,” she told a media call on Sunday meant to brief on her Nepal visit, when she attended the 4th BIMSTEC summit held on Aug 30 and 31.
“The main thing is Myanmar has lost its credibility by using fake pictures”, she said.
According to a Reuters report, the 117-page ‘Myanmar Politics and the Tatmadaw: Part I’ relates the army’s narrative of August last year, when some 700,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh, according to United Nations agencies, triggering reports of mass killings, rape, and arson. Tatmadaw is the official name of Myanmar’s military.
Meanwhile, a senior Bangladesh government official said on condition of anonymity that at least five fake pictures were used in the book.
A photo on page 28 of the book with the caption ‘Bangalis setting fire to houses and shops owned by ethnics’, is actually taken in March 2013 in Mandalay, where Rohingyas don’t live, he said.
“This is a photo of the anti-Muslim violence in March 2013 that took place in Meikhtila, central Myanmar and Muslims were the victims,” he said adding Radio Free Asia published the photo,
A photo on page 18 with the caption ‘Mujahits undergoing military training’ is also fake, he said.
“If you examine the photo, you will notice that people in the photo are wearing uniform and sports shoes, which were not available to the Mujahids in 1948-50, rather they used to wear Lungi,” he said.
Although the photo is made black and while intentionally, still, one can see that faces do not resemble Rohingyas, he added.
The official said in the book, Myanmar also used pictures of Bangladesh independence and conflict in Tanzania.
Recently Reuters published an in-depth report which showed that three pictures of the book are fakes.
Reuters found that two of the photos originally were taken in Bangladesh and Tanzania. A third was falsely labelled as depicting Rohingyas entering Myanmar from Bangladesh, when in reality it showed migrants leaving the country.
Another Bangladesh official, who served in Yangon, said that it is a practice in Myanmar to deceive people through propaganda campaign.
The country recently sent a group of Rohingyas to Geneva to speak in favour of Myanmar at the Human Rights Council session, he said.