Myanmar military mocked over altered images showing 'misspelt sign' at new year festival
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on April 18, 2023 at 08:25
- 2 min read
- By AFP Thailand
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The posts shared two photos of water festival celebrations in front of the city hall in Yangon, Myanmar's largest city.
They appeared to show a stage with a sign in Burmese that reads: "The Water Festival Stage for Corpses".
"Arrest the one who wrote the signboard," the post's mocking Burmese-language caption read on April 14, 2023.
The photo circulated online during the Thingyan festival, usually a joyful celebration involving public water fights that welcomes in the new year in Myanmar.
The festival has become politicised since the coup in 2021, with pro-democracy advocates calling for boycotts of junta-supported events, as AFP has reported (link archived here).
It is one of Myanmar's twelve traditional festivals (link archived here).
The same image was also shared in Facebook posts here, here and here alongside a similar claim.
Comments from some users indicated they believed the purported typo on the festival banner was genuine, with one saying that whoever had written the message had been forced to flee out of fear of being punished.
"I can't stop laughing," another user wrote. "It's an omen," one other said.
However, the banner has been altered to insert the typo.
Doctored banner
A keyword search found the same photo published on the BBC Burmese Service's Facebook page (link archived here) published on April 13, the first day of the festival.
“The first day of water festival in Yangon with tight security," part of the post's Burmese-language caption reads. "The evening view of the first day of the water festival in front of Yangon city hall and the people's park can be seen.
"Experts said that many people did not enjoy the water festival to show their sadness for hundreds of people died in Pazi Gyi village during military airstrikes in the past few days."
In the original photo, a sign above the stage reads, "The Holy Water Festival Stage".
The BBC report refers to an air strike on Pazi Gyi village in central Myanmar, which killed at least 170 people in April. AFP also covered the attack (link archived here).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo in the misleading posts (left) and the photo from BBC Burmese's post (right), with the altered characters highlighted by AFP:
A similar photo was also published by Myanmar media outlet Eleven (link archived here) on the same day from a different angle.
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