The Daily - Unearthing the Truth in Myanmar

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

The country is accused of waging a state-sponsored campaign of massacre, rape and arson against Rohingya Muslims. Why, then, did the government allow a New York Times journalist to tour the epicenter of the reported atrocities? Guest: Hannah Beech, the Southeast Asia bureau chief of The New York Times, who recently visited Rakhine State, where many Rohingya Muslims once lived. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. The country of Myanmar is accused of a state-sponsored campaign of massacre, rape, and arson against the Rohingya Muslims who live there. So why did the government of Myanmar allow a Times reporter to tour the epicenter of the alleged atrocities?

It's Tuesday, August 14th. We are following breaking news this morning. The U.S. government declaring the ongoing violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar as ethnic cleansing. The people are frightened, hungry, and stateless. The stateless Muslim minority are the casualties of fresh clashes between Rohingya militants and Myanmar's security forces. The Human Rights Watch condemned the latest evidence and says it proves a systematic slaughter of Rohingya militants and Myanmar's security forces. The Human Rights Watch condemned the latest evidence

and says it proves a systematic slaughter of Rohingyas. I had been covering for many years the persecution of the Rohingya, who are a minority Muslim people in Myanmar. Myanmar is majority Buddhist, and last August, there were attacks by Rohingya Muslim insurgents on some police posts and an army station in northern Rakhine, which is where the Rohingya are concentrated. And there was a very brutal, very mysteriously quick reaction to those insurgent attacks in which village burnings, executions, rapes, you know, all the horrible things that constitute ethnic cleansing happened.

And within a very short period of time, around 700,000 Rohingya fled from Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh. And so I wanted to see the epicenter, kind of the ground zero of ethnic cleansing. Hannah Beach is the Southeast Asia Bureau Chief for The Times. I had spent months and months applying to get to northern Rakhine. It's an area in which foreign journalists in particular have been basically not allowed to go. We could talk in refugee camps in Bangladesh to people who had very consistent, compelling stories, but you want to see the place. You want to see the charred villages.

You want to see the carcasses of the mosques. You want to be there. And Myanmar is a really difficult place to report. Even before you get there, you have to apply for a journalist visa. That can take weeks, it can take months. And in July, I got a letter from the Burmese authorities, and they said, congratulations, you have permission to go to Northern Rakhine. Anna, knowing what happened here, knowing that this is the epicenter of this military action, I find it sort of shocking that the Myanmar government would allow journalists like you to the scene of what is essentially their own crime. Why would they do that? I think largely because from the Myanmar government and military perspective,

this is not the site of ethnic cleansing. What we heard over and over again, as hard as it is to maybe believe, is that the Rakhine and the military did not burn down the houses. They did not execute people. They did not rape women. We heard that the Rohingya themselves burned down their own villages. Burned down their own villages. That's the government's explanation. Absolutely. And that's what we heard from dozens of people, not only from the military and officials, but also from some adult Rakhine villagers. And, you know, it sounds kind of crazy, but this is the consistent narrative that you hear. So in their minds, they're taking you on a tour of a place where this thing that you have been told has happened actually hasn't happened the way you've been told it did. Yes. And they want to correct our understanding of what happened.

So how does this tour start? I was there with a group of foreign journalists and each kind of journalistic group, publication or TV network is given its own car. We have our own driver. We had a pretty nice soldier who had a gun that was very close to our shoulders. So you have a minder there. We have a minder, an armed minder, who is in the back of our car. And every time we would stop, particularly the photographer, Adam Dean, really wanted to capture images and take pictures of the burned out mosques and things.

and take pictures of the burned-out mosques and things. And at one point, our friendly armed police guy saw Adam sort of running down the street, and he commented to Saul Nang, my Burmese journalist colleague. He said, you know, is your photographer over there? I think if he doesn't have a bulletproof head, it would be advisable for him to come back. That sounds like a threat. That does seem like a nicely worded threat. And they got very angry at certain points when we tried to get out of the car. I tried to have strategically upset stomachs. So we would stop and I would get out and slowly make my way to the bathroom. And that would give

Adam some time to be able to photograph. And it would give Sanang, my colleague, time to kind of chat with people. And so there are ways in which we try to stop the car to get out, stretch our legs, and maybe try to do as much news gathering in that short period of time as possible. So tell us about one of these stops that you make on the tour. So two of the most remarkable places where we stopped were repatriation centers that had been built to welcome the Rohingya who were in Bangladesh in the refugee camps back to Myanmar. The whole time it was just pouring rain and the sky and the sea and the mud, everything is brown. And so we've got our rain jackets on, we've got our umbrellas and we're kind of sloshing through. And we arrive at a place with barbed wire around it.

