Testing the limits of press freedom

Slodkowski, the Reuters bureau chief, first met Wa Lone in 2016.

Wa Lone didn’t speak English as well as another candidate Slodkowski was interviewing: “I had trouble understanding everything he said.” But Wa Lone struck him as both curious and driven.

That was important to Slodkowski, who had been coming to Myanmar since 2009. Slodkowski’s father was an underground journalist in Poland who was arrested in 1982 and spent a year and a half in prison under an authoritarian communist regime.

Wa Lone soon landed a job at Reuters. He’d been in Yangon for about six years at that point, doing charity work, taking English classes and working his way through a series of local newspapers.

He met the woman who became his wife, Pan Ei Mon, at one of them, the Myanmar Times. The first time they went for coffee, in 2013, Wa Lone asked Pan Ei Mon whether she had a boyfriend. She said that she did. “He said, ‘Okay, why don’t you choose between him and me,’” she recalled, smiling at the memory.

Before joining Reuters, he’d built a reputation for reporting about the country’s internal armed conflicts. At the Myanmar Times, where he worked for about three years, Wa Lone was one of the first reporters to reach an embattled border region in Shan State after a bout of fighting in 2015 between the military and an armed ethnic militia.

Such violence has a long history in Myanmar. Civil warfare began almost immediately after independence in 1948. Ethnic divisions that erupted in fighting back then have endured. More than 20 armed groups pose a central challenge for Aung San Suu Kyi and her government, who are pursuing national peace talks. To the north of Shan State, for example, among jade, amber and gold mines, it is the Kachin Independence Army trading fire with government troops.

After arriving at Reuters, Wa Lone soon began reporting about Rakhine State and the Rohingya Muslims. A story in October 2016 detailed allegations that Myanmar soldiers raped eight Rohingya women at gunpoint after coordinated Rohingya insurgent attacks on border posts. With Wa Lone’s name atop, the story quoted a Rohingya woman saying of a group of soldiers: “Two men held me, one holding each arm, and another one held me by my hair from the back and they raped me.” Government spokesman Zaw Htay denied the allegations when the story was published.

Wa Lone covered attacks by Rohingya Muslim militants as well. In August of 2017, he reported on official accounts of coordinated assaults by the militants on 30 police posts and an army base, killing 12 members of the country’s security forces. Those attacks would spark the military’s crackdown in Rakhine State.

The reporting traced a pattern in Rakhine in which insurgent strikes on security forces were met with overwhelming force that drove increasing numbers of Rohingya Muslims to flee the area.

Wa Lone pursued his job while facing difficulties making ends meet. His wife, Pan Ei Mon, said Wa Lone made the equivalent of $1,000 a month at Reuters, and she earned about $380 working in the advertising department of a local newspaper. Wa Lone’s annual income alone was about 10 times the country’s per capita gross national income. But living in the center of Yangon, Pan Ei Mon said, “It was never enough.”

They lived in a small apartment, a space subdivided from their landlady’s house. With Reuters headquarters often slow to reimburse their expenses in the far-off Yangon bureau, reporters there said they sometimes ran out of money after long trips before the next check. Both Pan Ei Mon and Wa Lone pawned their wedding rings. They used an older friend at the Myanmar Times to take the jewelry to avoid embarrassment, said Pan Ei Mon. On one occasion, Wa Lone used the cash to help pay for a reporting trip to Rakhine State.

Asked about its slowness to pay expenses in Yangon, Reuters said its global system for reimbursing reporters depends on using a credit card that isn’t widely accepted in Myanmar. In recent months, the news agency said in a written statement, it has made it possible for staff there to be reimbursed more frequently. On the pawning of the wedding rings, Reuters said: "We were not aware of this personal sacrifice and it is not something we would ever ask or expect of staff."

In investigating the massacre, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were on dangerous ground, said Myat Swe, co-founder of the Myanmar Times. He was arrested in 2004 by the military junta after his father, an intelligence officer, was purged. He spent about nine years behind bars for allegedly violating censorship laws. “What they did was they threw me in the prison first and then they looked for the case,” said Myat Swe, now chief executive at Frontier Myanmar magazine.

