Representation av statslöshet : Framställningen av Rohingyafolket i burmesisk media

Sammanfattning: This study aims to analyse how the stateless Muslim minority Rohingya from Myanmar are represented in Burmese media. Progress towards democracy has been made in Myanmar since the end of the dictatorship, making it possible for private newspapers to publish in Myanmar and increased the access to rights. However, this positive development has not affected all habitants in Myanmar. The UN still considers Rohingya to be one of the most persecuted people in the world. In this study, the material consists of articles from The Myanmar Times, Mizzima Business Weekly and The New Light of Myanmar. After assessing Hannah Arendt’s theory about the dependency on citizenship for human rights, and Steve Luke’s theory of power, this study uses the method systematic qualitative text analysis to sort the material. In addition, a critical text analysis inspired by critical discourse analysis is carried out. As a complement, photos are studied using visual text analysis. The main focus is on how Rohingya are represented in the material, and what can be said about Rohingya’s exclusion based on the findings in the material. The study shows that the name Rohingya is avoided in The Global New Light of Myanmar, who uses “Muslim Minority” as well as in The Myanmar Times, where group is often called “Bengali”. However, in Mizzima Business Weekly “Rohingya” is the most common name when describing the group. A key finding is that suppression, i.e. to silence issues concerning Rohingya, to deny their identity and ties to Myanmar, and to not acknowledge that Rohingya are affected by an event in the news, appears to various extents in all three newspapers, which shows how Rohingya are excluded and are often portrayed as “the others”. The study shows that the media is affected by “the power of the thought” and that the inherent paradox of the human rights can be applied in this case, and that in a society a stateless person is rightless and becomes completely excluded from the society. This is manifested to some extent in Mizzima Business Weekly and consistently in The Myanmar Times and The Global New Light of Myanmar.