Combining interviews with Burmese journalists and personal observations from his recent research in Burma, A. Lin Neumann describes the state of the press under one of the world's most oppressive governments. A supplementary report describes the activities of the Burmese exile press in Thailand.

The most surprising thing about the Burmese press is that it still exists. Governed repressively since 1962 and currently under military rule, Burma is by far the most information-starved country in Southeast Asia. Yet the press refuses to die.
The ruling junta enforces obligatory and capricious censorship at every turn. A host of topics are off-limits, from heavy rainstorms to local politics, losing soccer matches to details of the World Trade Center attacks. Yet there is a strong literary and journalistic tradition in Burma, and many journalists and writers believe that the future of the country hinges on a return to past freedoms.
Despite censorship and the risks of reporting, there are some signs of life in the Burmese press. Negotiating a labyrinth of regulations, private magazines have emerged in the last several years. Most of these titles are confined to business or fashion and all face great difficulty printing controversial material. Still, journalists are trying against the odds to keep their profession alive. 
Eighteen journalists are currently jailed for their work in Burma.1 Journalists who are still allowed to work must contend with a vast web of regulation and censorship imposed in the name of national security or risk arrest or loss of livelihood. Despite these challenges, certain journalists within Burma and in the overseas Burmese community still manage to report the facts about their appalling government. 

On a recent visit to Burma sponsored by the journalists’ rights group, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), I found surprising good humor and energy in a situation that would drive most reporters to despair. Once reasonably assured that their identities would be protected, dozens of local journalists – many of whom had suffered harassment and jail time for their work – welcomed me. 

They risked their freedom just by talking to an international human rights organization. “Never mind, we are used to the threats,” said a retired newspaper editor who has spent years in prison over the past four decades. “If you haven’t been in jail you haven’t been a reporter here.”

THE IMPASSE

Burma is deadlocked between pro-democracy forces on one side and the military regime on the other. Given strict censorship and government control over news content, it is virtually impossible for the Burmese people to engage in a frank national dialogue about their future. 

One of the most crucial measures of future political reform in Burma are the ongoing closed-door talks – the first since 1994 – between the regime and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The United Nations-brokered negotiations were widely covered everywhere except Burma. Yet inside the country, the local press is barred by censors from carrying stories about the dialogue. “We have no idea about this,” said one local journalist. “The talks cannot be discussed.” As a result, said the journalist, it was almost impossible for people to believe that anything will come of the dialogue. 

The press restrictions put Suu Kyi herself at a marked disadvantage. If she hammers out a secret power-sharing deal with the junta, she and her allies will merely be perpetuating the undemocratic practices of the past 40 years. But government officials clearly fear that any crack in the façade of repression could lead to a reprise of the 1988 democratic uprising, which was brutally crushed by the current junta. During that period, Suu Kyi rose to prominence and the military was nearly toppled by massive street demonstrations. 

For the first time in years, however, state newspapers have been permitted to mention Suu Kyi without attaching ritual insults to her name. The official New Light of Myanmar, for example, no longer refers to Suu Kyi as an “evil tool of foreign interests.” The Myanmar Times, a new English-language weekly that is pitched mainly at foreign readers and maintains close links with Burmese military intelligence, has even been allowed to cover the releases of some political prisoners and the reopening of offices of Suu Kyi’s political party, the National League for Democracy. Operating outside the direct control of the Ministry of Information, the paper has been billed as evidence that the junta is becoming more tolerant of independent political speech. 

That is not the case. Most Burmese read neither The Myanmar Times nor the handful of imported English-language publications available in Rangoon. For the vast majority of Burma’s people, the talks are just another rumor. They fear that the government is only raising expectations in order to undermine the opposition even further. “If we see some reality, then we will believe,” the editor of one magazine told me.2 

PAST AND PRESENT

For a time, starting with independence from Britain in 1949 and ending when the military seized power in 1962, Burma enjoyed a fair measure of press freedom. The post-colonial government was democratically elected and press freedom was a fact of life. Literary journals, mass market dailies, and political party newspapers competed freely for readers during a tumultuous period in which competing ideologies, from rightist parties to a powerful communist movement, used the press to vie for popular support.
In those days, Rangoon was a prosperous and fairly cosmopolitan Southeast Asian capital. Everything changed in 1962, when General Ne Win seized power and imposed the “Burmese Road to Socialism,” a policy designed to isolate the country from outside influences. One of his first moves was to nationalize all newspapers and establish a Press Scrutiny Board to impose strict censorship on all forms of information. The board remains fully active today. 

