In addition, with Khin Nyunt and Thein Swe out of the picture,
The Myanmar Times no longer received special privileges and was required to go through the same procedures as other periodicals in Rangoon.
Despite the loss of their Thein Swe & son connection, however, the ties between The Myanmar Times' foreign investors and the junta increased significantly in 2006, when Twinza Oil, the western Australian company owned by Bill Clough and his brother, signed a Production Sharing and Exploration Contract with the military-owned Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE).
Burma Campaign Australia estimates that Twinza Oil’s project could potentially earn MOGE US $2.5 billion through royalties, income tax and MOGE’s stake in the project. This means that the income from the Twinza Oil project alone could fund a quarter of Burma’s military for a decade.
Regardless of these new economic bonds between Dunkley's partners and the junta, he began to receive pressure both from the regime and his new business partner and in 2008 was forced to sack senior staff members and make “comprehensive changes” in the editorial department.
The relationship between the Australian and Burmese owners reportedly went downhill from there. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Dunkley and Tin Htun Oo were also involved in disputes over whether the paper should become a daily publication, which Dunkley advocated, and over how much profit the Burmese partner could remove from the business.
So given Tin Htun Oo's top level connections and the friction between him and Dunkley, it is not surprising that the regime clamped down on the Australian editor—what is surprising it that it took so long to do so after the removal of former poster-boy Dunkley's patron Khin Nyunt.
It is common knowledge that the regime keeps dossiers on all foreign persons of interest who reside or do business in Burma, and can drum up charges from immigration violations to smoking ganja or worse as its needs require. So Dunkley could easily have been in the same predicament years earlier if the junta had decided he had outgrown his usefulness or they wanted to change course.
Both may be the case right now, as some reports suggest that the regime plans to launch colorful daily newspapers and may even allow local editors to run the new publications. If Tin Htun Oo, who contested for parliament but lost in the 2010 election, is the new poster-boy and man who the regime wants to run its own daily, then neither the junta leaders nor Tin Htun Oo would want Dunkley around as competition.
On the surface, all of this would suggest that Dunkley is a hero and political prisoner for standing up to the regime on behalf of journalistic independence. But that is most assuredly not the case.
Larry Jagan, a Bangkok-based British journalist who writes often on Burma, previously told The Irrawaddy that although Dunkley pretended that his newspaper was independent, it was actually controlled by the regime. “Privately, Ross always said to me that he is a businessman first and a journalist second,” said Jagan.
Dunkley's willingness to place his business interests over his journalistic integrity was always evident to those who know Burma well. But if anyone had any doubts that this was the case, the Australian clearly displayed his willingness to appease Than Shwe's regime in January 2008, when he wrote an editorial praising the junta's “road map” to democracy, which was in fact a road map to keeping the generals in power.
“I believe that its [the junta’s] seven-point road map to democracy is the best way forward, and I support that,” Dunkley declared—possibly with the double-meaning that it was the best way forward for his own economic interests as well.
Sein Hla Oo, a veteran Burmese journalist based in Rangoon, once told The Irrawaddy that Dunkley’s pro-regime stand was not surprising since the paper had always been well connected to the ruling generals.
“It is semi-state-media,” he said. “Inside Burma, readers don’t care about this kind of writing by Ross Dunkley and others. People think this kind of writing is regime propaganda.”
To be fair, The Myanmar Times is better than the New Light of Myanmar. In addition, Tin Htun Oo would almost certainly be worse than Dunkley in managing the newspaper and staff members would not be happy to see him grab the reigns.
But even though The Myanmar Times has been publishing for seven years, despite claiming to have done so, Dunkley has never made a concerted attempt to use his priviledged position among the Burmese journalistic community to advance the cause of press freedom in the country. At the same time, there are still has more than 40 journalists languishing in prisons for pushing the free press envelope.
With the exception of Than Shwe and his ruthless junta colleagues, we do not wish on anyone the horror of being kept in Insein Prison. But it is not the imprisoned Australian editor who should be lauded and receive sympathetic international attention at this time.
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