Burma Relaxes Grip on Media, Vows End to Censors

RANGOON — It was a newspaper article that just months ago, Burma’s draconian state censors never would have approved.

It told how prison authorities crudely attempted to cure a scabies outbreak by wiping down naked inmates with medicine-laden brooms—a demeaning act that revealed the poverty of the nation's prisons and the decrepit state of its health-care system.

“In the past it would've been a very dangerous thing to publish,” said Zaw Thet Htwe, who wrote the story and was a political prisoner himself until last month. “It wasn't allowed.”

But in a sign of just how much is changing in this long-oppressed nation, it was allowed. The article was not only published this month in the Health Journal, a Rangoon-based weekly, but it hit the streets without having to be reviewed first by the government's infamous censorship body, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department.

Journalists have been jailed, beaten and blacklisted for decades in Burma, and the government continues to censor reporting about politics and other subjects it deems sensitive. But since last year, when the nation's long-entrenched military junta stepped down, censorship has ended on subjects such as health, entertainment, fashion and sports, and reporters are testing the limited freedom that has begun to emerge.

Today, images of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, once a highly taboo figure, routinely appear on the front pages of everything except state-controlled media. And the days of buying foreign publications, only to find sensitive stories cut out, are over.

“It's much more relaxed,” said Thiha Saw, chief editor of a news weekly called Open News, who said he's now able to write freely about fires, murders and natural disasters—all prohibited at various times in the past.

The government has gone even further, promising to abolish censorship altogether once the Parliament approves a new media law later this year. The legislation, currently being drafted, would effectively allow Burma’s independent press to publish on a daily basis for the first time in decades.

As recently as last fall, the future of journalism seemed grim in this Southeast Asian nation, which is also known as Burma. Reporters were still subjected to routine state surveillance, phone taps and censorship so intense that many were forced to work anonymously, undercover. In January, Reporters Without Borders ranked the country a lowly 169 out of 179 nations in its annual press freedom survey.

Few expected much change when the junta ceded power last March. The new government, dominated by a clique of retired officers, had risen to power in an election widely considered neither free nor fair.

But in an inaugural speech, President Thein Sein promised sweeping democratic reform, and vowed to “respect the role of the media, the fourth estate.”

In June, the government quietly began removing blocks on once-banned foreign news websites. It also began allowing international newspapers and magazines to be sold without sensitive sections cut out.

Exiled reporters, for decades among the country's most fervent critics, have been allowed to return and report freely, along with once-blacklisted correspondents from foreign news organizations, including The Associated Press.

“Things are moving in the right direction,” the Committee to Protect Journalist's Southeast Asia representative, Shawn W. Crispin, said Tuesday in Bangkok.

But he added, “The reforms we've seen are just scratching the surface. By any objective measure, Burma's media is still among the most repressed in the world.”

Nine reporters have been freed this year, but three remain behind bars, he said.

While “publications have been allowed to put Suu Kyi on the cover and report some of the things she says ... there are plenty of areas the press is not allowed to venture into, including any critical reporting of the ongoing conflict” between ethnic Kachin insurgents and the army in the north.

Thiha Saw, the Open News editor, said a team of around 50 government censors still spikes about 10 percent of the content in his 30-page journal each week.

But even that is progress. In the past, he said, censors were not averse to scrapping entire editions.

“We don't really expect freedom of expression in a few months or a few years,” the bespectacled journalist told the AP in an interview in his small Rangoon office, where a poster of Suu Kyi hangs on the wall.

Censorship has been in place in Burma one way or another since a 1962 military coup, he said, and “we still have a long, long way to go.”

Now, writing about peace talks between the government and ethnic rebels is OK, Thiha Saw said, but stories about fighting between them are not.