My Encounter with Bertil Lintner, who revealed the plot Ten Months Before the Rohingya Massacre

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Bertil Lintner (born 1953) is a Swedish journalist, author and strategic consultant who has spent nearly four decades writing about Asia. He was formerly the Burma (Myanmar) correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) and currently works as a correspondent for Asia Times. He was blacklisted by the Burmese military from the 1980s until 2012, yet was the first foreign journalist to report Aung San Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest in 1995. He lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with his wife Hseng Noung, an ethnic Shan from Burma.

His first book was the first I read about Burma. I later submitted posts regularly to FEER and Asiaweek — both then published in Hong Kong — under the pseudonym Bo Aung Din, and had several published in the letters-to-the-editor section. I even had correspondence with Mr. Lintner himself, who once sent me a three-page telegraph apologizing for a delayed book delivery and offered a six-month FEER subscription free of charge.

He later contacted me about ten months before the Thida Htwe massacre, ahead of Eid ul-Adha (4–9 November 2011). I had arranged for him to meet Datuk Ahmad Azam Abdul Rahman — a prominent politician, former right-hand man of Deputy PM Anwar Ibrahim, Chairman of Global Peace Malaysia, and President of a consortium of 77 NGOs — along with Rohingya activists. I also arranged for my son Zin Oo Ko to assist him with transportation.

He visited my clinic twice, but I was occupied with patients both times. When he came a second time the day before Eid to say goodbye, I invited him to stay one more day so we could talk at length — on Eid itself, I would be free and others would be busy with Kurban. He accepted.

We sat in the kitchen — joined by my son, my brother-in-law (a doctor), two other doctors, and my wife — and talked over food.

After a while, Lintner began speaking about widespread Islamophobia and the Myanmar Military’s plan for the mass murder and expulsion of Rohingyas from Rakhine and Myanmar. When we expressed disbelief, he warned us:

“You are non-Rohingya Myanmar Muslims and Panthays — you think you will be spared. After the Rohingyas, other Muslims in mainland Myanmar will come next. The military will incite riots, and kill and destroy your shops and homes.”

I reminded him that he had written a full Bangkok Post centre-page article predicting Ne Win’s resignation — with an Anti-Muslim riot followed by a Buddhist-Muslim alliance that would snowball — roughly two to three months before it happened. And that he had predicted Aung San Suu Kyi’s release about two weeks in advance.

He smiled and explained: he had married the sister of a Myanmar ethnic Shan rebel leader and lived near the border. The Myanmar Military Commanders were communicating repeatedly on wireless using code words — all recorded by the Ethnic Revolutionary Organizations (EROs) at the border, who had been trained by the CIA, MI5, Mossad, and others, and could decipher those conversations.

This conversation took place exactly ten months before the Thida Htwe massacre.

For further context, please see my earlier post: “Behind the Riots: Questions of Hidden Hands in Myanmar’s Communal Violence” 👉 https://myanmarmuslim.news/en/2026/04/14/behind-the-riots-questions-of-hidden-hands-in-myanmars-communal-violence/

Mr. Lintner possessed foreknowledge of the military’s plan to attack the Rohingyas and incite anti-Muslim violence across Myanmar — and shared it with us privately in November 2011. That knowledge was never published. Instead, in the years that followed, his writing shifted toward focusing on “international jihadists” in Burma.

As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.”

“We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

The following are the e-mail conversation of Mr. Bertil Lintner with me: