CPJ Press Freedom Online :
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Esther Htusan is no longer safe to report from her home country, Myanmar. The Associated Press reporter fled the country late last year after being threatened for her critical reporting on various topics that authorities deem sensitive, from the ethnic Rohingya refugee exodus, the military’s controversial counterinsurgency operations in Rakhine State, to State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s handling of the crisis.
Htusan came under heavy official fire in November after the government perceived she misrepresented a Suu Kyi speech that addressed issues of illegal immigration, terrorism, and global stability. Amid a furor, a prominent Suu Kyi supporter made a death threat against Htusan on his personal Facebook page, which had over 300,000 followers at the time, Associated Press reporters, who are familiar with the case but who requested anonymity, told CPJ. Before that, an unidentified man followed her home one evening, shouting her name from the darkness in front of her apartment in downtown Yangon. Htusan left Myanmar for Thailand in December due to fears for her security. In recent days, the journalists with whom CPJ spoke said, men who they believe to be plainclothes police visited her apartment building in Yangon and queried neighbors about her whereabouts.
“She’s not going back [to Myanmar] any time soon,” one of the reporters said.
Myanmar’s media, both local and foreign, are under heavy assault as security measures used to suppress the press under military rule are reactivated under Suu Kyi’s quasi-democratic regime, several journalists who cover the country told CPJ. It marks a
dramatic reversal in recent press freedom gains and augurs ill for the country’s delicate transition from military to elected rule.
Authorities are increasingly abusing various draconian colonial and military era laws to repress reporting on a widening range of topics. Many journalists and activists had hoped the laws would be amended or scrapped when Suu Kyi came to power with a strong electoral mandate to push democratic change through liberal reforms.
Nowhere is that backsliding more apparent than in the continued pretrial detention of local Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were charged under the colonial era Official Secrets Act. The two journalists were arrested on December 12 in Yangon after receiving documents from police that authorities said after their arrest were secret. Reuters said in a recent special report, “Massacre in Myanmar,” that Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo’s arrests were more likely prompted by their investigative reporting on a mass killing of Rohingya men by Buddhist villagers and Myanmar troops at the Rakhine State village of Inn Din on September 2.
In response to international news reports on the mass grave, Myanmar military chief Min Aung Hlaing acknowledged last month that his troops and villagers were behind the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslims, whose bodies were found in a mass grave at Inn Din, according to news reports.
President Htin Kyaw and Suu Kyi have both defended the Reuters reporters’ pre-trial detentions, underscoring the notion that Suu Kyi’s elected government and the powerful autonomous military now see eye-to-eye on the perceived need to roll back earlier allowances for media freedoms and actively suppress news that casts the government and military in a bad light.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Esther Htusan is no longer safe to report from her home country, Myanmar. The Associated Press reporter fled the country late last year after being threatened for her critical reporting on various topics that authorities deem sensitive, from the ethnic Rohingya refugee exodus, the military’s controversial counterinsurgency operations in Rakhine State, to State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s handling of the crisis.
Htusan came under heavy official fire in November after the government perceived she misrepresented a Suu Kyi speech that addressed issues of illegal immigration, terrorism, and global stability. Amid a furor, a prominent Suu Kyi supporter made a death threat against Htusan on his personal Facebook page, which had over 300,000 followers at the time, Associated Press reporters, who are familiar with the case but who requested anonymity, told CPJ. Before that, an unidentified man followed her home one evening, shouting her name from the darkness in front of her apartment in downtown Yangon. Htusan left Myanmar for Thailand in December due to fears for her security. In recent days, the journalists with whom CPJ spoke said, men who they believe to be plainclothes police visited her apartment building in Yangon and queried neighbors about her whereabouts.
“She’s not going back [to Myanmar] any time soon,” one of the reporters said.
Myanmar’s media, both local and foreign, are under heavy assault as security measures used to suppress the press under military rule are reactivated under Suu Kyi’s quasi-democratic regime, several journalists who cover the country told CPJ. It marks a
dramatic reversal in recent press freedom gains and augurs ill for the country’s delicate transition from military to elected rule.
Authorities are increasingly abusing various draconian colonial and military era laws to repress reporting on a widening range of topics. Many journalists and activists had hoped the laws would be amended or scrapped when Suu Kyi came to power with a strong electoral mandate to push democratic change through liberal reforms.
Nowhere is that backsliding more apparent than in the continued pretrial detention of local Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were charged under the colonial era Official Secrets Act. The two journalists were arrested on December 12 in Yangon after receiving documents from police that authorities said after their arrest were secret. Reuters said in a recent special report, “Massacre in Myanmar,” that Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo’s arrests were more likely prompted by their investigative reporting on a mass killing of Rohingya men by Buddhist villagers and Myanmar troops at the Rakhine State village of Inn Din on September 2.
In response to international news reports on the mass grave, Myanmar military chief Min Aung Hlaing acknowledged last month that his troops and villagers were behind the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslims, whose bodies were found in a mass grave at Inn Din, according to news reports.
President Htin Kyaw and Suu Kyi have both defended the Reuters reporters’ pre-trial detentions, underscoring the notion that Suu Kyi’s elected government and the powerful autonomous military now see eye-to-eye on the perceived need to roll back earlier allowances for media freedoms and actively suppress news that casts the government and military in a bad light.
