Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Nay Phone Latt decided in 2007 to inform expatriates about what was happening in Myanmar by starting a blog, a platform then subject to neither censors nor editors. Because Myanmar had no functioning Internet, he did his blogging from Singapore. He never criticized the government directly; he wrote short stories and poems full of metaphor. One told of a tiger that came to a village, entered a pagoda, and decided to stay. The villagers believed that wild animals belonged in the forest, and some wanted to kill the tiger. The daughter of the village chief said that the problem was not the tiger, but the place where it had installed itself. But no one could get it out of the pagoda, so they lived in constant fear. “Magazines published these stories because the censors didn’t know what I meant,” Nay Phone Latt explained.

When he returned from Singapore just before the Saffron Revolution, he organized the Myanmar Blogging Society so journalists could learn how to file dispatches from Yangon that might reach the outside world. He believes that reporting from inside the country was key to the reforms that came in subsequent years. The government arrested Nay Phone Latt after someone found cartoons disrespectful of the regime in his e-mail in-box. He explained that anyone could send anything to his in-box without his approval, but his inquisitors did not believe him. He was interrogated for ten days, during which he was not allowed to sleep, was often beaten, was sometimes tied up, and was taken from place to place blindfolded, so that he didn’t know where he was or who the people questioning him were. “In a military regime, inside the prison and outside the prison are not so different because the whole country is like a prison,” he said.

Sentenced to more than twenty years’ incarceration, he was first sent to Yangon’s notorious Insein Prison, where Ma Thida had also done time. Once he was transferred to a lower-security prison in Rakhine, he was allowed to write letters to his family. Again he resorted to metaphor to describe what he saw. “It’s a very, very good place to concentrate,” he said. “We had the right to read. And my parents came to me every month and brought books. I was never sad. My narrow cell was just like a little library.” He invited other inmates to his cell and taught them English or read to them; he taught them about computers, though there was no computer there. He dictated new stories to his parents, who published them under a pseudonym. After the 2012 general amnesty, he published his Prison Letters.

Nay Phone Latt said none of the political prisoners he knew had been afraid during their confinement. “Imprisonment made us stronger and more educated; prison is our university. There I learned never to focus on the long future. I learned to focus on the present.” Even now, he maintains, the government controls freedom of expression by law. “Not by pressure, by law. We can write, but sometimes they try to sue the journal, the editor, and the writer.” He pointed out that the Electronic Transition Act, under which he had been sentenced, remains on the books, though it has been amended to mandate shorter prison terms. The decision of which rules to enforce rests with the military. “We are not so safe,” he said. The chilling effect on journalists is strong.

Censorship empowers artists by implying that free expression is both immensely potent and profoundly dangerous. Censorship is a gesture of fear, and fear invests its objects with authority. Htein Lin was among the leaders of the 1988 movement when he was in law school. During the crackdown, he fled to a refugee camp in India. In 1992, India normalized relations with the military government of Myanmar. Though India still claimed to support democracy in Myanmar, members of the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front soon fled India to camps in the Myanmar jungle near the Chinese border. A grim clash worthy of Lord of the Flies ensued between the new arrivals and those already ensconced in the camps. Htein Lin and about eighty others were accused of being informers, tortured, and then locked up by their comrades. Ten died from infections after their fingers were chopped off. Fifteen were executed by their former student comrades. “You cannot get out of the jungle,” Htein Lin said. “You get wet and you will never be dry again. You are sinking into the ground every step you take. Where is the food? You cannot get the malaria out from your body. Then the leeches. When you are sleeping, they get into your softest spot and you wake up to feel them sucking blood from your eye.”