More Troubles At The Irrawaddy Magazine

[silverhammer24]

Dear Irrawaddy Donor, Firstly, thankyou to people within the various donor bodies for your replies, assurances and expressions of goodwill. We hope we have answered your questions satisfactorily. Somehow this email also ended up in the hands of three former Irrawaddy employees, and we thank you too for your encouragement. We shall honor our pledge of confidentiality to all parties. For a long time The Irrawaddy has been unwilling or unable to tackle seriously what is taking place in regional Burma. In the country’s ethnic ‘horseshoe’ there is an ongoing, deliberate attempt to destroy several entire cultures. That attempt is succeeding. Several international jurists have opined that this is genocide in terms of the Rome Statute. One would not easily discern any of this from reading The Irrawaddy, where the catastrophe of regional Burma is downplayed. The difference in tone and content between the magazine and the written reports of those on-the-ground in eastern Burma – the Free Burma Rangers, the Border Consortium, SWAN, et al – is considerable. These bodies, and many others, have taken on the role of exposing the horrors inflicted on ethnic minorities, and on fellow Burmans, by the Burman-dominated armed forces. It sometimes appears that The Irrawaddy sees its role as limiting the public relations damage to the Burman majority. Some of the most damning human rights reports for a generation have centered on Burma. At the time when several of them made the front pages of the world’s newspapers, they typically drew a single paragraph in The Irrawaddy, or were ignored entirely. Perhaps inevitably, the magazine’s moral paralysis has now become functional as well: • As a result of our previous circular, editing has been outsourced to Bangkok - out of fear that the magazine’s in-house staff are not loyal to the Editor, Aung Zaw. • The Irrawaddy’s own editors now spend most of their day chatting and web-surfing, in the absence of any work assignments. • The Editor has stated a belief that the Burmese junta is behind the present circulars. Notwithstanding that, a staff member presently in London has been instructed to look for culprits there. Another suspect is in Tokyo; yet another in Chiang Mai. In our judgment a siege mentality has arisen. • The Editor has openly discussed which journalists will be fired from the magazine, in the presence of candidates. This is especially upsetting for the Burmese staff so named, as their means of support in Thailand are slender. • Apparently no longer trusted, editorial staff have not been spoken to by the Editor for some weeks. • With the departure in the last two years of so many experienced reporters and editors, and the sidelining of many of those remaining, the magazine and website now contain increasing ‘filler’ material: stories lifted from newspapers; two-page self-promos. • Many cover stories and major stories (in the current issue for example) are written by outsiders, which raises the question of why the magazine’s 21 talented paid staff are not being given more challenging assignments. We do not relish criticizing individuals, nor do we enjoy causing offense. But The Irrawaddy’s present condition may be distilled down to two items - incompetence and malfeasance - and they do in our judgment need to be addressed if the magazine is to have a future. This brings us again to the Editor’s house in Chiang Mai. How this lavish home, worth many millions of baht, could have been built on a monthly salary of 32,000 baht is unclear. We make no claim to know. But the possibility that the home was built on funds intended to lighten the burden of some of the most oppressed people on Earth is, in our view, disturbing. Thus this substantial building project might merit investigation by the donor bodies which may have unwittingly paid for it. There is a second reason for drawing attention once more to this issue: justice needs to be seen to be done. Virtually every member of The Irrawaddy’s staff has long-held suspicions as to the funding of the Editor’s home. Those suspicions undermine their faith in their leadership, and thus in the magazine’s mission. Dissolving those suspicions would put to rest a long-standing and stubborn dampener on the magazine’s internal morale. In themselves, anonymous emails do not, and should not, have high credibility. They can make wild claims which cannot be corroborated. But that is not the case here. With the exception of the above remarks on the Editor’s home - which at this stage rest on circumstantial evidence - the accuracy of anything in these circulars may be gaged by speaking to any past or current Irrawaddy employee(s), in private and in confidence. Our first circular led to extreme measures inside the magazine: entire personnel areas no longer communicated with; now a experienced and skillful editing staff which (unwillingly) reads magazines and web surfs on full pay, because they can no longer be trusted with the information which is the magazine’s lifeblood. Defensiveness of this order is in our opinion more indicative that something is wrong than the reverse. As nearly everyone associated with The Irrawaddy in recent years has concluded, the magazine sorely needs new leadership. However neither its staff, its contributors nor its well-wishers have the power to fulfill that need. Only you are in a position to do that. Friends of The Irrawaddy

[george]

Thread closed for obvious reasons.

/Admin