Attacks on the Press - Committee to Protect Journalists

attacks on the press in 2009asia: burmadiscovered the detainees had sent news, images, or videos of the protests over theInternet to overseas news organizations critical of the regime.In April, CPJ ranked Burma as the worst place in the world to be a bloggerbecause of the extreme measures the government had implemented to curb Internetfreedom. Private Internet penetration is very small—only about 1 percent,according to the Internet research group OpenNet Initiative—so most citizensaccess the Internet in cybercafés. Authorities heavily regulate those cafés, requiringthem, for example, to enforce censorship rules. The government, which shutdown the Internet altogether during a popular uprising in 2007, has the capabilityto monitor e-mail and other communication and to block users from viewingWeb sites of political opposition groups, according to OpenNet.CPJ’s assessment was also motivated by the continued detention of bloggersNay Phone Latt, who was sentenced in 2008 to 20 and a half years on violationsof the Electronic and Video acts, and Maung Thura, who was initially sentencedto 59 years in part for communicating with exiled dissidents and giving interviewsto foreign media.Maung Thura, who maintained a blog known as Zarganar-windoor, whichloosely translates as “Tweezer’s Outlook,” had made comments to the BBCcritical of the government’s initial response to Cyclone Nargis. In January, familymembers were denied visitation rights after they had traveled more than560 miles (900 kilometers) from Rangoon to Myitk Yina Prison in Kachinstate. In early 2009, a Rangoon divisional court cut eight and a half years fromNay Phone Latt’s sentence and 24 years from Maung Thura’s term. The actionscame just weeks before a U.N. human rights official was scheduled to visit thecountry.Burma remained one of the most oppressive places in the world to be a printjournalist. The Ministry of Information’s Press Scrutiny and Registration Board(PSRB) continued to review all articles before publication and extended its reachto Web-based formats. The time-consuming and often arbitrary process forcednearly all privately held news publications in Burma to publish on either a weeklyor monthly basis.Burmese journalists who met with CPJ in 2009 said there were more than50 general newsweeklies and as many as 130 others covering sports and otherinnocuous topics. There were no independently run broadcast operations inthe country, but journalists estimated that a large majority of the populationopenly listened to broadcasts from the BBC and the U.S. government-fundedVoice of America.The visiting journalists said editors used two different pencils to edit copy:Blue pencils were used for line edits, while red pencils indicated that phrases ortopics were forbidden by the government’s censorship board. That censorship wasstrictly enforced for news stories that referred to the first anniversary of CycloneNargis, which left 140,000 dead or missing and affected an estimated 2.4 millionBurmese citizens, according to U.N. estimates. The exile-run Mizzima newsagency quoted Burmese editors and journalists as saying that the PSRB had rejectedmaterials for publication that recounted the severity of the storm’s destructionor showed victims still suffering from the storm’s impact.“We cannot be critical of the government’s efforts on recovery,” said theeditor of one weekly journal who was quoted in a Mizzima news report. “Ourstories that say that victims are still suffering are rejected. We must publishonly optimistic reports.” The state-run media simultaneously ran several newsstories that portrayed positively the government-led rehabilitation work in cyclone-hitregions.On August 21, the PSRB formally banned and withdrew the publishinglicense for the weekly news journal Phoenix over violations of censorship rulesand regulations, according to a Mizzima report. Phoenix’s publisher, known asMaj. Mar-J, had earlier written satirical articles about the regime’s radical decisionto move the national capital from Rangoon to Naypyitaw, a newly builtand highly fortified center just outside the central town of Pyinmana.Foreign reporters were also targeted for harassment. On May 7, the governmentexpelled two U.S. journalists, Jerry Redfern and Karen Coates, who werein the country to teach a PSRB-approved course on feature writing and photography.They were arrested without explanation in the central city of Mandalay,transported under guard on an overnight train to Rangoon, and deported withoutcharge to Thailand. “They asked us nothing, told us nothing, searched nothing,took nothing,” the two said in a prepared statement released after landing inBangkok.The regime also threatened those who published critical articles in prominentforeign news publications. On September 9, U Win Tin, former journalist andcurrent National League for Democracy co-leader, wrote an op-ed in The WashingtonPost titled “An Election the Burmese People Don’t Need,” which openlycriticized the military government’s plan to hold voting before achieving nationalreconciliation with the political opposition and while detaining more than 2,000political prisoners.U Win Tin was detained and interrogated on September 12 but releasedwithout charge the same day. A former editor-in-chief of the Hanthawati dailynewspaper, he served 19 years of a 20-year prison sentence on various charges,including inciting treason against the state for writing and distributing pamphletsduring antigovernment uprisings in 1988 that were crushed by the military. Hewas released in November 2008 after suffering two heart attacks in prison. Internationaladvocacy groups campaigned for years for his release.120121