Day partying seemed like a harmless enough subject to report on in Burma. To circumvent parental and societal pressure to spend the evening hours at home, teenagers there held parties in the afternoon instead–a clever cultural workaround. But in this Southeast Asian country only recently released from the grip of a brutal, almost 50-year military junta, it turns out even lighthearted reporting evokes darkness.
“A reporter working on a story about pirated movies was imprisoned for ‘defamation,’ ‘using abusive language,’ and trespassing”
My first inkling of trouble was when a would-be party guest in the former capital of Yangon informed me the event had been canceled. It was December 2013, and the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games were in full swing, hosted by Burma for the first time in over 40 years. The former manager of the party venue, “Jack,” explained that the police had shut down all parties, worried about the image drunk and disorderly youth would create while foreigners were in town for the event. Jack was in his thirties and as candid as could be–until I asked his real name. Then he informed me he would be in trouble if I quoted him. Although the cancellation of the party had to do with concern over image, the response of Jack and others involved indicated a deeper problem: People were scared of their government, especially in regards to speaking with the media.
This fear was not tied to any direct threat so much as to the unknown power of a government that had yet to earn their trust–a government whose reporting rules, and the punishments for breaking them, were much less clear than during military rule.
For almost half a century, Burma was ruled by an isolationist military regime, and what was and wasn’t allowed was relatively clear. But in 2010, elections were held for the first time in two decades, and long-time political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. The following year a quasi-civilian government came to power, and in 2012, Western countries eased longstanding economic sanctions.
With these changes came advances in press freedom. Pre-publication censorship banning topics like poverty and oppositional leaders was abolished in 2012, and visas were issued to foreign reporters previously barred from the country. Around the same time, the Associated Press and the BBC opened official bureaus, imprisoned journalists were released, and exiled media groups returned. But restrictive laws from the military regime–like the often-cited act that bans content that would affect the morality of the public in a way that undermines the security of the government–still exist, and no new media law has been put in place.
This coexistence of old and new makes reporting an exercise in uncertainty. In the past, foreigners had trouble getting into Burma. Now they roam more freely, but their interactions with locals are watched. Simply speaking with foreigners made locals suspect, said Jack, explaining that once he had spent a night in jail after talking to a foreign tourist. It was clear that the newly opened Burma was not quite as open as it was often portrayed, and that reporting from the country was going to be more difficult than I had anticipated.
Indeed, the pace of initial reforms has slowed, said Karin Deutsch Karlekar, project director, Freedom of the Press, Freedom House.
“There were these really big openings in 2011 and 2012, but the pace of opening has definitely slowed and there still are quite a few restrictions,” said Karlekar.
In dozens of interviews with reporters and editors, Shawn Crispin, author of the 2013 Committee to Protect Journalists report, “Burma Falters, Backtracks on Press Freedoms,” found that access is still restricted and authorities tend to treat the press as adversaries. According to the report, in 2012 a military colonel was demoted for giving unauthorized comments to Radio Free Asia, journalists are routinely restricted from accessing conflict areas, and a website that reported on government bombing of an ethnic group was later hacked. Freedom House also concluded in its 2013 report that Burma remains one of the more repressive countries in Asia in regards to press freedom.
Worrying trends cited in Freedom House’s forthcoming 2014 report include journalist imprisonment and government interference. A reporter working on a story about pirated movies was imprisoned for “defamation,” “using abusive language,” and trespassing. Inwa Publications decided not to distribute the July issue of Time magazine, which featured a cover story titled “The Face of Buddhist Terror,” and the government subsequently banned sale of the issue so no one else could sell it. In the absence of the clear-cut censorship regulations, what can and can’t be covered without government retribution is much less clear than before, said Karlekar. This uncertainty causes many journalists to practice self-censorship. This is most apparent when it comes to coverage of sensitive ethnic and religious issues, of which the case of the Christian Kachin in the north and Rohingya Muslims in the west top the list.
