Guest contributor
Khin Ohmar
Min Aung Hlaing is not a president. Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, DW, and Al Jazeera English should stop calling him one.
On June 16, Reuters reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping backs “Myanmar’s president” as the two leaders met in Beijing. Just two weeks prior to that, on May 28, Reuters reported that the “Myanmar president” would embark on his first visit to India “since taking over.”
No quotation marks. No qualifier. With those two words—”Myanmar president”—one of the world’s most influential news agencies simply handed Min Aung Hlaing the legitimacy he is seeking, neglecting the five years of airstrikes, massacres, mass imprisonment and egregious violence he has instigated.
This was not a slip. It is a pattern, it has consequences, and I have raised it before.
Manufactured legitimacy has real-world consequences
Watch how quickly the words become policy. On June 16, President Xi Jinping received Min Aung Hlaing at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, with a full state welcome ceremony.
On June 1, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Min Aung Hlaing at Hyderabad House in New Delhi.
In Beijing, President Xi offered the same logic in different words: China, he said, “adheres to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs.”
India’s foreign secretary told reporters that engagement is “not intended to be a commentary on the internal political arrangements” in Myanmar. Internal political arrangements.
Non-interference. This is what bombing funerals becomes in the language of normalization.
The National Unity Government (NUG) Foreign Minister Zin Mar Aung wrote to India urging it to weigh the implications of formal engagement that may normalize or legitimize military rule.
She is right, and the media’s language is part of that machinery. Every unqualified “President Min Aung Hlaing” makes the next handshake easier to defend, and makes the people of Myanmar, who have liberated the majority of their own country and are building federal democracy from the ground up, disappear from the story.
The people of Myanmar refuse to be governed by this criminal entity. They are dismantling it. Headlines that crown their tormentor “president” strip them of that agency and reward the violence designed to break them.
Reuters is choosing to make propaganda its house style
Last September, I publicly called out Reuters after its reporter referred to the junta’s rebranded ruling body, the so-called State Security and Peace Commission, as a “civilian-led interim government.” Germany’s broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) did the same.
I called this what it was: unethical narrative framing that credulously repeated the junta’s own self-description. I urged these outlets to exercise vigilance and to stop amplifying the propaganda of a military that has relentlessly and violently repressed the people of Myanmar since its illegal coup attempt in 2021.
But since then, the language has become only more craven. Now we get “Myanmar’s President Min Aung Hlaing,” stated flatly, as settled fact. “Myanmar’s President Min Aung Hlaing has said his new government will strive to normalize relations with ASEAN.”
His government. His presidency. His normalization.
The junta could not have written it better. In fact, the junta did write it. Reuters simply adopted it as house style. Other international news agencies, including AP, AFP, Al Jazeera, BBC, and NHK, have followed suit.
What the word “president” erases
Media ethics in conflict settings demand that journalists separate fact from framing. So let us state the facts that the word “president” is doing the work of erasing.
The man Reuters calls “president” is the military general who launched the illegal coup attempt of February 1, 2021, overthrowing a government democratically elected by the people.
In the five years since, his military has killed more than 8,000 democracy activists and supporters, arrested over 31,000, and displaced more than 3.7 million people.
It has launched thousands of airstrikes on villages, clinics, schools, funerals, religious sites, and displacement camps. These are atrocity crimes, documented in painstaking detail by Myanmar and international human rights organizations.
Then came the “election.” The junta’s own census admitted it could not even reach 19 million people, nearly 40 per cent of the population. Its electoral commission dissolved 40 political parties, including the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party that won overwhelmingly in 1990, 2015, and 2020.
In the weeks before voting, the military launched airstrikes, ground assaults, and arson campaigns across Sagaing, Magwe, and Mandalay regions. At least 404 people were arrested under so-called “election protection laws” for criticizing the process.
Civil servants were compelled to vote. Citizens were pressured to be photographed outside polling stations for junta propaganda. The military’s proxy party claimed a pre-decided victory, while the military’s 25 per cent bloc of unelected seats sat untouched.
Finally, in April, Min Aung Hlaing had himself sworn in as “president” of the very state he attacked. That is the process Reuters has compressed into a single respectful title.
Wire services set the vocabulary for international news
Why focus on Reuters? Because Reuters is not one newsroom among many. It is a wire service, sitting upstream of the world’s media. Its copy is syndicated verbatim, within hours, into mastheads around the world.
The June 10 article calling Min Aung Hlaing “Myanmar’s President” appeared word for word in US News & World Report, in Yahoo News, in The Star in Malaysia, in BusinessWorld in Manila, in Internazionale in Italy, just to name a few.
One style decision in a Reuters newsroom becomes the default vocabulary of editors on five continents, then of analysts, then of the policymakers who read them.
This is how manufactured legitimacy travels. The junta stages an “election.” The wire service drops the quotation marks. The world’s newspapers inherit the language. And governments, looking for cover to re-engage with the rebranded military junta, find it ready-made in the morning headlines.
It does not have to be this way, and other newsrooms prove it. On June 1, Al Jazeera English covered the same India visit by Min Aung Hlaing under the headline “Indian PM Modi meets Myanmar military gov’t leader.”
This junta is not the government of Myanmar’s sovereign state, nor of its people.
We’re still paying for the last time this happened
In November 2010, the military staged another sham election. Within a few months following that sham election, the world had bought the “transition” narrative wholesale. Sanctions were lifted. Investors rushed in.
I wrote in 2013 that only one side of the story was being told, and that under this veil of legitimacy the junta was consolidating, not reforming. The people of Myanmar are still paying for that credulity today.
In February 2026, after the current junta’s sham election concluded, I warned that the junta would escalate its campaign for international recognition and seek validation through state visits and ASEAN summits.
That is precisely what these Reuters datelines are recording. The question is whether the world’s most trusted news agency will keep serving as the vehicle for the military that is causing immense suffering to Myanmar’s people.
To the editors
You report on Myanmar. So report the facts.
The fact is that Min Aung Hlaing is the architect of an illegal coup attempt and the commander of a military waging war on the people of Myanmar.
The fact is that the “election” that produced his title was conducted under airstrikes, mass arrests, and surveillance, with the country’s most popular party banned, 19 million people uncounted, and many others voting under the threat of violent coercion.
A title manufactured through terror is not a fact. It is a claim to be rigorously examined. So I put the question to you directly: when you call Min Aung Hlaing “president,” whose facts are you reporting? His or ours?
Your style guide may feel like a technicality. In Myanmar, it is not. Every borrowed word of legitimacy emboldens a brutal military junta. Categorically, Min Aung Hlaing is not a president. He is a war criminal with a stolen title. Call him what he is.
Khin Ohmar is a Myanmar human rights activist who was involved in organizing the ‘8888’ nationwide pro-democracy uprising. She is also the founder and chairperson of Progressive Voice, a Myanmar human rights organization. She developed the Women Peacebuilding Program for Women’s League of Burma and served as program coordinator from 2000 to 2006.
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