"As the wheels of justice slowly turn at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, it’s easy to forget the hysteria that took over Myanmar in late 2017. Newspapers across the world ran images of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fleeing a military crackdown in Rakhine State, which had been launched in response to attacks by Rohingya militants on security posts. As international condemnation followed, the pages of Myanmar social media were filled with defiance. The popular narrative went that the largely stateless Rohingya had attacked their hosts, the Myanmar citizenry, in a campaign of Islamist terror that the world was intent on denying. Faced with this apparent threat, members of the public felt they had a duty to rally behind their government. Pressured to conform, and fired by fear and anger at what they perceived to be blatant lies in international media, many people said things they probably now regret. One of them might be Ko Zayar Lwin, the jailed member of the Peacock Generation thangyat troupe. As Frontier reported on May 24, the young dissident wrote a series of Facebook posts at the height of the crisis that included claims that the Rohingya – whom he called by the derogatory labels “kalar” and “Bengali” – were burning down their homes before fleeing to Bangladesh, and that it was difficult to distinguish ordinary Rohingya from “terrorists”. “The situation has turned these people whom we regard as terrorists into poor things in the eyes of the world,” he wrote in a post dated September 8, 2017, showing what many would regard as a shocking lack of empathy. “These people” had been denied citizenship and confined for years to camps and villages without freedom of movement, and with extremely limited access to health and schooling. They were now in the crosshairs of a military whose history of violence against civilians is well documented..."