The current junta has made a few cosmetic changes since it seized power in 1988, notably changing its name from the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) to the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) in 1997. A public relations offensive of sorts has been underway since then, largely directed by the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS), a think tank run by Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt, head of military intelligence and effectively the junta’s third-ranking member. But the repressive mechanism of military control remains essentially unchanged, and efforts to paint a picture of economic vitality under the new dispensation have not prospered. 

In March 2001, Khin Nyunt explained the regime’s press policy to an audience of Information Ministry staffers. “The staff should know the importance of the news value in line with the time and condition [sic] ,” said the general, according to the official New Light of Myanmar. “As the staff…are experienced persons in the journalism field, they have the ability to differentiate between news which will benefit the nation and the people, and news which will have a bad effect on the nation and the people.” In practice, of course, this means that the regime sets the agenda, determines most news content, and only allows certain subjects to pass the censors. As a result, local journalists are reduced to writing tame lifestyle and business features for a range of anodyne weekly journals and monthly magazines. 

Occasionally, some try to push the envelope by inserting veiled political references into their copy. When their efforts are censored, they often pass manuscripts around to one another or share banned magazines they have managed to save from the scrap heap. “If we stop trying, there will soon be no journalism in Burma,” said an editor at a business magazine. “In the future, when the situation improves, we will need our writers.” 

A retired journalist who spent long years in prison went out of his way to assist me in meeting some of his colleagues and friends, a risky proposition in Burma. “I do this because this is what I can do,” he said. “They won’t let me write.” The statement may seem melodramatic, but the editor, who was once a prominent journalist, has been barred from writing for publication and suffered permanent, crippling injuries from years of imprisonment. 

A younger journalist with a university degree in urban planning, who makes his living writing for a teen fashion magazine, spent a long day driving me around Rangoon. “I want to show you what they’ve done to our people,” he explained as we passed through the drab outskirts of the city. About an hour outside the city center, he stopped at one of the “satellite towns” constructed after the anti-government uprising of 1988 as a way of emptying central Rangoon of the urban workers who helped swell the ranks of demonstrators. “There are no hospitals out here, and few schools,” he said, adding that the inhabitants had been forcibly relocated. “There are very few factories and people have to queue for hours for buses into the city. People are sad. There is a lot of drinking.”
Could he ever write about this? “I do,” he said as we drove slowly through the squalor of a cramped shantytown carved out of a rice field. “In my private journal. I come here sometimes to talk with the people but it is very dangerous for them to speak with outsiders. Anyway, it will never be published.”

STREETS OF TERROR

In 1988, beginning in April on college campuses, there was a popular uprising against the semi-socialist dictatorship of General Ne Win. The streets were filled with thousands of young demonstrators calling for democracy. After a massacre of students by soldiers on August 8, 1988 the scale of the protests grew. The demonstrators formed street committees in an attempt to govern a capital that had seemingly been abandoned by its government. Official buildings had been ransacked and the bureaucracy was at a standstill. Even customs and immigration officials had abandoned their posts. 

Numerous unofficial papers began appearing in mid-August as the uprising gathered steam and the military largely retreated behind closed gates, leaving the streets to the students and demonstrators for several weeks. Even the doctrinaire state press joined the upheaval and started printing lively and uncensored reports.

Amid the chaos, a quiet lady named Aung San Suu Kyi returned from England to the country of her birth. The daughter of the country’s assassinated independence hero, General Aung San, she quickly became a symbol swept up in the struggle for change, who gradually accepted the mantle of leadership thrust upon her. 

But any hopes that the government would negotiate with the emerging democracy movement were shattered when another set of generals seized power. On September 18, the coup leaders announced the formation of a new junta called the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) to replace Ne Win’s failed socialist regime.3 A maelstrom of killing ensued over the following days as machine guns swept the streets of protesters, leaving thousands of corpses in their wake. 

