Myanmar fails to inspect: ‘Proof’ of Rohingya-set fires, not Myanmar Army

The Myanmar government said that villagers set fire to their own homes - the BBC's Reeta Chakrabarti tracked them down in Bangladesh and asked the refugees what happened.
In this combination of three images taken in September 2017, at left and center, photos provided by a Buddhist Rakhine villager to prove a government narrative of Rohingya Muslim people setting fire to their own houses shows a man with a group of people dressed as Muslims setting fire to a Rohingya home. Image at right, made from video, shows the same man, an Indian origin Myanmar man with Hindu faith named Yahular, pausing at a refugee camp in Maungdaw, in northern Rakhine state, Myanmar. Photo: AP

“I even tried to stop them,” the abbot, Zawtika, told reporters who visited violence-torn northern Rakhine state last week after an explosion of communal violence that has so far compelled a staggering 313,000 Rohingya to flee into neighboring Bangladesh.

“I told them not to do that, but it seemed like they wanted to.” Shortly afterward, a local Buddhist resident who is close to the monk, a man named Maung Maung Htwe, shared photos he said he had taken on his mobile phone that showed several people setting fire to the buildings.

The alleged perpetrators could be clearly seen — too clearly for anyone trying to advance the lie that Rohingya were responsible.

Journalists on the trip recognized two of the people in the photos as Hindus from a nearby public school the government officials had brought them to hours earlier. The school was filled with displaced Hindus who said their own homes had been burned by Muslims. An Associated Press reporter interviewed one of them.