By CPJ
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Esther Htusan is no
longer safe to report from her home country, Myanmar. The Associated Press
reporter fled the country late last year after being threatened for her
critical reporting on various topics that authorities deem sensitive, from the
ethnic Rohingya refugee exodus, the military's controversial counterinsurgency
operations in Rakhine State, to State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi's handling of
the crisis.
Htusan came under heavy official fire in November after
the government perceived she misrepresented a Suu Kyi speech that addressed
issues of illegal immigration, terrorism, and global stability. Amid a furor, a
prominent Suu Kyi supporter made a death threat against Htusan on his personal
Facebook page, which had over 300,000 followers at the time, Associated Press
reporters, who are familiar with the case but who requested anonymity, told
CPJ.
Before that, an unidentified man followed her home one
evening, shouting her name from the darkness in front of her apartment in
downtown Yangon. Htusan left Myanmar for Thailand in December due to fears for
her security. In recent days, the journalists with whom CPJ spoke said, men who
they believe to be plainclothes police visited her apartment building in Yangon
and queried neighbors about her whereabouts.
"She's not going back [to Myanmar] any time soon,"
one of the reporters said.
Myanmar's media, both local and foreign, are under heavy
assault as security measures used to suppress the press under military rule are
reactivated under Suu Kyi's quasi-democratic regime, several journalists who
cover the country told CPJ. It marks a dramatic reversal in recent press
freedom gains and augurs ill for the country's delicate transition from
military to elected rule.
Authorities are increasingly abusing various draconian
colonial and military era laws to repress reporting on a widening range of
topics. Many journalists and activists had hoped the laws would be amended or
scrapped when Suu Kyi came to power with a strong electoral mandate to push
democratic change through liberal reforms.
Nowhere is that backsliding more apparent than in the
continued pretrial detention of local Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe
Oo, who were charged
under the colonial era Official Secrets Act. The two journalists were arrested
on December 12 in Yangon after receiving documents from police that authorities
said after their arrest were secret.
Who were charged https://lnkd.in/eTzxcTe
Reuters said in a recent special report, "Massacre in Myanmar,"
that Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo's arrests were more likely prompted by their
investigative reporting on a mass killing of Rohingya men by Buddhist villagers
and Myanmar troops at the Rakhine State village of Inn Din on September 2.
Special report: https://lnkd.in/etZjSiD
In response to international news reports on the mass grave, Myanmar
military chief Min Aung Hlaing acknowledged last month that his troops and
villagers were behind the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslims, whose bodies were
found in a mass grave at Inn Din, according to news reports.
News Report NY_times: https://lnkd.in/e8Xyxww
News report Washington Post: https://lnkd.in/erfUe26
President Htin Kyaw and Suu Kyi have both defended the
Reuters reporters' pre-trial detentions, underscoring the notion that Suu Kyi's
elected government and the powerful autonomous military now see eye-to-eye on
the perceived need to roll back earlier allowances for media freedoms and
actively suppress news that casts the government and military in a bad light.
Earlier press freedom concerns center on charges filed
against journalists and others under Article 66(d) of the Telecommunications Act, a broad and vague
provision that allows for two-year prison sentences for online defamation. Many
reporters were held for long periods in pre-trial detention while
investigations and court proceedings were ongoing, CPJ research shows.
