By Maung Zarni
Myanmar media, often in collaboration with the military intelligence, branding another Burmese colleague Ko Harn Yawnghwe "enemy of the state".
HY is former special peace adviser to ex-President and ex-general Thein Sein (2011-15) and a prominent Shan leader.
I am sure there will be a lot of mud-slinging at him in the Burmese social media sites. Two of Myanmar's military academies - with a combined total of 10,000 military cadets - are the Burmese military's equivalent of Fifty Cent Army: the cadets are assigned 2 hrs a day as part of their computer science training to engage in social media campaign, logging into thousands of Facebook and Twitter accounts from where they attack a tiny minority of Burmese activists - like myself, Harn as well as foreign journalists who publicly oppose Myanmar genocide.
The Ministry of Defence Psychological Warfare Division - officially known as "Department of Public Relations" - generates daily the content of what needs to be disseminated through these cadets. Its Director-General is Major-General Aung Ye Win, my contemporary with whom I was very well-acquainted. When I was engaged in Track II with the military around 2005, he met me at the airport in Rangoon, and we had a pleasant chat. He gave him a bottle of shoe polish as I don't go places and meet people, without a token present, as a matter of Mandalay's old Burmese custom. I recently saw him on Burmese television, telling, unconvincingly, a group of Burmese journalists who were on the military-arranged tour in N. Rakhine that "Bengali extremists" (Rohingyas) slaughtered Hindus. When pressed by even the local journalists who asked the Misinformation General, "Do you have any hard evidence to support your claim?, he was stunned and couldn't come up with a simple Yes or No. His answer: "the thing that is surely true is that the Hindus would not kill other Hindus." Well, Aung San Suu Kyi would NOT agree: she has been telling BBC and other media that "Muslims in Burma also kill Muslims", and that the violence is not just committed by the Buddhists (on the Muslims).
Here are two links to how Myanmar private media are in perfect sync with the military and the NLD gov propaganda against the Rohingyas, justifying the genocide at home.
Myanmar journalists 'harassed' for reporting on Rohingya crisis
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/10/myanmar-journalists-harassed-reporting-rohingya-crisis-171016070429902.html
Rohingya: Hate speech, lies and media misinformation
How a vicious media campaign has intensified the pressure on an embattled people. Plus, Sinai's media black hole.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2017/09/rohingya-hate-speech-lies-media-misinformation-170916072755690.html
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