The fight for freedom begins with freedom of speech, says Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. This is one of a series of manifestos demanding a more outspoken world in the 40th anniversary issue of Index on Censorship

The gift of speech is the most effective instrument for human communication. The ability to communicate enables us to establish links across time and space, to learn to understand different civilisations and cultures, to extend knowledge both vertically and horizontally, to promote the arts and sciences. It also helps to bridge gaps in understanding between peoples and nations, to put an end to old enmities, to achieve detente, to cultivate new fellowships.

Speech allows human beings to articulate their thoughts and emotions. Words allow us to express our feelings, to record our experiences, to realise our ideas, to push outwards the frontiers of intellectual exploration. Words can move hearts, words can change perceptions, words can set nations and peoples in powerful motion. Words are an essential part of the expression of our humanness. To shackle freedom of speech and expression is to cripple the basic right to realise our full potential.

Can freedom of speech be abused? Since historical times, it has been recognised that words can hurt as well as heal, that we have a responsibility to use our verbal skills in the right way. What is the “right” way? The Ten Commandments include an injunction against bearing false witness.

Misusing the gift of speech to deceive or harm others is generally seen as unacceptable. Buddhism teaches that there are four verbal acts that constitute “tainted failure in living”: uttering deliberate lies for one’s own sake, for the sake of others or for some material advantage; uttering words that cause dissension, that is, creating discord among those united and inciting still more those who are in discord; speaking harshly and abusively, causing anger and distraction of mind in others; indulging in talk that is inadvisable, unrestrained and harmful.

Modern laws reflect the preoccupations of our ancients. Perjury, slander and libel, incitement to communal hatred, incitement to violence, all these are indictable offences in many countries today. The recognition of the negative consequences of misusing our gift of speech has not however been matched by an awareness of the detrimental effects of stifling free speech.

It is most generally in societies where the plinth of power is narrow that freedom of speech is perceived as a threat to the existing order. When speaking out against existing wrongs and injustices is disallowed, society is deprived of a vital impetus towards positive change and renewal. Censorship laws that ostensibly protect society from iniquitous influences generally achieve little that is positive. The most usual result is a pervasive atmosphere of uncertainly and fear that strangles innovative thought.

It was only in the 20th century that freedom of expression began to be recognised as a basic human right. Today, freedom of speech and expression remain tenuous or even unknown in many nations that are signatories to the UN’s declaration of human rights. As in the distant past, it is those in positions of power and influence who stand against the freedom to articulate common grievances and aspirations.

It has been rightly pointed out that what is most important is not so much freedom of speech as freedom after speech. Through long years of authoritarian rule, members of the movement for democracy in Burma have been punished for speaking out in protest against violations of human rights and abuses of power. The few who spoke out were articulating the silent protest of the many who had been cowed into submission. To stand as a few against the juggernaut of power is not hard. It was the solidarity of like-minded people, at home and abroad, that strengthened our advocates of freedom of speech.

An advocate of freedom of expression is necessarily also a practitioner. The basic law for those who want to defend freedom of expression is that they must demonstrate their commitment by practising what they preach. When we speak out for our right to freedom of speech, we begin to exercise it. When we write about our right to freedom of expression, we begin to practise it. There can be no theoretical advocacy of these freedoms, there can only be practical, practising advocacy.

Aung San Suu Kyi is leader of the National League for Democracy. She was awarded the Novel Peace Price in 1991

This article appears in 40 years of Index on Censorship which marks the organisation’s 40th anniversary with a star line-up of the most outstanding activists, journalists and authors. Click here for subscription options and more

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In fact the senior officer who had been summoned to passport control to inspect my journalist visa smiled and said “Welcome to Myanmar Mr. BBC”. I gibbered some words of thanks and headed out into the sweltering, glorious night.

In the old days you presented yourself at passport control with a pounding heart and a dry mouth, convinced that at long last you were about to be found out. After all, you had made so many visits as a tourist even the most gullible of immigration officers would be bound to question your devotion to the beauty of Burma.

It didn’t help when my “tourist” trips nearly always coincided with some major political upheaval. What kind of person wants to holiday in Rangoon while thousands of people are being locked up and tortured?

Yet I was never asked that question. Usually the bored officer flicked through the pages until he/she found the required visa, paused for a gut churning few seconds and stamped me into the country.

The real problem was not the men and women who stamped passports. It was the ghosts who haunted the short walk from immigration to customs. If you were going to get nailed going into Burma on a tourist visa it would happen in this little space. So I always made a point of not looking at the spooks from Military Intelligence who were scanning the faces of new arrivals. I knew they had a blacklist of journalists and photographs of their most hated. For some years I numbered among these.

