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Protest spotlights Burma's lack of press freedom
Irrawaddy - September 9, 2011
Focusing on the case of Hla Hla Win, a 27-year-old reporter for the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for breaching motorbike rules and shooting video, DVB Chief Editor Aye Chaing Naing said that, "there is no legal justification to arrest Hla Hla Win and she should not have been arrested in the first place".
Decades of military rule in Burma have incorporated vice-like press controls, and though these have been loosened of late, there are questions over whether this apparent liberalization is any more than rhetorical.
The DVB is a Burmese media organization with personnel in Norway and Thailand. Hla Hla Win and the 16 other reporters are among what Assistance Association for Political Prisoners – a Thailand-based organization staffed by ex-political prisoners from Burma – calculates to be 1,995 political prisoners or prisoners of conscience.
The Burmese government says that all the country's incarcerated are criminals, including the hundreds of Buddhist monks rounded up after the 2007 "Saffron" uprising against military rule.
However, the continued detention of almost 2,000 political prisoners points to what activists believe to be a sham transition from military rule to democracy. Ex political prisoner Nyi Nyi Aung, now in the US, told The Irrawaddy that the failure to release the detainees shows the insincerity of the Burmese rulers.
"They don't want to make any reform in Burma," he said.
Burma held elections in November 2010, the first since 1990, though the result was a predictable landslide for the army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Journalists have been given controlled-environment access to the recently-convened Parliament, but on the condition that they avoid reporting in a manner damaging to the "dignity of the Parliament and the State."
An article by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi recounting her recent trip to Bagan – a temple-laden city in north-central Burma – was passed for publication in a Burmese journal called The People's Era. However, this came about only after much of the content was chopped by the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD), the official name for the state censor.
However, unlike some other authoritarian states, Burma has a thriving private-run media, and according to US diplomatic cables sent from the country's Rangoon embassy, "the number of weekly newspapers has gone from just a handful 10 years ago to approximately 150 today." That said, most of the growth is in non-controversial areas "like sports and entertainment, with very little hard news about events in Burma or the outside world."
Coverage of Suu Kyi has long been a tricky issue for Burmese publications. The journal Messenger was recently banned from publishing its supplement section for a week by the PSRD, and Shiwei Yei, the Southeast Asia point-man for the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), told The Irrawaddy that the ban is likely "related to the journal's recent interview of Suu Kyi and the front page photo of her."
While stories about soap operas and sport can, for the most part, now be run without prior vetting by the censors, political stories are subject to word-by-word examination, meaning that critical or investigative coverage of the country's government cannot be undertaken.
According to US embassy officials, writing in a cable sent before the Burma's 2010 elections, the censor bans "20-25 percent of all stories in a given periodical." Burma's poorly-paid reporters have additional economic reasons to self-censor, say US officials in the same cable.
"Because Burmese reporters tend to get paid only for the stories that make it into the newspaper, self-censorship is prevalent."
An April 2011 parliamentary speech by Burmese President Thein Sein describing media as the "fourth pillar" of Burmese society was followed by other apparent liberalizations such as the watering-down – for now at least – of clumsy propaganda against foreign media by the much-lampooned New Light of Myanmar, a Burmese government mouthpiece which slated DVB, along with the BBC and VOA, with gems such as "killer broadcasts designed to cause troubles."
However, President Thein Sein – who was an army general and prime minister under the pre-election military dictatorship – tempered his 4th estate spin by telling Burma's MPs that they were "required through media to inform the people about what they should know."
A new target for satirists might be the Burmese information czar, Kyaw Hsan, who followed up a much-derided tearful breakdown at a recent government press conference – itself a novelty in Burma – by describing media as "red ants" in a parliamentary debate on Wednesday that was held in Burma's purpose-built but isolated administrative capital of Naypyidaw.
In his eyebrow-raising and quixotic response to a parliamentary proposal on press freedom, the minister of information said it would bring "more disadvantages than advantages," before launching into a half-hour speech which quoted from the ancient "550 Jataka Tales" and its fable of the elephant king Saddan. In the tale, the king offered flowers (press freedom) to his queen, but the flowers attracted red ants (journalists), which bit the queen.
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