CHRISTINA FINK Myanmar in 2018 The Rohingya Crisis Continues ABSTRACT The Rohingya crisis cast a long shadow over Myanmar in 2018, and prospects for the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh were bleak. The peace process with ethnic armed organizations remained stalled. Myanmar signed major investment agreements with China that could have a dramatic effect on the economy. KEYWORDS: Rohingya, Rakhine State, Facebook, peace process, China THE ROHINGYA CRISIS A year after 700,000 Rohingya Muslims sought sanctuary in Bangladesh, the Myanmar military continued to deny it had committed widespread rights abuses against them. The military leadership, with the acquiescence of the civilian government, refused to allow independent investigations into its 2017 security operations. Nevertheless, two Burmese journalists working for Reuters managed to collect information on one massacre of Rohingya men. To prevent publication and send a strong signal to other journalists, the police, who operate under military command, charged the two journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, with violating the colonial-era Official Secrets Act. They set them up by having two policemen invite them to dinner and hand them documents they had not asked for. Other policemen arrested them immediately afterward for possessing secret information. At the trial, a police captain broke rank and testified that the journalists had been framed. Unmoved, the judge in September 2018 sentenced the journalists to seven years in prison and the police captain to one year. Despite the international outcry, Aung San Suu Kyi, who runs the civilian government, defended the court proceedings. Reuters released the story, and the military CHRISTINA FINK is a Professor of Practice of International Affairs at the Elliott School of Interna- tional Affairs, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA. Email: <finkc@gwu.edu>. Asian Survey, Vol. 59, Number 1, pp. 177–184. ISSN 0004-4687, electronic ISSN 1533-838X.  2019 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ AS.2019.59.1.177. 177 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/as/article-pdf/59/1/177/79425/as_2019_59_1_177.pdf by guest on 25 May 2020