Very occasionally a journalist visa would be issued, usually for an event like the opening of parliament or founders day. But most of the time we were forced to adopt the disguise of tourists. This led to your correspondent parading around Rangoon in a Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts and flip-flops during the 2007 “Saffron Revolution”; I cut a figure so florid, plump and ludicrous that nobody could possibly have suspected me capable of appearing on television.

Reporting in those days meant following certain essential rules:

1. Never leave a compromising document, piece of paper in your hotel room.
2. Destroy all notes when you were finished with them.
3. Change taxis at least twice on your way to and from appointments with dissident figures. Lose yourself in markets and busy public places if you suspect you are being tailed.
4. Say NOTHING on the phone that didn’t sound like tourist blather.
5. Make sure to schedule several tourist activities each day so that anybody watching won’t have undue reason to be suspicious.
6. Never identify an informant on camera. This could have profoundly unpleasant consequences for them.
7. Never travel with your tapes. Find an alternative route for them out of the country. Its funny how many different people prove helpful when they know the story is an important one. This is one of the really pleasant surprises, for me, of clandestine operating. There are more idealistic people, committed to press freedom, than you think.

As the list –– and it is by no means complete –– indicates reporting from Burma in those days could be an exhausting business. Getting caught could mean a very unpleasant interrogation and deportation for the correspondent, but much worse for any of his informants. It was the knowledge of what could happen to the people who helped you that made reporting from Burma such a distinctly unnerving experience. Jail and torture were routine for those who took a public stand against the regime.

Since the beginning of 2012 I’ve visited Burma three times. Each trip has been on an official journalist visa. Not once have I been harassed, intimidated or interfered with. I have reported from city slums and rural villages, from huge opposition rallies and from within sedate government compounds. On my first “official” trip I walked the streets of downtown Rangoon interviewing people at random. Again my expectation was that a secret policeman would appear from the shadows and bundle myself and the camera team away. But nothing happened.

Suddenly it was possible to hire fixers who could organise interviews and translate without fear of arrest. We sat at a teashop in the middle of the city with a recently released pro-democracy activist who discussed his plans for the forthcoming by-elections. There were press conferences at Aung San Suu Kyi’s lakeside residence; they could be prolonged, crowded and exhaustingly democratic occasions: every backpack blogger travelling in Asia seemed to turn up with a question and was given an answer.

On the domestic media scene the iron fisted censorship has been substantially eased. I met young newspaper reporters out on the streets and asking questions of election candidates. The government has lifted restrictions on 30,000 websites, many of which provide political news and commentary.

The privately owned press is testing the boundaries of this new freedom. Exiled journalists were invited to come home for consultations on a new media bill. The only private TV station in the country felt free to broadcast footage of Aung San Suu Kyi addressing the British parliament. The first ever Rangoon Film Festival featured a vivid documentary on the suppression of the Buddhist Monks protests in 2007.

Yet there are still highly problematic areas. Journalist visas still tend to be issued only for landmark occasions: visits by foreign dignitaries, elections, national days of commemoration. Some foreign correspondents are thought to be still on a government blacklist. All blacklists must be scrapped.

As for visits to troubled areas the old habits of concealment and restriction still rule. As a consequence the reporting of the ethnic violence in Rakhine state — which displaced tens of thousands earlier in the summer — was often confused or biased.

Interviews with senior government ministers, especially the President, are very rare. The consequence is that an essential strand of the narrative of change is under-reported. How I long to ask the men at the top why they decided to embark on a process of such profound change, or to challenge both them and the opposition on their response to events in Rakhine state.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, was strangely lethargic on the devastating abuses of human rights known to be taking place. It has been criticized for failing to challenge the outpouring of ethnic chauvinism directed against the Rohingya Muslim minority. In fact senior opposition activist Ko Ko Gyi, a former political prisoner, was among the louder voices that joined in the public marginalization of the minority.

On a more general level the NLD’s media operation can be exasperating. Interview requests can vanish into the ether. Finding the right spokesperson on a given issue is invariably a chore. Some of this is down to the inevitable stresses of a long suppressed organization struggling to come to terms with new freedoms. But the centralizing of the media focus around Aung San Suu Kyi leaves the international media largely ignorant of other voices. Local journalists have also complained about their struggles with the NLD’s press bureau.

For all these misgivings the advance of media freedom in Burma is exciting. Burma has never really known a free press — not in the long years of British colonialism, not in the decades of military rule. The challenge now is to embed a culture of openness in which government and opposition are routinely challenged.

