Government under Suu Kyi cracks down on journalists
When five Myanmar journalists were sentenced to decade-long prison terms for reporting the alleged existence of a military-run chemical weapons factory in Myanmar a few years ago, Aung San Suu Kyi — then an opposition lawmaker — condemned the punishments as excessive.
The journalists had been convicted for violating the nation’s Official Secrets Act — the same law being leveled against two Reuters reporters facing 14 years behind bars.
“In a democratic system, security should be in balance with freedom,” Suu Kyi said in 2014. When “the rights of journalists (to report) are being controlled,” the notion of democratic reform is “questionable.”
Three and a half years on, the thinking of Suu Kyi, who now heads the government, apparently has changed dramatically. Rather than champion the press, she has presided over an administration whose courts have aggressively pursued legal charges against dozens of journalists, along with other attempts to suppress and discredit the media.
Police arrested Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo on Dec. 12 while they were investigating the massacre of 10 ethnic Rohingya Muslims in the village of Inn Din by the Myanmar military and Buddhist villagers. The Reuters story included photos provided by a Buddhist village elder of the 10 captives lined up in a row, kneeling, and later of their bloodied bodies in a shallow grave. The reporters further supported their account with testimony from Buddhist villagers who confessed to burying bodies and killing Muslims, and also from security personnel and the paramilitary police themselves.
But when former U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson met Nobel Peace prize laureate Suu Kyi this month and brought up the case against the Reuters reporters, it “brought almost an explosion on her part,” Richardson said.
Suu Kyi’s spokesman, Zaw Htay, has said that Richardson exceeded his mandate by bringing up the issue. Richardson had been invited to the country to participate in an advisory panel on the Rohingya crisis; he withdrew, calling it a “whitewash.”