From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbarrow. This is Daily.

Today, the country of Myanmar is accused of a state-sponsored campaign of massacre, rape, and arson against the Rohingya Muslims who lived there.

So why did the government of Myanmar allow a Times reporter to tour the epicenter of the alleged atrocities?

It's Tuesday, August 14.

We are following breaking news this morning, the U.S. government declaring the ongoing violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar as ethnic cleansing.

The people are frightened, hungry, and stapler.

The stateless Muslim minority are the casualties of fresh clashes between Rohingya militants and Myanmar's security forces.

The human rights watch condemned the latest evidence and says it proves a systematic slaughter of Rohingyas.

I had been covering for many years the persecution of the Rohingya, who are a minority Muslim people in Myanmar.

Myanmar is majority Buddhist and last August, they were attacked by Rohingya Muslim insurgents on some police posts and an army station in northern Rakhine,

which is where the Rohingya are concentrated.

And there was a very brutal, very mysteriously quick reaction to those insurgent attacks in which village burnings, executions, rapes, you know, all the horrible things that constitute ethnic cleansing happened.

And within a very short period of time, around 700,000 Rohingya fled from Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh.

And so I wanted to see the epicenter, kind of the ground zero of ethnic cleansing.

Hannah Beach is the Southeast Asia Bureau chief for the times.

I'd spent months and months applying to get to northern Rakhine. It's an area in which foreign journalists in particular have been basically not allowed to go.

We could talk in refugee camps in Bangladesh to people who had very consistent, compelling stories.

But you want to see the place, you know, you want to see the charred villages, you want to see the carcasses of the mosques.

You want to be there. And Myanmar is a really difficult place to report.

And even before you get there, you have to apply for a journalist visa that can take weeks, it can take months. And in July, I got a letter from the Burmese authorities.

And they said, congratulations, you have permission to go to northern Rakhine.

Hannah, knowing what happened here, knowing that this is the epicenter of this military action, I find it sort of shocking that the Myanmar government would allow journalists like you to the scene of what is essentially their own crime.

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