“The so-called ‘civil society groups’ have their own agenda. Personally I think they inflamed the situation,” said Cheung during an interview with the Myanmar Times published this week.

“I have advised many countries with complicated ethnicity issues … [In Myanmar] it is complicated. But there are some ‘human rights’ groups in Myanmar which make ‘quiet diplomacy’ not possible,” claimed Cheung, who previously served as the head of the UN Statistics Division. Prior to taking the job with the UN, Cheung served as a senior bureaucrat in Singapore, where he continues to work as professor.

Predictably, Cheung's comments were blasted by the very same groups he was blaming. “It is absolutely shocking for a UN official advising the national census to so bluntly dismiss the concerns and aspirations of the peoples of Myanmar,” the Myanmar Times quoted Tom Kramer of the Transnational Institute (TNI).

In the lead-up to the census, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group (ICG), TNI, and numerous Burma-based civil society groups warned that the census—which compelled respondents to identify their ethnicity using a widely discredited list developed during the Ne Win era—could worsen long-standing ethnic tensions in the country.

UNFPA country director Janet Jackson,  who apparently was acting on the advice of Dr. Cheung, chose to ignore the warnings of rights groups and go forward with the census process by accepting UN funding and overseeing the provision of UNFPA technical assistance to Burma during the census process.

Whilst the census was being carried out, anti-Muslim riots erupted in Rakhine state, where members of the stateless Rohingya minority were barred from identifying themselves by their term of choice in contradiction to long-standing international norms.

Also, while the census was being conducted fighting erupted in Kachin State between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and Burma's army in Mansi Township (spelled “Manje” in Kachin). When the conflict broke out Burma's state owned New Light of Myanmar claimed in an April 6th article that “As part of the nationwide census-taking process, the census enumerators are carrying out their tasks with the help of the armed forces in some regions that face some difficulties in Kachin and northern Shan states.”

The fact that the census was used as a pretext to deploy more soldiers to a heavily militarized zone destroyed what little if any credibility the census had amongst many Kachin people.

Moreover, the UN insisted on going forward with the census process despite repeated warnings that it was seriously flawed insofar as it prevented respondents from identifying themselves as belonging to more than one ethnicity, posing a serious problem for Burma’s large population of people who have mixed ethnic heritage.

Other problems that arose during the census process stemmed from the list of ethnic groups that was used. For instance, the list included 12 Kachin subgroups despite the fact that most Kachin people recognize only six or seven such groups. Some Kachin subgroups were even listed twice with different names under Ne Win’s ethnic classification scheme.

As the Economist magazine reported, the ethnic list was also problematic in Chin State: “There are 53 Chin subgroups on the list, for instance, many of which the Chin themselves do not acknowledge, raising old suspicions that the census results will be used by the Burmans to keep the Chin politically divided and thus weaker.”

In addition to its own financial resources, the UN raised money from several European countries—including Norway, the UK, and Switzerland—to cover the UNFPA’s census costs. The UNFPA and foreign donors provided most of the census funding, although Naypyidaw also contributed US $15 million towards the US $74 million supposedly needed to conduct the census.