When Myanmar’s government defends the harsh sentence
given to two courageous reporters who
exposed mass murder, it breaks a
fundamental promise of democracy: the rule of law based on facts.
By Stephen J. Adler (Opinion – nytimes)
Mr. Adler, the president and editor in chief
of Reuters, sits on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
*
In Myanmar, as everywhere, facts have power. It was the
gruesome facts uncovered by two of our reporters for Reuters, Wa Lone and Kyaw
Soe Oo, that led to their being framed, arrested, tried and — this month —
handed a draconian seven-year prison sentence. Last week, Myanmar’s civilian
leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, resolutely ignored the facts and vigorously
defended the unjust convictions. With the United Nations General Assembly
gathering soon, it’s time to harness the facts to secure our reporters’
freedom.
Here are the facts:
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority based in Rakhine
State, in western Myanmar, a majority-Buddhist country. Last year, a military
crackdown sent more than 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to refugee camps in
Bangladesh. The United Nations has accused the Myanmar government of ethnic
cleansing; Myanmar says its operations in Rakhine were in response to attacks
on security forces by Rohingya insurgents.
Last December, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were investigating
the role of the military and the police in the deaths of 10 Rohingya men and
boys in a Rakhine village; a village elder had given our reporters photographs
documenting the mass murder. One showed 10 men and boys kneeling in a field;
another showed them in a mass grave, hacked and shot to death. Dozens of people
who had been near the murders described what had happened, as well as the
burning and looting of Rohingya homes by security forces. Being skilled
reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo interviewed everyone they could: not just
the fleeing Muslims but also Buddhists, the police and other security forces.
The shocking evidence they found was indisputable. This
is the virtue of on-the-ground journalism practiced by reporters who speak the
local language, follow strict rules of independence and objectivity, and know
their beats. This type of reporting, which is at the heart of Reuters’s work in
the 166 countries where we operate, can provide proof of facts in ways that
punditry or secondhand accounts simply cannot. Indeed, the Myanmar authorities
were forced to admit that the massacre had occurred, even as they prosecuted
our journalists for uncovering it.
Their arrest was an obvious setup, aimed at unmasking
Reuters’s sources and deterring us from publishing the account of the massacre.
Intimidation was severe: The reporters were hooded and brought to a secret
interrogation center, where they were kept handcuffed, continuously
interrogated, threatened and denied sleep. Officers forced Kyaw Soe Oo to kneel
for hours when they found the photographs of the killings on his phone. Two
weeks passed before their families, lawyers or we at Reuters knew where they
were. Once we made contact with them and completed their reporting, we
published the explosive
story, with the reporters’ full support.
For eight months, with our reporters still behind bars, a
court in Yangon heard what passed for a prosecution case. The arresting officer
testified that he had burned his records. Another witness read notes he had
scribbled on his hand so that he could, by his own admission, remember how to
testify.
Then came the unexpected, heroic moment when one police
officer testified that a brigadier general had ordered an inferior officer to
plant papers on Wa Lone and arrest him. Despite that testimony, the prosecution
continued; the officer was himself arrested and sentenced to a year in prison.
International observers have seen the farcical trial for
what it was: an attempt to punish our journalists and dissuade other reporters
from covering events in Rakhine State. Diplomats from many nations, including
the United States, Britain, Canada, Norway and Australia, have spoken out
against the lack of due process and the rule of law, and the stifling of a free
press in a country that has been promised democracy.
But so far, global outrage hasn’t changed anything. Ms.
Aung San Suu Kyi claimed that the trial had nothing to do with press freedom
and that the convictions were legitimate under the Official Secrets Act, a
colonial-era law that bars the collection of secret documents to aid an enemy.
The overwhelming evidence is , rather, that the police planted the documents in
question on our journalists, whose only intent was to report truthfully.
So, now what?
With the world’s nations preparing for the opening this
week of the United Nations General Assembly, it is time to affirm not only the
facts of this case but the value of facts themselves — to declare our certainty
that some things are true and others are not. We must reject the cynical and
dangerous idea that everyone is entitled to their own facts. We can see where
this has gotten us in Myanmar and elsewhere. And we need to reaffirm the
essential role of a free press in uncovering facts.
Journalists, being people, are imperfect. But journalism,
done right, serves a high public purpose. It produces transparency in markets,
holds governments and businesses to account, gives people tools to make
well-informed decisions, uncovers wrongdoing, inspires reforms, and tells true
and remarkable stories that move and inspire. The United Nations must insist
that the suppression of a free press contradicts the very nature of democracy
and cannot be tolerated. And other multinational institutions, alongside
governments, should make it forcefully clear to Myanmar’s leaders that Wa Lone
and Kyaw Soe Oo must be freed.