The Truth And Nothing But: Press In Myanmar

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The truth and nothing but

By Dave Tacon

Feb. 5, 2013, 1:59 p.m.

IT BEGINS with whispered warnings to stay off the streets. At noon the next day, under a cloudless Rangoon sky, it becomes clear why: the monks are preparing to march. They arrive in increasing numbers, a mass of maroon robes gathering at the magnificent Shwedagon Pagoda.

There's a clear sense of deja vu in this protest by Burma's spiritual leaders. In 2007, rising fuel prices spurred monks to take to the streets in what became known as the Saffron Revolution.

The then military junta's reply was to turn its armed forces against the protesters with particular attention on anyone carrying a camera. Burma's citizens had suffered under brutal government repression for decades, but the most resonant and disturbing images of the protest showed the murder of Japanese video journalist, Kenji Nagai, who was shot and killed by a soldier at point-blank range while in the background police beat protesters with batons.

This time the catalyst for the monks' protest is the proposed construction of a Chinese-backed copper mine in the country's north-west. Yet, despite the familiar turnout of soldiers to keep a watchful eye on the protest, much has changed in Burma since the Saffron Revolution

.

Under President Thein Sein's reformist government, hundreds of political prisoners have been freed, including democracy icon and Nobel peace prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. Byelections last April saw the revered leader win a seat in parliament.

Ceasefires have been brokered with most of the country's rebel ethnic armies. In an acknowledgement of Burma's reform program and its steps towards democracy, US President Barack Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton have both visited the country. Trade sanctions have also been lifted by several countries and a closed financial system has been opened to foreign investment.

Amid this whirlwind of reform, one of the clearest barometers of change is Burma's media.

Today, Kyaw Phyo Tha, is among dozens of journalists at Shwedagon Pagoda. Until this year, the publication he works for, The Irrawaddy, was illegal. Now, the magazine is openly available and distributed free of charge on the streets of Rangoon. The 35-year-old reporter follows the flow of the march with his press credentials openly displayed on a lanyard around his neck.

There is a tense moment when the procession rounds a corner into a divided road lined with trucks loaded with riot police armed with tear gas and assault rifles.

A small group of journalists moves across the median strip, photographing and filming the police with cameras and smartphones, but the convoy leaves almost as soon as it appears. ''The police told the monks they didn't have a permit to protest,'' Tha says later. ''They said, 'We don't care. We're marching anyway' and they [the police] just left.'' Ultimately, the monks, surrounded by a moving, protective human chain, reach city hall, hold a news conference and quietly disperse.

''I used to write under a pseudonym,'' Tha said a couple of days earlier over coffee in central Rangoon. ''Whenever I heard a knock on the door, I thought it was the secret police.''

It was a well-founded fear. The Burmese government had historically jailed journalists to silence them, a tactic well-documented by groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Yet at the end of last year, the CPJ reported that while record numbers of journalists were imprisoned globally, for the first time since 1996 not one was jailed in Burma.

At the beginning of 2012, Burma's leaders extended an invitation to Aung Zaw, the founder and editor of The Irrawaddy. During his visit, Zaw was told the ban on his publication, which is funded by international donors, had been lifted after almost two decades of being based in Thailand. Encouraged by this, The Irrawaddy opened its first bureau in Rangoon last October and other previously exiled media such as Mizzima News and Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) followed suit.

Still, these are cautious steps. The DVB bureau is in a secret location and the core of The Irrawaddy's operations remains in Chiang Mai in Thailand. ''We're dipping our toe in,'' says Tha. ''Things can backslide and if they do, we're the first ones arrested.''

One publication that has had several high-profile collisions with Burma's legal system is theMyanmar Times, a weekly newspaper founded in 2000 by Australian Ross Dunkley and Burmese national Sonny Swe.

Dunkley ran foul of Burmese authorities in 2011 and spent 47 days in prison for charges relating to the drugging and assault of a sex worker. At the time Irrawaddy editor Aung Zaw suggested Dunkley had been framed in an attempt to wrest control of the Myanmar Timesfrom him. This claim was also aired by David Armstrong, the chairman at another of Dunkley's enterprises, the Phnom Penh Post newspaper. He was later convicted of ''simple assault'' and fined for an immigration offence.

Sonny Swe, co-founder of the Myanmar Times, fared much worse at the hands of his country's courts. During a purge of military intelligence in 2004 he was imprisoned for 14 years for violating censorship laws, and his father, Brigadier-General Thein Swe, was sentenced to 152 years in prison for a variety of charges.