Fergal Keane is an award winning journalist and author. His most recent book is Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944

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Flag-waving supporters danced to rap music blaring through the Rangoon night accompanied by the raucous singing of Burmese freedom songs.

According to unofficial results the NLD, led by Nobel Peace laureate and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide 43 seats out of 44, contested in special by-elections for the 644 seat parliament.

After almost 20 years kept under house arrest, Suu Kyi is believed to have emerged triumphant with a reported 99 per cent of the vote in her constituency of poor farmers.

After the “Arab Spring”, the pro-democracy movement in Burma, which dates back to the abortive peoples’ uprising in 1988, and was re-ignited by the “Saffron Revolution” led by Buddhist monks in 2007, has once more renewed its peaceful challenge; but this time the Burmese people moved their protest from the streets to the ballot-box.

Recent changes launched by new President and former general Thein Sein made it possible for the NLD to agree to participate in elections for the first time since 1990. In 2010 Suu Kyi, known widely as “the Lady”, and her party boycotted the elections which rubber-stamped the victory of the military‘s political wing the USDP (The Union of Solidarity and Development Party). The changes launched by President Thein Sein, and his pledge to hold free and fair election, made it possible for the NLD to agree to participate in the elections.

President Thein Sein, and Aung San Suu Kyi appear to have forged a surprising degree of trust and understanding.

Thein Sein has surprised and shocked many army generals by his courting of western governments, reducing media censorship, releasing over 600 political prisoners, and permitting Burma’s first credible election since 1990, when the NLD party won just under 80 per cent of all parliamentary seats.

In the Burmese capital of Naypyidaw, there is a galaxy of Suu Kyi pictures on posters, T-shirts and newspaper front pages. If you didn’t know The Lady was running for a parliamentary seat, you would assume she was the latest pop-star sensation or a Hollywood actress.

Instead she is the revered daughter of national hero and founder of Burmese independence, General Aung San, and she is attracting the kind of adulation that comes with sainthood. Only a year ago people would have been arrested for possession of memorabilia of Suu Kyi, who was then held under house arrest.

Prospects for press freedom and a new media law
During the election campaign, a Unesco-sponsored conference on press freedom and the government’s new media law took place in Rangoon. The big surprise was that the contingent of exiled Burmese journalists at the top of the regime’s extensive media blacklist, gained a 6-day visa in order to attend this historic media event.

Internet censorship has also been relaxed. The websites of exiled Burmese media — Irrawaddy magazine, Mizzima news agency and DVB TV, transmitting on satellite from its head office in Oslo, were a high priority in the regime’s systematic suppression of critical information. Now access has been restored and the government has, in principle, agreed to allow some representatives of the exiled media to establish offices in Rangoon.

Information Minister U Kyaw Hsan, who loyally served the military regime for six years prior to the formation of a civilian government in 2010, addressed the conference and affirmed that the new government, headed by President Thein Sein, was committed to increased press freedom.

Currently journals that publish weekly reviews of news and politics must submit their proofs to the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD) before publication. Thein Sein declared that he was also committed to the gradual removal of state censorship prior to publication.

Former “enemies of the state” banned by this same Minister of Information were now sitting in the same room, listening to his assurances that he supported press freedom.

In his opening address to a media conference held in Rangoon in March, the minister argued: “we are not drafting the new media law with the intention of banning or hampering press freedom. Our aim is to facilitate the proper use of press freedom for the long-term progress of Myanmar’s media sector”.

The new media regime will allow privately-owned newspapers to publish dailies, (now only weeklies are permitted).The government is expected to carry out its promise to drop prior censorship.

The press are today permitted to print Suu Kyi’s photo on the front page, but U Soe Thein, veteran journalist and editor of The People’s Age Journal complains that the censorship board still uses the red ink to block those stories which are critical of the government or quote the other side in peace negotiations.

Soe Thein said: “In our coverage of recent peace talks and ceasefire agreements with ethnic groups opposed to the government, we are only allowed to cover the government side. We are not allowed to quote anyone from the ethnic rebel side like the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO)”.

“I don’t really trust the minister and his assurances about more press freedom” says Soe Thin, who has been jailed several times for his writings. He insisted “we journalists will continue to push the envelope”.

Many editors and journalists are worried that the new media law contains no clause to protect the media from the repressive laws and the legal machinery of the dictatorship, that could still be used to silence the media and jail them at any time.

Eighty-two-year-old U Win Tin is Burma’s most fearless and respected journalist, who has survived over 20 years imprisonment. Since the late 1980s, he has been a close advisor to Suu Kyi.He says: “the media law gives no protection to journalists. We need legal protection. This is the key issue.” He argues that promises about press freedom don’t add up to much and has called for “tangible guarantees”.

