Ross Dunkley, the Australian editor and publisher of The Myanmar Times, has been arrested by Burmese authorities and locked up in the infamous Insein Prison.
 
Although he was officially detained for immigration violations, his arrest reportedly stemmed from a business conflict with his Burmese partner, Dr Tin Htun Oo, relating to the newspaper's ownership interests and operating strategy.

Aung Zaw is founder and editor of the Irrawaddy magazine. He can be reached at [email protected].

Dunkley founded the English language newspaper in 2000 with the backing of Bill Clough, an Australian mining and oil and gas entrepreneur. In Burma, however, foreigners are only allowed to own a minority stake in media organizations, so Dunkley needed to find a local partner with enough connections to land the appropriate publishing licenses and permissions.

That person appeared in the form of Sonny Swe, the son of Brig-Gen Thein Swe, a former military attaché to the Burmese embassy in Bangkok who in 2000 was a high-ranking official in the intelligence department and one of Khin Nyunt's right hand men. A deal was struck, and with Dunkley and his group owning 49 percent of the shares and Sonny Swe holding 51 percent, The Myanmar Times was launched and touted as Burma’s first truly independent news source.

However, the newspaper was seen by many as part of a public relations exercise by Khin Nyunt to polish the image of the military government. At the time of its inception, it even had its own censorship board consisting of Tin Win, Burma’s labor minister, and none other than Thein Swe. Although the two high-ranking junta officials carefully screened the contents of the newspaper, their involvement meant that The Myanmar Times did not need to pass through Burma's draconian press censorship board.

In addition, the newspaper was granted special dispensation to cover sensitive domestic issues such as the status of Aung San Suu Kyi and visits to the country by UN special investigators—it was even given an exclusive interview with Khin Nyunt. Such privileges, which were never offered to the local press, gave Dunkley's newspaper a leg up on all other independent publications in Rangoon. But in return, The Myanmar Times had to toe the official line and paint a positive picture of military-ruled Burma.

For example, after the attack on opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s convoy in Depayin, Dunkley’s paper presented the junta position that the clash was between pro-Suu Kyi and anti-Suu Kyi groups. News organizations outside Burma, however, widely reported that the attack was orchestrated by junta officials and perpetrated by hired thugs.
 
In 2004, the publishing landscape changed dramatically for The Myanmar Times when Than Shwe purged Khin Nyunt's entire intelligence service and placed the spy chief under house arrest, where he remains today.

Thein Swe was also arrested and received a sentence of more than 100 years in prison. And Sonny Swe, then the majority shareholder and the deputy chief executive officer of The Myanmar Times, was arrested on the charge of committing “economic crimes,” given a 14-year sentence and sent to prison in Lashio, Shan State.
 
The regime then hand-picked Tin Htun Oo—who was closely associated with junta leaders such as former Information Minister Kyaw Hsan—as Dunkley's new business partner and handed him Sonny Swe's 51 percent interest in The Myanmar Times.

Tin Htun Oo was seen as an apologist for the regime and did not have the reputation of being an independent minded journalist, and reports soon emerged that Dunkley and Tin Htun Oo did not get along well. 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. The real heros that deserve our focus and support are the journalists who, while caring nothing about personal economic profit, take risks every day to fight for a free press and the right of the Burmese people to receive accurate information about their country and government.

Related articles:

Internal Power Struggle at Myanmar Times?

The Junta’s Colorful Apologist.

Irrawaddy, Myanmar Times Spar in Bangkok.

Myanmar and stonewalled democracy.