Burmese Media Revolution: Shouts for freedom from exile ; Maung Yit & MoeMaKa

Articles from - http://www.sampsoniaway.org/bi-monthly/2010/07/27/burmese-media-revolution-shouts-for-freedom-from-exile/

by Silvia Duarte

Maung Yit and MoeMaKa

Maung Yit joined the Burmese democracy movement while studying electrical engineering at Rangoon University. After graduating in 1993, he became a writer and cartoonist for local magazines and journals. During that time he developed his skills as a technology journalist. Five years later, almost totally giving up hope for the struggle for democracy and freedom of the press in Burma, he left to find a job to support his family. In 2002, he arrived in Fairfield, Iowa, to study computer science.

He had wanted move to Silicon Valley and pursue an IT job, but he ended up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2003, he and his friends founded MoeMaKa Media, an Internet news source, as a way to combine freedom of press and Internet activism and reignite their struggle for democracy.

In 2006 MoeMaKa’s founders decided to diversify their format to get around the government censors inside Burma and started using the blog format to present their content. MoeMaKa’s is one of 800 active Burmese blogs.

According to a survey conducted by the Burma Media Association in August 2009, most of the blogs are hosted by BlogSpot and WordPress. Eighty percent are in Burmese, 8 percent in English, and 10 percent are bilingual. Three-fourths of the bloggers are between the ages 21 and 35 and have a college education.

Over half of these bloggers are living in Burma and began blogging less than two years ago. The majority focus on entertainment-related topics. Only 8 percent discuss news-related subjects—one of those is by Maung Yit.

Burmese Media Revolution: Shouts for freedom from exile ; Kyaw Zaw & Irrawaddy

Articles from - http://www.sampsoniaway.org/bi-monthly/2010/07/27/burmese-media-revolution-shouts-for-freedom-from-exile/

by Silvia Duarte

Kyaw Zwa and the Irrawaddy magazine

When Kyaw Zwa Moe was in high school, it was easy for him to grab a book from his home library of more than two thousand volumes. He was especially attracted to books about Burmese history, politics, and literature. Thanks to that, he said, the idea of democracy was foremost in his mind. When the pro-democracy movement began, he became a leading member of the student union in his school.

On September 18, 1988, the now-ruling junta staged a bloody coup and the military authorities launched a crackdown against all political organizations. Kyaw Zwa’s union went underground. He and his fellows continued their political activities until their arrests in 1991. Kyaw Zwa was sentenced to 10 years in the Insein Prison, notorious for inhumane and dirty conditions, prisoner abuse, and use of mental and physical torture. He was there for eight years.

In prison he improved his English. Prison guards who were sympathetic to jailed activists, smuggled American magazines into his cell. “I unintentionally learned journalistic writing when I read stories published in Time and Newsweek. I never wanted to be a politician; I wanted to be independent, and I thought that writing for a journal or magazine could be my way,” he said via email.

Burmese Media Revolution: Shouts for freedom from exile ; Than Win Htut

Articles from - http://www.sampsoniaway.org/bi-monthly/2010/07/27/burmese-media-revolution-shouts-for-freedom-from-exile/

by Silvia Duarte

Than Win Htut and Democratic Voice of Burma

The government began to persecute Than Win Htut in 1991, when he and some of his colleagues published a book without the “blessing” of the censorship committee. That year the police arrested two of his friends involved and weeks after came to the house where Than Win Htut was hidden. He hid on the roof, trembling as he watched the security forces handcuff his friends.

At the end of 2002 Than Win Htut travelled to Cambodia to attend a journalism training program organized by the New York Times. “As a result of the training I realized that I could still write in exile and I wouldn’t have to be afraid of the censorship. So I decided not to go back to Burma,” he said from Norway via Skype.

After the training, he went to Thailand and wrote for English and Burmese newspapers. In 2004 the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) offered him a job as a senior radio reporter. DVB is a non-profit media organization that began in Norway in 1991 after the Burmese government barred Aung San Suu Kyi from traveling there to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Now DVB is the best example of what the Burmese foreign–based broadcast media can do.

In “Strategies of an Exile Media Organization,” DVB deputy director Khin Maung Win explains how DVB uses a variety of strategies to get their signal into Burma. The first strategy is to broadcast via shortwave radio, which can reach everywhere in the country and is highly effective because the regime cannot block the signal. Among the other well-known radio stations broadcasting from outside of the country are the Burmese services of the British Broadcasting Cooperation, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia.

Burmese Media Revolution: Shouts for freedom from exile ; Aung Thwin

Articles from - http://www.sampsoniaway.org/bi-monthly/2010/07/27/burmese-media-revolution-shouts-for-freedom-from-exile/

by Silvia Duarte

Unable to catch his breath as the torturer pummelled his chest, Aung Thwin was becoming lightheaded. The interrogator asked him for the tenth time: “Do you work for Democratic Voice of Burma?” “No, I don’t,” Aung Thwin hoarsely repeated. Images of the interrogator flickered before his eyes, reminding him of 1990, when he was arrested and tortured until his blood-soaked shirt stuck to his body—the reason why his posture is altered to this day.

The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) is a multimedia organization based in Norway that has a website—in English and Burmese—and a radio and a tv station that broadcasts into Burma. Answering “Yes, I work for DVB” could mean a minimum of 20 years in prison for Aung Thwin. And if that happened, all the risks Aung Thwin took in the past would have been wasted. Since 2006 he has walked Rangoon’s streets trying to appear calm while smuggling in his pockets devices that to the Burmese government were as dangerous as a bomb: a USB with forbidden information and a camera with his images.

In 2006 he secretly filmed a documentary about children dying in the hospital during a dengue epidemic and, as a result, the government forbade the use of cameras in the hospitals. Through his images, he also exposed one of the most corrupt businesses of the Burmese generals: the Highway Express Bus Company—the Burmese equivalent of Greyhound. During the military’s crackdown on monks during the 2007 Saffron Revolution, his footage captured four soldiers carrying the body of Kenji Nagai, a 50-year- old Japanese photojournalist murdered by Burmese troops.

Aung Thwin sent that image to the DVB and they shared it with the world. The Burmese government couldn’t deny its crime and the Japanese government couldn’t deny its anger.