Imprisonment of Burmese Reuters Journalists Sparks Controversy on Journalistic Suppression

According to a Straits Times article on 11 September, the UN has reported that Myanmar is “conducting a ‘political campaign’ against independent journalism”, in response to the jailing of two Reuters journalists from Myanmar that reported on the massacre of Rohingya Muslims. These two journalists (Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone) were jailed for seven years after being convicted of violating Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act by reporting on the recent Rohingya crisis. 

The UN statement as reported by the Straits Times seems to point towards a quashing of democratic sentiments & the potential for free journalistic approaches to presenting facts on such crises in Myanmar. This article also highlights the fear and dissent among Myanmar’s journalist population, as they are allegedly staging protests and beginning online campaigns to push back against this unfairly harsh ruling. 

This was exceptionally interesting to me, and I attempted to corroborate this report according to the list of Burmese news sources provided on our course site. Unfortunately, more than half (4/7) of these news sites no longer exist, which may be another symptom of local government attempts to crack down on journalists reporting beyond what the government is comfortable revealing. The only site where I managed to find some coverage of this fiasco was on The Irrawaddy, which highlights the fact that local journalists, human rights activists, and legal professionals are attempting to repeal the Official Secrets Act. According to the report on The Irrawaddy, “The Official Secrets Act was enacted by the country’s former British colonial rulers in 1923 to criminalize the sharing of almost any kind of information held by the government.” In their subsequent paragraphs, the journalist emphasizes that such an act only further contributes to a lack of freedom of expression & a further enabling of the military and government to erase traces of their own wrongdoings by suppressing any conversation about it.

From these articles, it is clear that press freedom is becoming a pressing issue both in Myanmar and globally, as in the modern age of internet and connectivity, it can be easy to flesh out these disjunctions between local and international news coverage, thus highlighting areas in which the government is clearly exercising its ability to censor local journalists or activists. It is crucial to examine the ways in which the state exercises its censorial powers, and to analyze its rationale for limiting and carefully curating narratives on the nation that make its way into national journalism.

Other Sources:
https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/calls-mount-official-secrets-act-am…
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-journalists-explainer/facts-o…