The underground and independent newspapers were immediately closed following the coup, but many of those practicing journalism in Rangoon today were part of those rebel papers and see their brief publishing life as a sign that press freedom can eventually be reborn in the country. Many of the journalists involved in Burma’s brief flirtation with press freedom fled to exile in neighboring Thailand or joined the underground resistance. Others were rounded up and jailed in the months and years following the crackdown.

I was one of only four foreign journalists who were actually in Rangoon when the uprising got underway. There was no independent Burmese press left to follow the story, and international media was largely transfixed by the Seoul Olympics.

FAST FORWARD

Thirteen years later, Rangoon remains a city out of time. The stunning Shwedagon Pagoda complex still glistens magically in the sun and the charmingly faded British colonial skyline has changed little. A handful of new buildings rose in the mid 1990s to herald Burma’s planned debut as an Asian economic tiger. A few new hotels were built or refurbished to cater to a tourist wave that never landed. The splendid century-old Strand Hotel, which was a shadow of its Victorian grandeur in 1988, has been restored to its original glory. But the occupancy? “None sir,” said the bellman with a sad nod of the head. “No guests this week, sir.” The elegant lobby bar only buzzes when the small diplomatic community gathers to swap rumors on Friday evening.

The freewheeling media debates of 1988 are long gone. State newspapers dominate, such as the New Light of Myanmar, whose pages bristle with dour headlines about how Secretary Number One of the ruling junta met with the Fisheries Secretary to discuss the prawn. Opinion pages are frequently given over to multi-part diatribes against foreign reporters whose coverage is allegedly part of an elaborate global plot to besmirch the country’s good name.

Matters of seeming national importance are off limits. In the mid-1990s, the government conducted a sustained military offensive against several insurgent ethnic minority forces based in northern Burma. The Burmese press ignored the story completely until the regime announced a series of negotiated settlements with purported minority representatives. 

Burma is a global center for the narcotics trade, but the problem is not covered except for government pronouncements. The former leader of the insurgent Shan State Army in northern Burma, General Khun Sa, is wanted for drug trafficking outside Burma. But having made peace with the government, he is said to live in Rangoon, although the fact cannot be mentioned in the domestic press. A severe AIDS crisis is also spreading rapidly according to international experts, but there is little independent reporting allowed on the issue. The issue of forced labor – the widespread practice of pressing villagers into service as unpaid road workers and military porters – has made Burma a virtual pariah state in the eyes of the International Labor Organization (ILO). But this is yet another taboo subject for the media, even though the junta is now allowing ILO representatives to monitor the issue. 

OUTSIDE INFORMATION 

There is no public Internet access in Burma, apart from a handful of expensive email accounts that pass through a central military server where messages can be delayed for hours while the censors read them. Fax machines must be licensed and it can take years to obtain a permit to carry a cellular phone. State television is a staid propaganda vehicle. Satellite television is available in foreign homes and hotels, but few Burmese can afford it. Tattered copies of foreign newsmagazines are sold as virtual contraband from street stalls. For a premium, passing motorists can also buy smuggled week-old copies of the Bangkok Post and the Nation, English dailies from neighboring Thailand. The papers are hawked by skittish newsboys who keep a watchful eye out for the police. Ordinary people depend on Burmese language broadcasts beamed into the country by Radio Free Asia, the Voice of America, the BBC, and the Democratic Voice of Burma, a dissident news service based in Norway. Hungry for news, people keep track of the world on tiny short wave receivers, hiding them from authorities and listening only in the privacy of their homes.

Foreign journalists are generally barred from living in Burma. The international press corps in Rangoon consists of a single correspondent, from the Chinese state news agency Xinhua. Foreign reporters must apply for special journalist visas to enter the country, along with a “Permit to Conduct Journalistic Activities.” The rules change unpredictably and there are no access guarantees. In recent months, perhaps because of the ongoing talks with Suu Kyi, some foreign correspondents have found it easier to enter Burma. The PR-savvy OSS has organized press junkets to Burma in order to promote tourism and publicize the regime’s drug control efforts. But all visiting reporters are followed and monitored by intelligence agents and it is frequently impossible to interview Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for years.

