19 Nov 2012 | Asia and Pacific
President Barack Obama’s speech at Yangoon University appears to be another step in what he described as a “remarkable journey” for the country. The progress does look real.
Back in 2007, BBC special correspondent Fergal Keane wrote a report for Index after he returned from reporting the brutal crackdown on the Saffron revolution.
He alluded to the necessarily secretive nature of entering the country and meeting interviewees:
I won’t go into how I managed to get into the country: suffice to say that I was able to operate for several days without being picked up. It was nerve wracking and posed immense human and journalistic challenges.
While describing the immense difficulties local activists faced, he was optimistic about the role of the web in opening up the country and helping local democrats get their story out. “[T]he “bamboo curtain” has been lowered once again,” wrote Keane. “But not for long I believe.”
Yangon, Burma: A child holds a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi along with President Obama (Demotix)
Five years on, and Burma seemed to have changed almost beyond recognition for Keane:
“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.”
Shortly before Keane wrote that dispatch, the Burmese government had announced that it was scaling down censorship. On 1 June Tint Swe, head of the Press Scrutinisation and Registration Department was quoted by AFP saying:”There will be no press scrutiny job from the end of June. There will be no monitoring of local journals and magazines.”
Remarkable in a country where newspapers and magazines had faced pre-publication censorship for decades.
After the release of political prisoners in 2011, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and and satirist Zarganar, the first real test of whether the broader population would enjoy extended free speech under the newly liberalised regime came in January of this year, with the Arts of Freedom Film Festival, which more or less passed the test (barring the rejection of some submissions from outside Burma.
Since then, progress has been pretty much consistent. But there is a long way to go yet. Burma is nowhere near a democracy, and the disturbing reports of violence against the Rohinga Muslim population (and the opposition NLD’s apparent indifference to it) are certainly cause for alarm.
Obama spoke today Burma’s need to embrace Roosevelt’s four fundamental freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Burma has huge challenges in all these areas.
Padraig Reidy is news editor at Index
16 Nov 2012 | Americas, News and features
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15 Nov 2012 | Asia and Pacific
Vietnam is a country that bans authors because of what they write. I know this because it has just happened to me. Two months ago the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam invited me to attend its annual East Sea conference. Today, standing at the airport check-in counter at Heathrow Airport, I finally abandoned my efforts to get there. It’s a huge disappointment — the conference looks excellent and it would have been a chance to properly understand the Vietnamese position on the East Sea disputes. Now the book that I am writing about those disputes will have to go ahead without a Vietnamese perspective. All because of the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security.
It’s taken two months of emails and phone calls to get to this point. For the past week the Diplomatic Academy has actively been trying to find a solution, and in the past few days the British Embassy in Hanoi has also been trying to help. Today came the confirmation — my visa has been refused by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The Embassy told me as I was waiting by the check-in desk.
The only reason the MPS can have for banning me is that it doesn’t like the book I published two years ago, Vietnam: Rising Dragon. It can be the only reason — I have no contact with dissident organisations, I have never plotted to overthrow the Party or the state and I have never committed an offence against Vietnam’s immigration laws. Of course, when I was the BBC reporter in Hanoi six years ago, I regularly broke the Press Law — but then every foreign journalist in Vietnam breaks that almost every single day. It’s impossible to be a foreign journalist in Vietnam without contravening the Law’s draconian restrictions.
The Press Law requires all foreign journalists to give the authorities five days notice of every journalistic activity they undertake — every interview, every phone call, every request for information. Of course it is impossible to do this and meet deadlines, so all foreign journalists just break the law and the authorities ignore it — until the foreign journalist writes something that the Ministry of Public Security doesn’t like. It’s one reason why Vietnam sits at the bottom of international lists on media freedom. But they don’t get banned.
So why am I a threat to Public Security? Does the MPS think my book could really destroy the leading role of the Communist Party of Vietnam? It’s a fair, honest and balanced portrayal of modern Vietnam. That means it contains both praise and criticism — honest accounts of how the political system works, how the Party maintains its hold on power and how it relates to the outside world. Little of it is new to most Vietnamese people: they know most of these things very well. I think my offence was to say these things in public – and in English — where foreign governments and aid donors can read them. Vietnam: rising dragon has been well received. At least one American university recommends it to students studying Southeast Asia. No-one has told me about any mistakes or inaccuracies, and no-one has called it biased or unfair.
Perhaps this is the reason why it has not been granted a publication licence in Vietnam. Perhaps this is the reason why I am now banned from the country too. It seems that — for the MPS — it’s an offence to write the honest truth about modern Vietnam.
Bill Hayton is a former BBC reporter in Hanoi and author of Vietnam: Rising Dragon
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