Whether you know it as Burma or Myanmar, the story is the same in the secretive Asian state: A military dictatorship out for nothing but its own power, represses all of its people's freedoms and rights — including a free press.
The crisis in Burma might be considered off-topic for this blog, but as long as dictators anywhere go unchallenged, dictators everywhere can breathe a little easier. I usually concentrate on the dictatorship in Havana, but at the end of the day, it's all part of the same struggle for freedom.
And in Burma, some of the bravest on the front lines — or in the prisons — are her journalists.
Reporters Without Borders has the background:
As the military junta threatens to crack down on demonstrations by monks and opponents, six Burmese journalists are in jail in the country. Photo-journalist Win Saing was arrested on 28 August while taking photos of activists in the National League for Democracy (NLD) making offerings to monks in Rangoon. After being taken to the Kyaik-ka-san detention centre, he is currently being held at the police station in Thanlyin near Rangoon. He is in danger, as are hundreds of other people arrested in recent weeks, of being mal-treated.Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association call for his release, along with that of five other imprisoned journalists.
Burma’s best known editor, U Win Tin, age 77, has been imprisoned since July 1989 in a special cell of the notorious Insein Prison in Rangoon. Sentenced to 20 years in prison for anti-government propaganda, he was one of the organisers of the demonstrations in 1988. In 2007, he launched an appeal for resistance to the military regime which imprisoned him. “All political prisoners should be released and the democratic parliament recalled. We should not drop these demands”.
U Thaung Sein, photo-journalist, and Ko Moe Htun, leader writer on the religious magazine Dhamah-Yate, were sentenced in March 2006, to three years in prison for taking photos of the new capital Naypyidaw, a mysterious city rising out of the earth at the whim of the chief general of the military junta. At their trial, the judge did not even bother to call witnesses or to let the two journalists speak in their defence.
Monywa Aung-Shin was arrested in September 2000. Former editorial manager of the magazine Sar-maw-khung (the literary world) banned in 1990, he became during the 1990s one of the publicists of the LND. He was sentenced to seven years in prison under Article 17 (20) of emergency legislation. Ne Min, a former contributor to the BCC, was arrested for having sent news reports to foreign-based media.
Read more of what RSF has to say, here.
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