Enemies of the state -- why the press in Southeast Asia is under attack

News outlets from the Philippines to Myanmar face growing threats

DOMINIC FAULDER, Associate Editor, Nikkei Asian Review, and CLIFF VENZON, Nikkei staff writer

BANGKOK/MANILA -- Myanmar has closed off an entire section of the country to reporters. Cambodia is shutting down news organizations. The Philippine president has casually discussed murdering journalists. And the Thai government has suggested the press needs some "attitude adjustment."

Hopes for constructive, healthy tension between Southeast Asia's increasingly authoritarian governments and the media have degenerated into mutual contempt and increasingly naked repression. Indeed, some journalists and bloggers have effectively been designated enemies of the state.

"These trends reflect growing currents around issues of identity politics and populism," veteran Thai journalist Kavi Chongkittavorn, a regional commentator and former president of the Thai Journalists Association, told the Nikkei Asian Review. "They reflect the growing confidence, and even sense of impunity, of ruling parties that they are very much in control of their own narratives."

Media freedom was the issue that recently transported Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's civilian head of government and former darling of the international press, into an incandescent rage that ended a beautiful friendship. Her old American pro-democracy ally, Bill Richardson, the man who in the 1990s lobbied for her freedom from house arrest, had the temerity to request on Jan. 22 the release of two Reuters journalists arrested 41 days earlier under Myanmar's 1923 Official Secrets Act. Their row continued over dinner, with Richardson wondering at one point if he was physically safe in the quivering presence of the 1991 Nobel peace laureate.

"It was a very heated exchange," said Richardson, who dropped out of an international commission invited by Suu Kyi's government to investigate the exodus of nearly 700,000 Rohihgyas, members of a Muslim minority, into Bangladesh since August. In this bitter public divorce, the two sides later could not even agree on whether Richardson had resigned or been "terminated."

Detained Reuters journalists Wa Lone, left, and Kyaw Soe Oo are escorted by police during a break at a court hearing in Yangon on Feb. 1. © Reuters

"The main reason I am resigning is that this advisory board is a whitewash," Richardson told Reuters. He refused to be part of "a cheerleading squad for the government."

Richardson was clearly stunned by Suu Kyi's hostility. His appeal for the two imprisoned journalists had already been telegraphed in the regional press. "She blames all the problems that Myanmar is having on the international media, on the U.N., on human rights groups, on other governments, and I think this is caused by the bubble that is around her, by individuals that are not giving her frank advice," the former New Mexico governor and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. told The Associated Press. His old boss, former President Bill Clinton, is among those who have appealed for the release of the reporters.

Significantly, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, heading an earlier commission set up on Suu Kyi's initiative, called in August for proper media access to Rakhine State -- something the government continues to refuse.

The two journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were arrested outside a Yangon restaurant on Dec. 12 with classified documents given to them by police relating to the brutal crackdown by security forces in Rakhine. The violence included the murders of eight men -- shopkeepers, fishermen and an Islamic teacher -- and two teenage students on Sept. 2 during operations to flush Rohingyas out of Inn Din, a coastal village. Although the reporters had no opportunity to disseminate any secret information, bail has been denied. The speed of the arrests and contradictory police statements have raised suspicions that the two reporters were entrapped.

"The Reuters investigation of the Inn Din massacre was what prompted Myanmar police authorities to arrest two of the news agency's reporters," Reuters said in a detailed investigative report published on Feb. 8. "Then, on Jan. 10, the military issued a statement that confirmed portions of what Wa Lone, Kyaw Soe Oo and their colleagues were preparing to report, acknowledging that 10 Rohingya men were massacred in the village." Members of the security forces are now facing rare disciplinary action over the slayings.