In Kachin State, more than 100,000 people have been displaced since 2011, when a three-year ceasefire between the government and Kachin Independence Army ended. Burmese authorities forbid foreign journalists from entering the region and many other rebel-held areas, but if journalists can find their way in, the rebel armies tend to be accommodating and the local populace candid, said Timothy McLaughlin, a senior reporter for the weekly Myanmar Times. In contrast, the Burmese military and other government forces have a far more guarded relationship with the press, he said. As a result, McLaughlin wrote in an email, it has allowed “these groups to be portrayed in larger part as rag-tag freedom fighters, when in reality a lot of these groups themselves are involved in some not-so-nice activities.”
While reporting on the rape of ethnic Kachin women by the Burmese military and police in a region under government control, photographer Diana Markosian and I faced more direct interference. Our interview was interrupted by several plainclothes policemen, and we were escorted to the local police station for questioning. After being asked for our passports and hotel location, we deemed it safer to leave the region than to continue reporting. We did not fear for our safety, but now that the police were watching us, we knew it would be hard to conduct interviews in the small mountain villages where we had been working.
Associated Press reporter Esther Htusan was forced to take even more drastic precautions last year while reporting on the Navy’s confiscation of land. She said she had to go into hiding in order to get rid of the military spies following her. It is this type of government harassment of both local and foreign journalists that can result in self-censorship. Htusan admits she takes government response into consideration when deciding whether or not to cover an issue.
Journalists are not the only ones who fear retribution–subjects sometimes are too scared to tell their stories, especially in conflict regions like Rakhine State, where Muslims and Buddhists are fighting. “They think expressing their condition and feeling would lead them to punishment,” Htusan wrote in an email.
Eaint Thiri Thu, who works as a journalist and fixer/translator, highlighted several reasons people fear talking to the press. When it comes to politics, they fear possible government retribution; in regards to working conditions, they fear the loss of their job; with religion, they fear societal pressure. While working with a team reporting on efforts at cooperation between faiths, Thu met a nun from Kachin State who originally agreed to talk, only to refuse later. Thu believes it was not government pressure that silenced the nun, but senior monks from the nun’s own monastery.
McLaughlin cites another group that practices self-censorship–foreign governments and non-governmental organizations, afraid to jeopardize their relations with the current regime.
While reporting on the rehabilitation of former child soldiers, Markosian and I encountered almost all of these forms of self-censorship. Representatives of NGOs repeated that it was a very sensitive topic and were guarded in their responses. Government representatives stalled and offered only brief replies.
Our translator instructed us to keep our meetings with former child soldiers short and only discuss the subject in a safe location, like her home, which was located in a neighborhood where our subjects were not known. An interview with one former child soldier was interrupted when a nosy neighbor paid an impromptu visit. I had been warned ahead of time to hide my notebook and recorder if this were to happen. At the home of another former child soldier, we were asked to keep our voices down because a neighbor had military connections.
Neither of the young soldiers had official discharge papers, so there was a real danger they could be imprisoned by the military. But because they had been underage recruits, their imprisonment was unlikely. This did little to lessen their fear. With them and the other subjects I spoke with during the two months I reported from Burma, December and January, fear was always there. It is a fear reinforced by the military’s still-prominent role in the government, said Freedom House’s Karlekar.
“I think there is enough concern that things could slip backward again, that people would be hesitant about sort of speaking freely or expressing open criticism or things like that, because that was so ingrained for so many years,” she said. “Those sorts of habits, I think, take much longer time to change.”
In the case of the day party story, the invasion of foreigners may help hurry things along. While “Jack” and “John,” another Burmese man associated with the nightclub scene, would not let me use their real names, Rick Hein, part owner of a Yangon bar and an expatriate, had no problem being identified. The teens were hesitant to tell me their names for a reason more universal–fear that their parents would find out. It seems even in a country where the government is a force to be reckoned with, parents are an even stronger one.
Katya Cengel is a journalist, journalism lecturer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and author of Bluegrass Baseball: A Year in the Minor League Life