International journalists who write negative stories about Burma can be banned from entering the country. Bertil Lintner, a Thailand-based Swedish reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review, has been unable to visit for fifteen years, although he is an internationally respected authority on Burma who has published several books on the country. A number of other Bangkok-based foreign correspondents are unable to obtain visas, perhaps because the regime thinks they know too much. Reporters who please the regime, on the other hand, appear to have special access. These include some Western reporters who have written optimistic stories about the regime’s talks with Suu Kyi.

For years, much of the information from inside Burma has come from foreign embassies whose staffers can field phone calls from reporters abroad with relative security. International wire services, such as Reuters and the Associated Press, must otherwise rely on Burmese stringers who operate under constant scrutiny. Wary of talking openly to CPJ for fear of government reprisals, a number of these reporters say they are regularly called in for questioning when their agencies run stories that are too critical of the regime. The reporters must frequently disguise their sources and plead ignorance if confronted by military intelligence agents regarding stories they write, especially when they cover human rights issues or anything concerning Aung San Suu Kyi. Overseas news editors sometimes change bylines on sensitive stories or add a Bangkok dateline in order to protect their colleagues inside Burma.

Several Burmese stringers told me that they can work sources inside the military government but must be very careful how they report the information. There appear to be key splits within the ruling junta, especially regarding how to handle Suu Kyi, and Western critics and journalists writing for foreign agencies can exploit these tensions – albeit carefully – to find stories. “Up there, among…the generals, there is difference of opinion,” said one wire agency stringer. “Sometimes we can get stories from them.”
Burmese censors are extremely wary of bad news for reasons that are seldom obvious to the outside observer. The censorship office does not give interviews and its guidelines are not made public. The September 11 attacks were ignored by state television and only mentioned in passing by government newspapers. Police confiscated contraband videotapes of CNN’s September 11 coverage and threatened vendors with arrest. Even the news of junta leader Than Shwe’s letter of condolence to the United States was delayed by several days.

When the national soccer team was eliminated from the regional Tiger Cup tournament in the early rounds late last year, the official censorship board quietly ordered newspapers to refrain from reporting the results. “We just enjoyed the trip. They wouldn’t let us do any work,” said a reporter who covered the tournament, which was held in Thailand. Others are less relaxed about the restrictions. “To me it is mental genocide. They are not killing the Burmese people physically but they are killing our ability to think,” said Pe Thet Nee, the editor of the Burmese Independent News Agency (BINA), a small exile news service that covers Burmese politics from Thailand.

VOICES OF POWER

Private publications – not newspapers but magazines and weekly “journals” as they are called in Burma – operate under a Byzantine regulatory framework. To obtain a publishing license, which can be revoked at any time, they must pay stiff fees (as well as bribes) to government agencies such as the Department of the Navy and the Drug Control Board. While government agencies technically hold the licenses, once a fee is paid the publications operate as private businesses, with the licensing agencies generally appointing officials as nominal chief editors.

For the most part, the private magazines are billed as beauty and teen magazines, and their covers splashed with photos of models and singers. It is a tactic of survival, say the editors, since they are unable to publish controversial material and the government seems to want to promote consumerism.

All four of Burma’s daily newspapers are published by the News and Periodicals Enterprise (NPE), a division of the Information Ministry. These are almost exclusively vehicles for government propaganda. In addition, some 50 private weekly and monthly magazines are allowed to exist under strict government supervision.

“The censorship board has told us we must not write about AIDS, corruption, education, or the situation of students,” said the editor of a monthly magazine whose publishing license is held by a government ministry. “We also cannot write about any bad news and we must be careful about everything political. That does not leave very much for us to publish.” 

The only substantial change in censorship policy has been the gradual elimination, in the late 1990s, of the practice of inking out offending pages or ripping out whole sections of magazines. But the current system is hardly an improvement – indeed, it suggests an increase in censorial sophistication. Under laws dating back to the 1960s, each edition of every publication must be submitted in advance to the Press Scrutiny Board, an agency of the powerful Ministry of Information. If the censors object to any portion of a story, the entire layout must be redone to remove the offending material. Even after the censors have cleared the magazine, they must review all changes again after printing. Magazines must frequently scrap entire print runs because of last-minute objections from the censors. All this creates a powerful incentive for self-censorship. 