There are armed guards stationed very close to each other holding their kind of ancient Burmese rifles. And we wade through the water. I mean, if Hollywood wanted to come up with a concentration camp setting, this would be a pretty good one. And we walk in, it's white prefabricated buildings. This is the repatriation center. This is where we're going to welcome back the Rohingya who had fled to Bangladesh.

Clearly, the government wants to show off what they have constructed, even though they don't believe that the Muslims belong in their country. They're being magnanimous, and they're allowing them to come back in. Those repatriates to be transferred to another temporary camp. And it's curious because there don't seem to be very many people around except for soldiers. There are a couple of dogs, which is sort of strange in a place where you're welcoming Muslims back. And we walk into one room and slosh, slosh, slosh. And on the ground is a row of kind of terrified looking Rohingya. And they're kind of curled up and kneeling. And over them are soldiers, not pointing guns at them exactly, but their guns are prominent. And we start talking to these

people, and it turns out that these people had not been repatriated. What do you mean? Well, they had been living in their villages in Myanmar. And one day, they said, Myanmar authorities came and threw them in jail. They were in jail for five and a half months, and then they were released and charged with illegal immigration, even though they had been arrested in their villages in Myanmar. So they had never even left. They had never even left the country, and we had been given the impression that these were people who had been repatriated.

So these are essentially props. They're props, and they're sitting cowered on the ground, surrounded by people with big guns who are the precise people who would be associated with the ethnic cleansing of their people. It was an extraordinary, surreal experience. Are these essentially prisoners? Well, they were prisoners and now they cannot leave a concentration camp that is ringed by barbed wire and monitored by soldiers and armed immigration guards. I'm struck, Hannah, that this is sort of the best the government can do. It's remarkable because I'm not a Myanmar government official, but if I were to try to bring foreign journalists to place, I don't know, I would prep them better. You know, I would find somebody

who would be able to give a more compelling story. And I think it shows not only the incompetence of the government, but I think they just didn't know how to prepare carefully enough because they can't really get their heads around what it is that the world thinks about Myanmar now. So I guess I'm curious why this ethnic cleansing campaign by the government would allow for any of the Rohingya, like the ones you're meeting in this welcome center, to be there alive still.

like the ones you're meeting in this welcome center, to be there alive still? Yeah, I mean, there was a clear push to get a lot of people out. But there are still a significant number of Rohingya who live in the country. Who stayed behind. Who stayed behind. And there were people who tried to leave and couldn't leave. And one of the most remarkable experiences I had, we were trying to cross a river. And we weren't sure whether the car would be able to cross the river.

And so we got out of the car. And suddenly we see these people wading through the water. And we look at them. We're like, oh, my gosh, they're Rohingya. So we kind of rush up to them and start talking with them. And one of them was a woman who was in her probably 70s. and one of them was a woman who was in her probably 70s and because it was raining so heavily, I kind of pushed her under this police hut and as soon as we got under the police hut,

she was just shaking. I mean, I've never seen someone... And I spoke a few words in the Rohingya language to her and she was sort of holding my hand and she said, you know, I don't want to be here. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be here, but I can't leave. And there were some armed guards quite near us. And there was one particularly behind me. And I could see, you know, she was kind of leaning in. But every now and then her eyes would dart behind me. And I kind of looked and I realized that there was an armed guard there.

And she said, I do not want to be near those people. I don't like those people. She was really almost too scared to speak. But it was one of my rare moments where I was having kind of a free interaction with a Rohingya in Rakhine State, which is, of course, their homeland. Right. And what did she manage to tell you in this truncated conversation? She managed to tell me that her village had been burnt down. She managed to tell me that she had tried to escape to Bangladesh and had not been able to do so.

