For the past years, The Gambia has been trending for championing the Rohingyas cause with a resounding case at the International Criminal Court. Well, Myanmar’s military regime is now paying back using very low cuts. The soldiers’ strategy consists on making use its propaganda newspapers to smear the “Gambia as a historical land of slaves-turned-impoverished sex tourism hub”, as the West African nation continues its Rohingya genocide trial at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). From all indications, the smear campaign seems directed towards winning Bangladeshis’ local public opinion.
The first of two recently published smear articles was authored by Aung Naing Oo, who heads the regime’s Union Government Office 1. The former military officer penned ‘The Generous Country’, which was published in the Oct. 17 issue of junta newspapers.
The following article, titled “Interesting Facts about Gambia” and published on Oct 31, was written by Yin Yin Nwe, an advisor to junta chief Min Aung Hlaing and ex-daughter-in-law of the late military dictator General Ne Win.
In his article, Aung Naing Oo recounts his experience of selling rice to the Gambia under Than Shwe’s regime in 2004. He describes the Gambia being then a poorly developed country with low income and food insecurity, where 47 percent lived in poverty and 30 percent in extreme poverty. He wrote that he had never heard of the country prior to his first encounter with Gambians.
“Gambia was facing a food crisis in 2004 and had sought help from Than Shwe’s regime”, said Aung Naing Oo, who was involved in the rice sale as a deputy general manager of the state-owned Myanmar Agricultural Produce Trading. He gushed that the dictatorship sold good-quality rice to The Gambia at a favorable price out of “humanitarian concern”.
“Gambia purchased 30,000 tonnes but was only able to ship half of the purchase within the designated period and was liable for storage costs on the other half. The regime waived the charges”, he claimed.
“The export of rice to the Gambia reflected our nation’s generosity,” Aung Naing Oo’s article concludes.
The military loyalist went on to serve in the national planning and economic development ministry under Thein Sein’s quasi-civilian government and now ousted National League for Democracy government. The current regime appointed him to the portfolio of Investment and foreign economic relations minister and Commerce minister.
Yin Yin Nwe, an ethnic Shan-Mon woman, who served as chief education adviser to the Thein Sein administration, heaps even more insults on the Gambia.
Her article describes it as a country enslaved by Arabs, a nation of illiterates, the “laboratory of Africa” where “citizens are guinea pigs for clinical experiments by Western companies, and a sex tourism hotspot where young Gambian men serve older women from northern Europe.”
She reports seeing crowds of young Gambian men on the beach when she visited the capital, Banjul, in 1994-1999, writing that she did not leave the hotel because of warnings from her colleagues.
She also questioned whether The Gambia had received benefits for opening the case against Myanmar at the ICJ.
The Gambia filed a lawsuit in 2019, alleging a genocide of the Rohingyas under Myanmar’s National League for Democracy government. The Myanmar regime is still defending the case and has regularly accused the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) of being behind the Gambia’s bold move at the ICC.
