"Myanmar’s internationally reviled military chief, widely accused of commanding “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes” against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority, has evidently now discovered religious tolerance. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw, and several of his deputies made a rare, if not unprecedented, late August visit to a Muslim mosque in the town of Pyinmana, close to the national capital of Naypyitaw. Two weeks later, in what some see as a sort of public relations roadshow, the military chief visited the Joon Mosque in the central city of Mandalay. Then, on September 17, in the commercial capital Yangon, he visited the Muslim Free Hospital, a local clinic established in 1937 that despite its name is actually a multicultural charity. As is customary for religious shrine visits in Myanmar and elsewhere, Min Aung Hlaing made donations of rice, oil, salt, peas and cash to the mosques, offerings that were earmarked as given by himself, his family and his deputies’ families. Less familiar, the military chief also offered up messages of tolerance, inclusion and unity to his Muslim audiences, noting at one stop that all Myanmar citizens are “living in the same land, drinking from the same source and living under the same roof.” That’s, of course, unless you’re among the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya forcibly driven out of the country in 2017 by his military’s “area clearance” operations in Rakhine state, and are now languishing in abysmal refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh..."