Leaving Myanmar
- phuketrichard
- Expatriate
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Leaving Myanmar
good read from a journalist ( the managing editor of Frontier Myanmar) that left Burma
https://mekongreview.com/leaving-myanmar/Journalists who are ostensibly permitted to work in the open, meanwhile, face danger from two sides: first, and most gravely, from the security forces, who don’t distinguish media workers from protesters in their bloody crackdowns, as one Frontier reporter found when he was shot in Mandalay on 27 March, and second, from the protesters themselves, who from bitter experience are increasingly on guard against plain-clothes military spies and saboteurs, called dalan in Burmese. This has photojournalists in particular in a dilemma over how to equip themselves: turn up to a protest with a large professional camera and press jacket, and you could make yourself an even bigger target for the army snipers, but go incognito with casual dress and a small amateur camera or smartphone, and you could be accused of being a dalan and roughly ejected from the area.
But even as reporting has become more dangerous, journalists still head out each day to cover the uprising. In showing such grit, they are far from unique. People in virtually every corner of society are throwing aside livelihoods and risking death to oppose dictatorship. Even state railway workers, who earn a pittance, facing ultimatums to break ranks with a nationwide strike and return to work or be evicted from their staff housing, have responded by packing up their belongings and making themselves homeless. Amid such sacrifice, many journalists feel obliged as citizens, and not merely as media professionals, to brave bullets and imprisonment to do their jobs.
In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. HST
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