The failure of the Rohingya crisis
Thiri did not shy away from any tough questions or sensitive topics during my interview with her. And certainly there are few subjects more fraught than discussing the Rohingya crisis. When I asked Thiri, herself a journalist, fixer, activist, and human rights activist— why this situation was so ignored for so many years by the Bamar majority, she responded. Thiri is no apologist by any means, and has referred to this failure as a stain on the country and people. However she does feel it is important to study and analyze what led to this blind spot occurring.
“Journalism in Myanmar is intertwined with activism, so they may be politically liberal, but we’ve been brainwashed since forever! We grew up being constantly brainwashed by the regime.”
“The brutality of the military is so horrible, it's hard to believe until you see it. And the local journalists couldn’t address the issue properly, because to go to Rakhine state, you'd need lots of money, and you'd have to fly and face many different [bureaucratic] procedures and the like. So most of the local media just didn't have that kind of money to send a journalist to do an in-depth story.
I'd say that probably the one main thing is the access, or rather the lack of access to them [the Rohingyas]. And as opposed to the international media, [local journalists] cannot spend so much money on the trip. And also they may not be able to hire a local translator and a fixer.
Journalism in Myanmar is intertwined with activism, so they may be politically liberal, but we've been brainwashed since forever! We grew up being constantly brainwashed by the regime. And the region is famous for the previous military dictatorship, which is known for being really good at ‘divide and rule.’ The brainwash mechanism that they used was: ‘us’ and ‘them.’
We never learned about the Rohingyas or anything about them in our textbooks! But around 2012, when the crisis happened, the military started talking about the Rohingyas as outside people, saying that there are no Rohingyas, only Bengali and people who try to manipulate the politics and destroy the country etc. That's what we've been brainwashed with for decades. And we have limited information and limited access.
So it could only happen because of the state-sponsored divisions of the ethnic groups. For a long time it was easier for [Bamar] people to believe that these people didn't belong to us, and it's especially important to note that the country was in transition… so most people were really worried that this transition into democracy could shift and get back into the hands of the military.
So their focus was to push the country to a better place, where the military couldn't exercise control any more. So for them, the main goal was to make this transition into a state of democracy, which is free from the military.
My analysis is that most [Bamar] journalists are also coming from this activism background. And so they wanted to push the country to that democratic goal, and to get out of the military's control. So maybe that's why they couldn't see beyond their ethnic and citizenship boundary, when they approached the Rohingya issue.
But I would say the main thing is the access; that they don't have the financial power and other resources to get to the areas to understand the suffering of the Rohingyas, and to realize for themselves that it is true.”