Day: November 24, 2021

Nearly 10 months into Myanmar’s military coup, the country’s media is striving to keep reporting while navigating arrests and harassment from the junta.

Thousands of protesters have refused to accept military rule, including ousted politicians, activists, religious leaders, and others, and fighting has broken out between junta and local defense forces.

But local media trying to cover that opposition come up against obstacles.

Early on, the junta revoked the licences of five media outlets. It was a decision that “shook” the industry, said Thomas Kean, editor-in-chief at the English-language news outlet Frontier Myanmar.

“Since then, more have been banned, more journalists have been arrested and it’s been downhill since then, gradually more difficult, month by month,” said Kean.

 

One of his own team—American journalist Danny Fenster—was jailed for nearly six months.

 

Byond revoking licenses and arrests, the military cut access to internet and amended a telecommunications law to allow for prison sentences.

 

The junta has said it is acting to bring stability. Military spokesperson Zaw Min Tun has previously said that the military “respects press freedom” and arrests only journalists who incite unrest.

 

History of repression

 

Rights groups including Reporters Without Borders (RSF) say the coup has put media freedom back a decade. But some say the country never enjoyed real press freedom, even under Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy government.

 

Under the last period of military rule, the country was deemed one of the most censored places globally. Access to independent news websites was blocked, visas to foreign media were seldom granted and the few privately owned media operations had to submit content for review before publication.

 

Those restrictions started to ease in 2011, when Thein Sein was elected as the first civilian Prime Minister in nearly half a century.

 

His early policies relaxed restrictions and abolished the pre-publication censorship regulation.

 

Around that time Kean was working for Myanmar Times, one of the country’s oldest privately owned English-language newspapers.

 

“From around mid-2010 you could get the sense that, it was still heavily censored, but you could feel the censorship was getting lighter. For the standards of the time, a fair bit of [political] debate was getting into newspapers,” Kean told VOA from Melbourne, Australia.

 

The relaxing of media rules had an immediate impact. Myanmar showed a slow but steady improvement on RSF’s annual press freedom index, moving from 151 in 2013—its first appearance—to a record high of 131 in 2017. The index scores countries on media rights, with 1 being the most free. Myanmar in early 2021 ranked 140.

 

As the censorship laws were scrapped, Myanmar saw a wave of privately owned media outlets forming. “2015 was peak of print advertising market,” Kean said.

 

The following year, major telecom companies began operating in Myanmar.

 

However, in a trend seen globally, the expansion of internet services had a negative impact on the print industry, which saw a decline in ad revenue.

 

Aye Chan Naing, co-founder of the independent media outlet Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), told VOA those issues persist today.

 

“The business, and streaming, it’s also become threatening for independent journalism—like, the online Google, Facebook, all the advertising income, it’s going into the digital marketing, and media are not really surviving,” he said.

 

While censorship was eased during this period, reporters still risked arrest and restrictions.

 

In 2017, Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were jailed for more than 500 days over their reporting on the Myanmar military’s massacre of members of the Rohingya in Rakhine state.

 

But the ramping up of arrests since the coup has led outlets like Frontier Myanmar and DVB to change how—and where—they report.

 

Media in exile

 

One of the biggest changes said Naing, who operates DVB from exile, is that reporters have to rely heavily on numerous sources.

 

“The [biggest] challenge is we have to depend on our sources, second hand or third hand. It’s very hard for us to be on the ground. And we have to depend on witnesses,” he said.

At least three DVB journalists were detained in Myanmar for several months, until being released as part of a mass amnesty in October.

 

A further three fled to Thailand but were arrested and given suspended prison sentences for illegal entry. They have since relocated to a third country.

 

The obstacles and difficulty in reporting has made social media and citizen journalists vital, said Kean.

 

“To some extent media organizations can operate remotely, but we can’t send reporters around the country like we used to. It’s very difficult to verify exactly what’s happening,” he said.

 

The Yangon-based Frontier Myanmar launched in 2015, publishing feature-style journalism targeting English speakers.

 

But shortly after February’s coup, it was forced to cease the print edition.

 

“We were worried about the safety of our distribution staff and we shifted focus to breaking news,” Kean said. “We didn’t want to get distracted by trying to write features for a magazine, because that wasn’t the kind of information people needed at the time.”

 

After an outbreak of COVID-19 among the paper’s team, and a disappearing print audience, Kean said it didn’t make sense to resume publishing for the moment.

 

In an email to subscribers last month, Frontier Myanmar reassured readers that the publication had only temporarily suspended its services.

 

“It’s obviously not something we wanted to do, but we think it’s in the best interests of the Frontier team and necessary for our long-term survival,” the email read.

 

The detention of the paper’s managing editor, Fenster, also had an impact.

 

Fenster, 37, was freed last week after nearly six months in prison on accusations that he was still working for Myanmar Now, an outlet banned by the junta earlier this year. The journalist had resigned from that company months before the coup.

