Police Are Forcing Myanmar Journalists To Sign False Statements Amid Crackdown

When veteran newspaper editor Salai Papui was taken into custody in a remote part of western Myanmar, police demanded he sign an agreement to not film protests against the military coup.

“Just sign it,” the officers told him at the station. “Our bosses are seeing your live streams. They’re putting pressure on us.”

He initially refused, then agreed after a night in jail. Once released, he went straight back to reporting. 

“The mainstream media have few journalists in ethnic areas, so ethnic media has a responsibility to cover them,” Papui, 50, told VICE World News, referring to the frontier regions that host Myanmar’s more than 130 distinct ethnic groups—most overlooked by a global media struggling to access major cities let alone far-flung border states.

The country’s decade-long experiment with democracy is in shambles after the military takeover on Feb. 1. But the limited freedoms over the past 10 years paved the way for an explosion in independent media operating in areas once cut off from the outside world under previous military regimes. The widespread availability of smartphones has also given journalists new tools to document protests, abuses and deadly crackdowns that have killed at least 60 people in recent weeks.

The new junta is now scrambling to contain the information flowing out of the country despite nightly internet shutdowns. Authorities have rounded up scores of journalists throughout Myanmar and forced many to sign “confessions” to a host of fabricated offenses, according to multiple interviews. They have also demanded reporters sign agreements to not take photos, contact protest leaders, attend public gatherings, or anything else the junta finds distasteful. The regime has revoked the licenses of five media outlets and, in a confusing turn of events, warned the press not to describe the coup as a coup.

Papui’s paper, the Hakha Times, which he founded last year, is one of the few reporting in native dialects of Chin state, a remote territory bordering Bangladesh and India reachable only via crumbling tracks through the western mountains. Prisoners of language and geography, Chin people rely on their own reporters to tell them when the police might cut the power, shut down the internet, or raid a demonstration. 

“I’m a journalist,” Papui, who has been reporting for decades in Chin state, told the police when they told him to stop covering the protests. “This is my job and I have to do it.” 

Multimedia reporter Seing Latt Aung and several of his colleagues, who all work in the northern state of Kachin near the Chinese border, were treated similarly. They were given two confessions to sign: one for breaking curfew, and then another for broadcasting fake news.

“We could not sign because we didn’t do these things. So they replaced it with a document saying we won’t shoot videos and photos of police,” Seing Latt Aung said. They signed, “but we’re still doing the broadcasts.”

“We can’t take a break,” he continued. “There are very few journalists here, and they [security forces] are taking advantage of it. Our weakness is their strength. As long as we publish at least one or two photos, they tend to be a little more restrained. But if we stop, they’ll do whatever they want.”

In a press conference on March 11, Myanmar’s junta spokesperson accused journalists of provoking unrest and refuted allegations about restrictions on the media. But the reality on the ground tells a different story of official harassment, beatings and further arrests throughout the country. International outlets are not immune. An Associated Press photographer was one of the many arrested and charged since the coup.

Publications have stopped listing bylines to protect their reporters, an old practice from decades of military rule. Many journalists have been sleeping in the forest to avoid capture.  In the southern city of Myeik, a March 8 video caught police dragging journalist Ko Aung Kyaw of the Democratic Voice of Burma out of an apartment in the dead of night. He is still in prison.

“Local papers face particular risk,” said John Quinley, senior human rights specialist for Fortify Rights. “There’s not a lot of international attention being paid to them. They can go missing, they can be detained without people even noticing.”

Quinley has spent the weeks since the coup interviewing local media and documenting their struggles. He said ethnic journalists are both the most vulnerable and, in some ways, the most resilient. They’ve spent years reporting from the front lines of ethnic conflict.

They’re used to seeing tanks on the streets, having their cameras confiscated, spending hours in interrogation rooms and having documents shoved in their faces. Quinley spoke with one outlet in Rakhine state—the site of Myanmar’s Rohingya genocide—that already had several team members on the run. After the coup, the rest of their colleagues joined them in hiding.

“We have experience reporting on conflict,” said Mai Kaung Seng, editor of Shwe Phee Myay News in northern Shan State, where the military has clashed with several different armed groups for years. “But some new journalists are a little scared. Some are afraid of being arrested. Being arrested is easy. Anything is possible right now.”

Mai Kaung Seng said his ten-member staff is stretched thin, struggling to cover the coup and the ongoing clashes between local armed groups and the military which have simmered for years.

“The role of ethnic media is extremely important here,” he said. “The mainstream media can’t cover all of the issues across the country. The mainstream media can’t even cover everything happening in Yangon.”

Yet this dual responsibility—to journalists’ own communities and to the outside world—takes a heavy toll.

“We have to produce print and digital. Doing both is exhausting,” said Thu Rein Hlaing, editor-in-chief of Dawei Watch, which serves the ethnic Dawei community of Myanmar’s southern peninsula. “We have to work day and night. We get up early in the morning. We're tired. We have to be careful. No one can say when or how something will happen. We don’t know when they will arrest us, or how they will do it. We are not safe anymore.”

On the western border in Chin state, Papui and his colleagues will hold out for as long as they can. Times were already hard for poorly funded Chin media, and his paper was hanging on by a thread.

“Employees cannot be paid regularly. Young people are taking real risks. I'm worried they will not be able to continue. The whole of the media is wondering if it can survive the year,” he said.

But unlike his young staff, Papui has been reporting for decades. He has seen elections fail and juntas rise, and Myanmar journalists have always found a way to report the news. It will take more than a piece of paper to stop them now.