A recent advance should not detract from broader,
troubling realities in the country.
By Luke Hunt
This week, headlines were focused on a surprising
decision by a Yangon court in favor of two jailed Reuters reporters in what has
become a landmark case for press freedom in Myanmar. But while the decision
itself might be encouraging, it nonetheless masks the real trouble with the case
itself and what it says about the state of the country on this score.
It is worth recalling the big picture here: that the two
Reuters correspondents were initially detained simply for documenting a
massacre that the Myanmar government continues to deny or downplay under the
leadership of former Nobel laureate and State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi.
Hearings to decide whether Reuters reporters Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28,
will be charged under the colonial-era Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum
penalty of 14 years in prison, have been underway since January.
The pair had been working on an investigation into the
killings of 10 Rohingya men and boys in Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine state during
the military crackdown, which the government justified as a means of rooting
out potential terrorists. Their investigations uncovered photos of the 10
kneeling with their hands tied before being executed, and a mass grave where
they were buried.
The fact that they have met this fate for simply trying
to uncover the truth is not surprising but nonetheless deeply troubling:
Myanmar has maintained its policy of denying the Muslim Rohingya any form of
recognition, despite having lived in the predominantly Buddhist country for
generations (indeed, the word “Rohingya” is frowned upon, and the government,
including Suu Kyi, prefer the word “Bengali”).
Indications so far suggest that, as expected, the case
does not really have much in the way of a legal foundation. Last month, for
instance, a police officer, a witness for the prosecution, testified the pair
had been set up by Police Brigadier General Tin Ko Ko.
But the real troubling fact was that though that in and
of itself should have warranted a dismissal of the case, Captain Moe Yan Naing
has been pilloried by his seniors and his family evicted from their home, which
was a government house. His family has been denied access to him after being
told he is being held in a “safe place.”
The decision to proceed with prosecution followed an
announcement that four army officers and three soldiers were sentenced to 10
years of hard labor for their roles in the Rohingya atrocities, and expelled
from the military. Details of their actual involvement remain sketchy, and
given the scale of allegations and the exodus of some 700,000 people into
Bangladesh, legal action against the perpetrators to date seems paltry at best.
Instead, the focus remains on the messenger.
Some 163 civil groups have signed an open letter to
President Win Myint asking him to immediately release the two reporters accused
of possessing secret government papers in what they called; “obviously an
unreasonable case.”
“We believe that this is not a fair case … What we all
want is truth and justice,” Thatoe Aung, a human rights activist who helped
organize the petition to the president, said in a Reuters dispatch.
Western nations, press freedom advocates, and senior
officials with the United Nations have also called for the release of the two
Reuters reporters. The International Criminal Court is deciding if it has
jurisdiction over the “deportation” of Rohingya to Bangladesh and whether this
constitutes a crime against humanity. The U.S. government is also conducting
its own investigations into alleged atrocities, including the allegations of
murder, rape and torture; that could also be used to prosecute the Myanmar
military.
All this is worth keeping in mind even when occasional
advances might be celebrated. That includes the one this week, where a judge in
the case made a surprising announcement that he would indeed accept the police
captain’s evidence rather than throwing it out.
The decision was rightly noted as a surprising and rare
display of the independence of the judiciary in Myanmar, and an advance in
favor of the journalists. But that should not in any way detract from the
broader, sobering reality that the trial’s occurrence itself is a troubling
development for press freedom in Myanmar, and speaks volumes about the major
challenges it faces in the treatment of the Rohingya population and how it
treats journalists, foreign and local. As Human Rights Watch recently noted,
there is little cause for celebration when it comes to press freedom in Myanmar
amid the country’s backsliding.