And it seems like now she has been kind of constricted to a certain radius around where she's living. But she can't go very much further. where she's living, but she can't go very much further. And every time I saw her walk by or even kind of see somebody who represented Myanmar officialdom, her whole body language changed. She kind of crouched. She didn't want to make eye contact. She just seemed like an absolutely traumatized, terrified person. Well, what are you thinking as you're talking with a Rohingya woman like this? I mean, are you worried that she, and as well the people who are in that welcome center, will be punished for talking to you? It seems like they could really face some serious consequences for telling the truth, which is at odds with the government's story. In her case, she really wanted

to get her message out. And it was one of those situations where I think she understood the implications of what she was saying. She was saying, I am trapped. I want to get out of here. Please send the message that we are a terrified people and we don't have many choices. And the fact that we've suddenly run into

a foreign journalist as we're crossing a swollen river in Myanmar has given her this kind of unprecedented opportunity to get a message out to the world. Most of the time that we were on this trip, we were in a car. And it was very frustrating in many times because it was raining. We couldn't see very clearly out of the car. I was having to unroll my window and re-roll it up to make sure the condensation wasn't too bad. And we would see tantalizing little glimpses of things.

And we asked our driver, we said, so are any of the burned villages, forget about who burned the villages, was it the Rohingya or was it the Rakhine, where are the burned villages? And he said, oh, I don't think there are really any around here. And then we started, as we were driving, we would see signs for some of the places where we knew massacres had happened. And so one of the telltale signs of a village that had been burnt was that the palm trees themselves were still there, but they were blackened poles. And at the very top of the palm tree, we usually had the fronds. There was nothing there.

So you had these kind of forlorn-looking sticks, poles sticking out. And so once we saw those, we knew that we were in an area where there had been a Rohingya village. And then your eyes become attuned, and you start seeing little things. Like at one point, we saw the dome of a mosque kind of toppled on the side with the star on it. And these little bits that showed that hundreds of thousands of people had lived in this region, but there was nothing left except for this detritus. And eventually we were able to get to a small village where, again, we met with the locals and the government officials, and they said the usual line, which is, yes, the Rohingya burned down their own villages, and then they mysteriously left, and they haven't come back, and we don't really understand why.

And I went actually to a few houses and just kind of slipped in. And it was raining quite heavily, so it was easier to sort of get away from the miners because maybe their umbrellas weren't good as ours or they didn't want to be splashing through the water. And we got to a house and there was a family there. And there was a little girl, she was maybe 14 years old. She said, well, why are you here? And I said, well, because of the troubles last year. And she said, yeah, you know, I'm a little bit sad about the troubles because I had a Muslim friend who lived a few doors down and I really miss her. And so we talked about her friend

and it was clear that it was one of her besties. And I said, so what happened to her? And she's quiet and she said, well, the Rakhine Buddhists, they burned down the Muslim houses. This was the first time that I had heard somebody in Rakhine state tell what I believed was a true narrative. And it's a child.

And it's a child. And she was innocent enough not to know what the narrative that she was supposed to give to a foreign journalist was. But immediately there was a young man next to her, and he kind of poked her and said, you know, that's not what you're supposed to say. You're supposed to say that the Muslims burned down their own villages. And then the girl looked kind of shame-faced and she looked down at the ground. And then we went outside and we were near a soccer pitch and there were some kids playing soccer. And so I went over and we were near a soccer pitch. And there were some kids playing soccer. And so I went over and was talking to a few kids. And one of them came up.

And he's one of those kids, he was kind of a preteen, but just had a confidence about him. I said, so hi, what's your name? We talked about Manchester United. We talked about football for a while. And I said, so over there, that used to be the area where the Muslims lived. He said, yeah, you know, the Rakhine burned down their houses. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. So, you know, now we've got second child corroboration. And I said, but I thought that the Muslims burned down their own villages. And he looked at me and he said, but that's stupid.

Why would the Muslims burn down their own villages? Which is a very good question. And it was posed by, you know, a young child. What is life like now in these places where the Rohingya used to be the majority and now these other people are just kind of living their lives there? I mean, there's a sense of emptiness because this area was predominantly Muslim and now it's not. But in the remaining villages, two things have happened.