The military, he said, retains vast power, which Aung San Suu Kyi is unable to check. “You can clearly see that she doesn’t have any influence whatsoever on the military,” said Myat Swe, sitting in a second-floor office where production notes for his magazine were scribbled on glass walls.

That made Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo’s reporting “quite risky,” he said, especially in Rakhine State, where the government is aware of reporters’ movements and locals don’t like journalists, domestic or foreign.

Under the junta, which lasted half a century, Myanmar had what was regarded as one of the world’s strictest systems of censorship. After the junta installed a quasi-civilian government, the country announced in 2012 that it was ending pre-publication censorship of news reports. Later that year, it said that private daily newspapers, shut down since 1964, could be published.





“You can clearly see that she doesn’t have any influence whatsoever on the military.”





A fitful loosening and tightening followed – 10 journalists and media executives were imprisoned in 2014, for example. As Aung San Suu Kyi’s party took power in 2016, expectations rose that she would introduce an era of greater press freedom.

But journalists continue to be incarcerated. In June last year, the military arrested three Myanmar reporters in Shan State for covering a drug-burning event by an ethnic militia. They were charged under the Unlawful Associations Act, a colonial-era law that broadly prohibits contact with banned groups. The charges were dropped in September.

Former Reuters journalist Aung Hla Tun knows what it is like to cover the military. Ushering visitors into his office in Naypyitaw, he pointed to an internal Reuters reporting award on a shelf which he won for covering the Saffron Revolution protests in 2007. “I got a chance to do my bit for democracy, for freedom of press for Myanmar,” he said.

That year, he produced a series of reports from the streets as protesters defied the junta. In an internal Reuters note circulated in October of 2007, Aung Hla Tun was praised for displaying “enormous courage, resourcefulness and journalistic integrity in putting us consistently ahead on the major breaks and turns in the story.”

He is no longer a reporter. Aung Hla Tun left Reuters at the end of 2016 and was named Myanmar’s deputy information minister in January 2018. He said he chose to serve in the government out of loyalty to Aung San Suu Kyi.

Sitting on a sofa, dressed like a typical Myanmar official in a traditional sarong-like garment called a longyi, with neatly combed hair, glasses and placid expression, he recounted the stories of his own family members arrested by the former military regime.

He also talked about Wa Lone.

Aung Hla Tun worked with Wa Lone briefly in the Reuters bureau and knew him before that as a member of the reporting community in Yangon. While at the Myanmar Times, Wa Lone said he attended sessions that Aung Hla Tun hosted for journalists looking to brush up their English and improve their time management.

They considered each other friends. Aung Hla Tun attended Wa Lone's wedding in 2016. A snapshot from the day shows him on stage, a place of honor, with the beaming couple.

But Wa Lone said he and Aung Hla Tun disagreed over coverage of events in Rakhine State. At one point, Aung Hla Tun said, he gave Wa Lone advice: “be careful.”

The prior Reuters bureau chief in Yangon, Paul Mooney, said Aung Hla Tun referred to Rohingya Muslims as “Bengalis,” a term implying they are foreigners that’s commonly used in Myanmar. When Buddhists attacked Muslims during riots in the city of Mandalay in 2014, Mooney said, Aung Hla Tun only wanted to relay official comment from the capital. “If there was anything negative that might kind of make the Burmese army look bad, he didn’t want to be involved with it,” Mooney said.

Aung Hla Tun disputed Mooney’s descriptions of him. Mooney, he said, tried to paint him as “anti-Muslim.” However, he said, “I have many Muslim friends.”

Aung Hla Tun said he had asked officials in the government about Wa Lone’s case. But, Aung Hla Tun said, he discovered that it was inadvisable to lobby for Wa Lone’s release: “Some close friends warned me, ‘You should stop or you will be in danger.’” He did not explain further.

“I have done my best, he was my friend,” he said.

His voice strained as he spoke about the news agency’s coverage of Rakhine State. “Reuters should have apologized to the government. Apologize!”