Kean said Frontier Myanmar were “incredibly relieved” that Fenster was finally released.

 

“We were in the dark as to what was going on, in terms of the efforts to have Danny released. Until he got on the plane and left Myanmar airspace, we were still not celebrating,” Kean said.

 

However, at least 37 journalists remain in detention in Myanmar, according to Reporting ASEAN, an organization documenting the crackdown.

 

 

Source: Voice of America

Beijing’s pledge this week to avoid dominance in the South China Sea comes too late to convince smaller Southeast Asian claimants to the strategic waterway after years of Chinese expansion, experts say.

 

President Xi Jinping made the pledge Monday at a virtual summit marking the 30th anniversary of ASEAN-China dialogue. He told leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations that Beijing would avoid “bullying” smaller countries over their competing claims to the 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea.

 

China’s representation at ASEAN events typically falls to Premier Li Keqiang, but this time, Xi addressed the Southeast Asian countries and said “China will never seek hegemony, still less bully smaller countries,” according to a Tuesday report by Beijing’s state-run China Daily website.

 

China vies with Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam for sovereignty over parts of the resource-rich sea, which stretches from Hong Kong to Borneo. The Chinese government has conducted landfilling of tiny islets in the sea, in some cases for military use, alarming the other countries.

 

The Chinese navy, coast guard as well as its fishing fleets often antagonize other claimants, all militarily weaker than China, by passing through the disputed maritime tracts prized for fisheries and subterranean fossil fuel reserves.

 

Southeast Asia reaction

 

Xi’s comments have been met with skepticism among ASEAN member states because Southeast Asian leaders have heard similar language before, said Jay Batongbacal, international maritime affairs professor at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City.

 

Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam are members of ASEAN, which negotiates as a bloc over external trade and security matters, including South China Sea conduct.

 

“The rest of the region, of course, won’t take it at face value,” Batongbacal said, referring especially to Southeast Asia. “It’s the actions of China that raise these concerns, even though China has been giving that kind of assurance even before.”

 

China has no intention of quitting its positions in the sea, said Alexander Vuving, professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Hawaii. Xi had told former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2015 that China would not militarize the sea but did anyway, Vuving said.

 

Vietnam would not trust China’s latest comments, he said, while the Philippines and Indonesia will find it suspicious. Indonesia does not vie with China over islets, but the two sides have disagreed over sea lanes.

 

Vietnam has sparred with China over disputed islands since the 1970s, leading to deadly clashes in 1974 and 1988. Malaysia and the Philippines have spoken out over the past year.

 

Earlier this month, Chinese coast guard vessels blocked Philippine resupply boats bound for Second Thomas Shoal, a Philippine-occupied atoll, and fired water cannons.

 

“We abhor the recent event in the Ayungin Shoal and view with grave concern other similar developments,” Duterte said Monday during his virtual participation in the ASEAN summit. “This does not speak well of the relations between our nations and our partnership.”

 

“The problem is that message [from China] becomes more laughable to a lot of its neighbors with every passing year,” said Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative under the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

 

“You look at the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait, the border with India,” Poling said, referring to potential military flash points involving Beijing. “It’s getting harder for the ASEAN members who aren’t involved in the disputes to still believe this Chinese line.”

 

Why Xi spoke out

 

Regional experts like Eduardo Araral, associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s public policy school, say that having Xi take the unusual step of personally addressing the fraught issue of hegemony in the South China Sea before ASEAN member states was “the logical thing to do” for a burgeoning global power.

 

“When you’re a small country and you border with a big country, you get nervous when that big country grows very big, so I guess for the past 30 years, this is the utmost question on the minds of leaders of ASEAN,” Araral said. China has the world’s third strongest armed forces after the United States and Russia.

 

“So, when [fellow ASEAN leaders] have this opportunity to meet with President Xi Jinping, they probably expect him to make those assurances,” he said.

 

Vuving of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, however, said Xi may have made his hegemony comment in case Southeast Asian governments are wondering whether Xi’s recent meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden — or the AUKUS military technology sharing deal — could have altered China’s geopolitical posture in the region.

 

AUKUS, a security deal between the United States, Britain and Australia designed to contain China’s expansion, is opposed by Beijing.

 

Between the AUKUS rollout and last week’s China -U.S. virtual bilateral, Vuving speculated that the Chinese may have “felt that they need to reassure their Southeast Asian neighbors a little bit.”

 

While China is expected to “spread its sphere of influence” throughout the region without risking trade through any blockage of sea lanes, Araral said, Beijing might also try to displace the influence of Washington, which maintains a regular naval presence and sells arms in the region.

 

Multiple U.S. administrations have declared their support for a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” which views “Beijing’s claims to offshore resources across most of the South China Sea [as] completely unlawful, as is its campaign of bullying to control them.”

 

ASEAN members without South China Sea claims are Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore and Thailand.

 

Source: Voice of America