One, the Rakhine and their other ethnic minorities, mostly Buddhist, a lot of them have been given new homes. There are these new little prefabricated shacks that have been gifted to the Buddhist populations. But the other thing that's happened is that there has been a very concerted effort to build over some of the areas where the Muslims lived. So for instance, in the village with these two kids, we visited a nice new school and we asked around, so what used to be where this nice new primary school was? Oh, that might've been where the Muslims lived. They're literally paving over. They're paving over. And as you're driving, you see bulldozers.

A lot of the companies that were crony companies to the military have been supporting an effort to essentially erase any kind of proof that the Muslims lived there. There was one village called Indin and that was famous for a massacre. And I remember driving and reading the stories of where these Rohingya men had been executed. And the description was of a road and then sort of a grassy area and then the ocean. And suddenly we found ourselves on a road next to a grassy area and then the ocean. And suddenly we found ourselves on a road next to a grassy area and then the ocean. And we saw the sign for Indin and just looking there and saying, somewhere here, this is where the massacre happened. And there's no sign of where it was. And it was so spooky and so surreal to be kind of racing by there as our driver's saying, no, no, no, there's nothing here.

There's nothing to see. I mean, you know, you feel like you're in a massive graveyard. We know, Hannah, the story that the government wanted to create in this tour. What is the story in the end that this tour actually told you? One of the things that struck me most about covering this issue is that the way in which the West in particular and broadly the international community sees the Rohingya issue and those people in Myanmar see the Rohingya issue, they are completely diametrically opposed. And I've been covering Myanmar for a long time.

And in many ways, Myanmar was a good news story, right? Because it was a country in which a secretive military hunter voluntarily, bloodlessly, gave up some power and allowed a Nobel Peace Prize laureate named Aung San Suu Kyi to be able to run part of a civilian administration. And given all of the other trajectories in the world, which are pretty negative, you know, the rise of the strongman, the failure of the Arab Spring, this was such a powerful foreign policy story in which democracy seemed to be moving in the right direction. And so I think particularly those who were fighting the good fight for democracy felt almost betrayed when the narrative from the West turned from that to saying, we've got a problem, guys, because what you're doing in northern Rakhine is ethnic cleansing.

And so I think that one of the reasons that the Myanmar government allowed us to go on this trip was because they really wanted us to go back to that story. The good news story. The good news story. You were there to tell the good news story. Yeah, and to say, look, guys, you know, we've got a lot of other issues. And really, this ethnic cleansing thing, it's not ethnic cleansing.

And by the way, the Rohingya burned their houses down. And let's correct your mistaken impression. And unfortunately, by the end of the tour, that's clearly not what I thought. And unfortunately, by the end of the tour, that's clearly not what I thought. Hannah, thank you very much for telling this story and for doing this reporting. Thank you very much. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. Like many people, I had and expressed personal political opinions during an extraordinary presidential election. Many contained expressions of concern for the security of our country. Opinions that were not always expressed in terms I'm proud of. On Monday, the FBI fired Peter Strzok, the agent who helped lead investigations into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server and Russia's interference in the 2016 election, until he was caught sending incendiary text messages about then-candidate Donald Trump. But the fact is, after months of investigations, there's simply no evidence of bias in my professional actions. Neither a congressional hearing nor an internal

investigation found any evidence that Strzok's dislike of Trump influenced the FBI's investigations. But the Bureau determined that his messages, sent to an FBI colleague, had violated its policies. In a tweet, President Trump used Strzok's dismissal to once again call for the end of the special counsel investigation. Based on the fact that Strzok was in charge of the witch hunt. Will it be dropped, he asked. It is a total hoax. No collusion. No obstruction.

I just fight back. And. Turkey's currency took a dive again Monday, plunging as much as 11% against the U.S. dollar. Indian rupee today nosedived to a record low against the U.S. dollar. This morning, the rand lost more than 10% of its value against the U.S. dollar. The currencies of at least a half-dozen countries, including India, South Africa, and Indonesia, plunged on Monday amid growing fears that Turkey is on the verge of an economic collapse

that could spread across the global financial system. The Times reports that heavy borrowing from foreign banks and an inability to repay those loans is behind Turkey's troubles, but that its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has refused to take basic steps like increasing the cost of borrowing that could end the crisis. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.