This was followed by an aggressive takeover of Myanmar Times by local competitor Tin Tun Oo, a media entrepreneur with strong government ties. Dunkley continues to campaign for Swe's release and the return of shares in the Myanmar Times company taken from him and sold to Tin Tun Oo when Sonny Swe was imprisoned.

The Myanmar Times had been a controversial enterprise from the outset. When Sonny Swe was jailed, Dunkley's attempts to get various embassies to support his newspaper drew sharp criticism from the then chief of the US mission in Rangoon, Carmen Martinez.

IN CABLES revealed by WikiLeaks, Martinez slammed the newspaper and Dunkley as ''a regular apologist'' for the military junta. This contempt is shared by some sections of the journalistic community. ''I had people screaming at me in the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok when I said I worked for the Myanmar Times,'' says Geoffrey Goddard, who was chief editor from 2001 to 2005. ''Today I feel vindicated - absolutely.''

Now a senior editor at the paper, Goddard recalls the trepidation he felt when he left a position at the Sunday Herald Sun in Melbourne for a country whose dismal human rights record had made it a pariah state. ''It involved a moral compromise coming here,'' he says. ''For years we had to run government propaganda on a page called 'National Affairs'. But every private sector newspaper had to run it: we had no choice. I used to call it the garbage page … It's just amazing how much has changed.''

Goddard compares President Thein Sein to Russia's reformist former president Mikhail Gorbachev.

For Goddard, the most profound change was the scrapping of prepublication censorship in August 2012. Previously, reports such as the 2002 death of the country's former dictator Ne Win, head of state from 1962 to 1981, could be banned from all media on the whim of its rulers.

Publishing Aung San Suu Kyi's name was banned for many years.

However, he points out that the Burmese press is far from unrestricted. All daily publications are government owned and privately owned media still must adhere to a list of loosely framed guidelines. ''If you breach those guidelines, you can be fined, suspended or shut down,'' he says.

The boundaries of what is permissible are still unclear. Goddard recently saw how close his newspaper had flirted with the new limits of expression when the Myanmar Times published a cartoon by Harn Lay, also a regular contributor to The Irrawaddy. The drawing showed a Burmese man in traditional dress casting peace doves into the sky, which are then shot down by a gun-toting general.

The cartoon could have been viewed as a commentary on the breach of a ceasefire agreement with ethnic rebels in restive Kachin State.

It provoked a furious and lengthy editorial in the military publication, Myawaddy Daily. In patriotic prose, all those responsible for the offending cartoon were warned against insulting the military. Asked whether he sees the possibility of the military seeking to grasp absolute power again, Goddard is cautiously optimistic.

''I think the reform process has developed too much momentum to stop, [but] there are certainly hardliners lurking in the background.''

While the easing of restrictions on the media has caused a surge of new weekly and monthly publications, including those specialising in fashion, lifestyle and cars, some activist media groups such as Burma VJ have been sidelined in the country's new media landscape.

Burma VJ, a group of guerilla video journalists, were recently the subject of a Danish documentary, Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary in 2010.

These video journalists operated covertly during the dark days of military repression, smuggling their footage out of the country to be broadcast back into Burma via other countries such as Norway.

Many of the group's video journalists are former political prisoners.

Bo Bo, 42, served eight years of a 15-year prison sentence for his participation in student celebrations of Aung San Suu Kyi's 1991 Nobel peace prize. Bo Bo fled Burma after the arrest of a number of his Burma VJ colleagues in the wake of the Saffron Revolution; he returned from exile in Thailand in May last year.

Years on the run have left a residual paranoia in the former engineering student, who was tortured during his interrogation by military intelligence. He now runs the Golden Harp taxi service with two other Burma VJ members.

''We will be in trouble again for talking to you,'' Bo Bo says during a meeting that is also attended by his colleague Shell.

Shell, 43, who was released from prison last month, points out that Burma still has more than 200 political prisoners.

''They're still arresting people,'' he says.

Although 1200 political prisoners have been released since the beginning of 2011, the pair refuse to let their guard down.

''Now is a very important time,'' Bo Bo says. ''We're waiting and watching to see if real change will happen … We're permanent members of Burma VJ. We're on standby.''

Dave Tacon is an Australian journalist based in Shanghai.

Source: http://www.thecourie...thing-but/?cs=5