Twenty-one year old Sithu Zeya, a video journalist from Democratic Voice of Burma, who was released from jail in January this year, is a good example of this legal limbo-land that media now inhabit. His release was a conditional freedom. He could still be returned to prison to serve the remaining 18 years of his sentence, if he breaches any of Burma’s all-embracing and ill-defined public order and security laws.

At the March media conference the Information Ministry did not respond to repeated calls for the repeal of legislation that infringed human rights and press freedom.

A joint statement by exiled media groups, which was released following the conference said: “It is important that the media law in Burma should not only focus on freedom of the press and freedom of expression, but also constitute a safeguard for the security and rights of members of the media community.”

In the wake of post-election euphoria there is an emotive surge of hope that the landslide by-election wins will create an irresistible momentum towards press freedom and democracy.

But Aung San Suu Kyi has warned that nothing is irreversible and these reforms can easily be rolled back. Burma is still a military-dominated regime with 25 per cent of the 644 seats in parliament automatically reserved for army officers, far outnumbering the 43 seats that pro-democracy forces have just won.

Both local and exiled journalists who choose to return, are still vulnerable to sudden shifts in the government’s interpretation of “responsible journalism”.The media will continue to be a high risk sector in Burma for a long time to come, as long as the ultimate power still resides in the hands of a military that has become accustomed to being the ultimate guardian of the nation.

Tom Fawthrop is a freelance foreign correspondent based in south-east Asia

Aung San Suu Kyi writes a free speech manifesto for the new edition of Index on Censorship saying : “The fight for freedom begins with freedom of speech”

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PLUS: Read Aung San Suu Kyi’s speech “Freedom From Fear”, here

In most cultures the end of the old year is a time for both spiritual and physical cleansing. It is a time for discarding what is worn out or ill- omened, a time to create an unsullied space for pristine thoughts and new beginnings. Tomorrow is the first of the three days of the Thingyan festival which precedes the Burmese New Year. Thingyan denotes a crossing over from the old to the new.

Education is the bridge that enables us to cross over from redundant mental processes to fresh intellectual vigour. In its best and broadest sense, education is seen not simply as a means of acquiring paper qualifications but as the door to wisdom, the foundation for all that is auspicious. Buddhism associates good deeds with the wise and evil deeds with the foolish and ignorant. Those who seek to remove ignorance help to promote not only worldly knowledge and spiritual enlightenment but, and this is of the utmost importance, a sense of individual responsibility and self- reliance.

Such qualities are urgently needed in contemporary Burma as it passes through a critical period of transition. The choices made at this time will determine the future of the country for years to come. It is therefore essential that our young people should be equipped to rise to the many practical and intellectual challenges which now confront them. One scholarship is but a drop in the ocean of existing needs. It is my hope that our own people will participate increasingly in the endeavour to gain for our country the benefits of truly meaningful education. It is the most valuable legacy that we can leave to future generations.
has been released after seven consecutive years under house arrest.

In most cultures the end of the old year is a time for both spiritual and physical cleansing. It is a time for discarding what is worn out or ill- omened, a time to create an unsullied space for pristine thoughts and new beginnings. Tomorrow is the first of the three days of the Thingyan festival which precedes the Burmese New Year. Thingyan denotes a crossing over from the old to the new.

Education is the bridge that enables us to cross over from redundant mental processes to fresh intellectual vigour. In its best and broadest sense, education is seen not simply as a means of acquiring paper qualifications but as the door to wisdom, the foundation for all that is auspicious. Buddhism associates good deeds with the wise and evil deeds with the foolish and ignorant. Those who seek to remove ignorance help to promote not only worldly knowledge and spiritual enlightenment but, and this is of the utmost importance, a sense of individual responsibility and self- reliance.

Such qualities are urgently needed in contemporary Burma as it passes through a critical period of transition. The choices made at this time will determine the future of the country for years to come. It is therefore essential that our young people should be equipped to rise to the many practical and intellectual challenges which now confront them. One scholarship is but a drop in the ocean of existing needs. It is my hope that our own people will participate increasingly in the endeavour to gain for our country the benefits of truly meaningful education. It is the most valuable legacy that we can leave to future generations.

Aung San Suu Kyi. First delivered by her husband Dr Michael Aris at afundraising reception hosted by the educational charity ‘Prospect Burma’

Read Aung San Suu Kyi’s speech Freedom From Fear, here

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Read “Freedom from fear” here

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