Article 66(d): https://lnkd.in/eTpXWq5
CPJ research: https://lnkd.in/e5Dr2nY
Research by
Free Expression Myanmar, a local nongovernmental organization, shows that
prosecutions under the law had a 100 percent conviction rate in the period
spanning 2016-17. CPJ is aware of several journalists now face pending charges
under the draconian provision, which has been used both by Suu Kyi's elected
government and the autonomous military to silence and intimidate critics. https://lnkd.in/eHqyjrs
But many sensed a wider crackdown was underway when three
local journalists--Thein Zaw with The Irrawaddy, and Aye Nai and Pyae Phong
Aung at the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB)--were arrested and detained on June 26 in the country's
northeastern Shan State. All three were held on charges under the 1908 Unlawful
Association Act, a provision used against journalists during military rule to
discourage reporting on the nation's various ethnic armed conflicts. https://lnkd.in/eUGwZ9F
The Myanmar military dropped the charges and the three
reporters were released
on September 1, but an intimidating precedent was set. "I am sure every
journalist feels discouraged and unsafe since last year, when our reporter and
DVB reporters were arrested by the military," said Kyaw Zwa Moe, editor of
The Irrawaddy's English-language edition. "The arrest of the Reuters
journalists has only made the situation worse." https://lnkd.in/eBR48ND
The government's repressive focus now is on censoring
coverage of western Rakhine State, from where over 680,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees have fled military
violence into neighboring Bangladesh since August 25 last year. Arakan Rohingya
Salvation Army (ARSA) insurgent attacks on security force outposts that day set
the cycle of violence in motion. https://lnkd.in/eTsnXQq
The government has strictly barred reporters from the
state's northern reaches--apart from a handful of tightly stage-managed press
tours--in the name of security. Most of the reporting on the allegations of
rape, summary executions and other abuses has been sourced through refugee and
victim interviews in camps in Bangladesh.
Myanmar's government has denied nearly all the
allegations, including recent reports of the discovery of mass graves in
northern Rakhine State. Most recently, authorities denied an AP report of five mass graves
that the news agency had identified through interviews with survivors and
time-stamped cellphone videos. https://lnkd.in/et-6h3t
Authorities have threatened, but not yet filed, charges
over the report and demanded
the news agency issue a correction and apology. https://lnkd.in/enP6uzZ
Local journalists who try to cover Rakhine State's murky
ethnic politics and conflicts are often the ones who are terrorized. Kyaw Lin,
a local reporter who runs a news service known as Roma Time, was stabbed twice in the back by
an unknown assailant while riding on a motorcycle in Rakhine's Sittwe township
on December 20. https://lnkd.in/eaJ7gHr
After spending five days in a Sittwe hospital to treat
severe wounds that caused blood-clotting, he moved to Yangon due to fears for
safety, he told CPJ. Over a month later, Kyaw Lin says that authorities have
made only token efforts to apprehend his assailants, who he believes did linked
to ethnic Rakhine nationalists want to silence his reporting on the illegal
drug trade.
Kyaw Lin said he continues to receive threats on his
telephone and social media, with one anonymous Facebook poster recently writing,
"You may live this time but won't next time." With those threats, he
now keeps a low profile in Yangon and said he does not intend to return to
Rakhine, where he has a wife and young child, in the foreseeable future.
"We [journalists] are living in a dark time," he told CPJ.
The situation is also deteriorating for foreign reporters
and their local sources. Bertil Lintner, a Thailand-based reporter who was on a
government blacklist for nearly 30 years during military rule, told CPJ he was
trailed and surveilled by Special Branch police during a reporting trip to the
country in late December.
In northern Kachin state, where the government continues
to fight against ethnic insurgents, authorities took Lintner's picture and
later questioned one of his news sources about their meeting. The officials
also interrogated the driver of a UNHCR official whom Lintner interviewed, he
said. Lintner said it was the first time since he resumed reporting from the
country in 2013 that he was overtly followed by officials.
"They're trying to intimidate local people against
speaking to foreign reporters," said Lintner, who said that for the first
time since 2013, he was required by Suu Kyi's Foreign Ministry to provide a
detailed itinerary and list of proposed interviewees and news topics before
receiving a media visa. Previously, media visas were administered solely by the
Ministry of Information.
Other foreign journalists told CPJ that they have faced
difficulties renewing and receiving media visas, prompting some to report under
pseudonyms to avoid possible denial of their applications over critical
reporting. Kayleigh Long, a freelance reporter who contributes to various
international outlets, told CPJ she recently decided to quit the country
altogether rather than put her fixers and contacts at risk.
"The stakes for the local people who help us do our
jobs is high--I never want to be responsible for a fixer or driver being
jailed, but that's unfortunately being seen as a higher possibility these
days," said Long, who recently moved from Yangon to Bangkok. "To me,
being based there is no longer worth it."