The censorship process is also said to be rife with bribery. Censors must often be bribed to clear each new edition for publication. Publishers say they must also turn over up to 20 percent of each print run to the censors, who sell them on the street. One editor told CPJ that his magazine and others even had to pick up the tab for a Press Scrutiny Board holiday trip. “Even without the political and censorship problems, they are making money from us,” said the publisher of a beauty magazine. “Every time we turn around we have to pay.”

Corruption and censorship notwithstanding, some outside observers see the emergence of semi-independent publications as a hopeful sign. “Burma is in transition from being…one of the most closed societies in the world,” said historian and Burma-watcher Martin Smith, who notes that business publications have “found a niche that didn’t exist before.”
It is difficult to sustain even such tempered optimism in conversation with journalists inside the country. Two monthly business publications, Dana (Prosperity) and Myanmar Dana were launched in the 1990s as part of the regime’s drive to privatize state-owned industries and attract foreign investors. These publications are among the highest-quality in Rangoon, but they operate within very narrow confines. “If we could report what we know, that would be one thing, but we can’t,” said one staffer. 

UNDER THE RADAR

The July 2001 issue of a journal called Sabai Phyu (White Jasmine) featured a cover quote from the social theorist Edward de Bono: “You can analyze the past, but you must design the future. Otherwise it may be no better than the past.” One editor said the quote probably escaped censorship only because the censors did not understand what it meant. 

The editor of a fashion magazine told CPJ that the list of banned topics he had encountered included everything from deposed dictators such as Slobodan Milosevic and Suharto, to floods, plane crashes, and train wrecks. Staffers knew not to write anything even remotely critical of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the ten-member regional alliance that Burma joined in 1997. “We are encouraged, though, to write anything bad about Thailand,” said the editor, noting that the two countries are currently embroiled in a border dispute. “But that could also change.” 

One reporter told me in detail of his travails in trying to write a story. In June 2001, a dam broke near Wundwin township, about 100 miles south of the city of Mandalay in central Burma. The barrier had silted over and become unstable due to poor maintenance and unusually heavy rains. When it finally gave way, some 200 villages were flooded. As many as 1,000 people died, some of them bitten by poisonous snakes that had been swept along by the deluge. 

International media reported the bare details of the disaster, but Burmese journalists mostly avoided it. However, one enterprising local reporter thought he had found a way to slip past the censors and into the story. He went to the flood area with his camera and notebook and documented relief efforts organized by the local people. “I took the angle that the Burmese people help one another in times of crisis and natural disaster,” the reporter recalled. “I didn’t say anything about the reason for the dam breaking or the maintenance problem.” Instead, he played up a spontaneous flood relief donation drive launched in Mandalay to help the victims and reflected on the Buddhist devotion that such charity implied.

His editor showed me the layout that was sent to the censors. It was a 16-page photo essay, with dramatic pictures of the flood’s aftermath and quotes from survivors, a disaster story straight out of Journalism 101. But the story never saw the light of day. “They censored it. I never got an explanation,” the writer said. That month, the magazine went to press 16 pages short of its normal length. Today, the article exists only in a handful of page proofs that were printed prior to the censor’s decision. 
The board even spiked a local film critic’s review of The Man in the Iron Mask because he quoted the Musketeer slogan, “One for all and all for one!” The censors apparently decided that “one” referred to Aung San Suu Kyi and “all” to the Burmese people.

Tin Maung Than, the editor of the journal, Thintbawa (Your Life), fled into exile with his family in late 2000. Tin Maung Than got into trouble for circulating photocopies of a rare speech by a government official who openly criticized Burma’s economic policies. The military also watched Than closely because he was once associated with Suu Kyi’s opposition political party, an affiliation he gave up many years ago to concentrate on writing. “Real journalism is not possible in Burma,” he said. “We have to say everything in general terms and let the readers feel the meaning for themselves.”

MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

In March 2000, The Myanmar Times opened for business. The weekly English language paper features snazzy graphics and good paper. It is published by an Australian entrepreneur named Ross Dunkley, who prepared for the job by serving as managing director of the Vietnam Investment Review, one of the first private magazines in that heavily censored country. With good color separation, quality paper, and a slick layout, The Myanmar Times is unlike any other publication sold on the streets of Rangoon. But the US$2 cover price is more than four times the cost of any other weekly journal and well beyond the means of most Burmese readers. A recently launched Burmese language version is also expensive by local standards.

The Myanmar Times is exempt from many of the rules that govern other publications in Rangoon, a fact that annoys its competitors to no end. For example, the Times is the only Burmese paper to have carried fairly straight coverage of the ongoing talks between Aung San Suu Kyi and members of the ruling junta. On occasion, Suu Kyi’s picture even appears on the inside pages of the paper. The Myanmar Times is also the only local paper to have mentioned recent releases of political prisoners and to have noted that the ILO recently accused the Burmese military of using forced labor in rural areas. 

Dunkley plugs his new weekly as the first “truly free press” in recent Burmese history. In fact, Dunkley’s enterprise is the brainchild of intelligence chief Lt.-Gen. Khin Nyunt, Secretary Number One of the ruling junta, and members of the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS), the government think tank over which Khin Nyunt presides. Earlier this year, the Times even carried a rare interview with Khin Nyunt.

The Myanmar Times is a key part of Khin Nyunt’s strategy to rehabilitate the junta’s battered international image, says Bertil Lintner, the Swedish journalist based in Thailand who has covered Burmese affairs for 20 years. Lintner and other analysts believe that Khin Nyunt disagrees with the Information Ministry’s heavy-handed approach to propaganda. An influential OSS officer named Col. Thein Swe is also frequently quoted in The Myanmar Times and appears to be actively involved in running the paper. When the Times was launched, Thein Swe told Asiaweek that the paper would be “different, more flexible” than other papers.

For his part, Dunkley downplays his paper’s obvious closeness to the regime. “Officially we go through military scrutiny, but the reality is that we have an amicable dialogue, and 95 percent [of the paper] is not subject to censorship,” Dunkley told Agence France-Presse earlier this year. “I just report the facts,” he said. When reached by phone in Rangoon, Dunkley refused to be interviewed, instead referring all questions to an assistant who subsequently could not be reached despite repeated calls. 

AND IN THE END

The net effect of years of isolation and censorship has been to starve the Burmese people of news access that is taken for granted in most countries. By comparison, even China is an open society.

As the world moves toward a more open global information society, the people of Burma are stuck in the past. Many of the social and political problems that plague Burma – ethnic tensions, rampant corruption, poverty – are worsened by the lack of information and debate on the issues. The regime apparently fears that any media liberalization could provoke a political transition in which it would risk loss of power and subsequent reprisals. 

Whatever happens to the current regime, one lasting legacy of military rule will be the generals’ steadfast prohibition on press freedom. For almost 40 years, ever since Ne Win staged his coup in 1962, the country has been run as the parochial playground of whatever band of officers is in power. The result has been the depletion not only of the country’s financial capital but its intellectual capital as well. Journalists have become isolated from their peers in other countries. They are unable to study their craft and censorship has stripped the media of any critical edge. These will be hard patterns to break, even if the regime is replaced. 
Recovery will be a long process. “If we were allowed to, we could set up newspapers tomorrow because we have the presses,” said a frail former editor who once spent seven years in solitary confinement after he was arrested for his writing. “But where would we find the journalists? I am one of the last…who remembers what it was like to have real newspapers in this country.”


This article is adapted from a report prepared for the Committee to Protect Journalists.


ENDNOTES

1 Attacks on the Press 2001, Committee to Protect Journalists, New York, 2001. 
2 In this and many other references in this work, the author has been asked to shield those he spoke with from possible official reprisal by not revealing their identities or details of their publications. 
3 The SLORC changed the official name of the country from Burma to Myanmar after seizing power but many observers, CPJ included, respect the wishes of many Burmese and continue to use the country’s traditional English name. While Ne Win was replaced, it is widely believed that he continues to wield substantial influence behind the scenes.