Satellite image of Rohingya village with many homes destroyed by ethnic cleansing (Source: Human Rights Watch)
UN Secretary General António Guterres called Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya people “ethnic cleansing,” saying there’s no better word to describe the now 380,000 people forced to flee a violent military campaign—this after decades of discrimination and repression in Myanmar, where Rohingya are denied citizenship and rights, despite having been in the country for centuries. Rohingya militants killed 12 security personnel at a police post in late August; the government’s response has been a brutal scorched earth campaign, burning villages and attacking civilians, while denying human rights organizations access to the region.
Now. See if you would get that sense from PBS NewsHour‘s September 3 account:
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, urged Myanmar today to stop its military crackdown against minority Muslims there, known as Rohingya. Myanmar officials say 400 people have been killed in recent clashes between soldiers and Rohingya insurgents, who claim Myanmar’s 1.1 million Muslims are persecuted. The government considers the insurgents a terrorist group. The United Nations says about 73,000 Rohingya refugees have crossed the border into Bangladesh in the past 10 days.
So the lead is that a predominantly Muslim country is coming to the defense of other Muslims. There are “clashes”—a favored media term that suggests a symmetry of forces—and an implied balance between the Rohingyas’ “claim” that they’re persecuted and the government’s assessment that insurgents are “terrorists.”
But I thought, that was early days; surely the NewsHour will return to this story with a more humanistic take. I was wrong about that. The September 5 program included a brief clip from a UN Refugee Agency official recounting hardships of those fleeing the country, which Judy Woodruff then followed up (you might say countered) with “army officials in mostly Buddhist Myanmar say they’re responding to attacks by Rohingya insurgents.”
Then on September 13, the show aired a brief clip of the UN chief calling on Myanmar authorities to end the violence, which Woodruff followed with “Myanmar claims that it’s only reacting to attacks by Rohingya insurgents.”
Human rights groups and the UN describe that “reaction” as ethnic cleansing. But the NewsHour seems to think this horrific brutality is more of a potato/potahto sort of thing.
ACTION: Please ask the NewsHour to return to the Rohingya story with a report that treats the question of ethnic cleansing as more than a matter of opinion.
CONTACT: viewermail@newshour.org
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.