TOO MANY ISSUES
Apart from the generals, there is a surfeit of other subjects to be scrutinized in Burma, courtesy of the way the military has run the country since 1962. For instance: Households experience chronic power shortages, leaving much of the country in almost permanent blackout, but the junta's new capital in isolated Naypyidaw gleams with 24-hour electricity. For some reason, too, women workers have become staple sights in road projects while children as young as seven toil away in tea stalls, many with only food as their wage. Burma has also long been known as an AIDS hot spot.

But a straightforward report on any of these or something similar is bound to land one behind bars. Tired of dodging authorities, many Burmese journalists have elected to report on their country from far away.

There are more than 100 Burmese journalists now working in exile, mostly in Chiang Mai, Thailand. They fled from Burma after a crackdown following the 8888 Revolution (a student-led uprising that culminated on August 8, 1988) against the military junta.

“I myself am a persona non grata,” says Aung Zaw, who is editor in chief of the popular Irrawaddy magazine. “I cannot go back to Burma. I am forced to live in Thailand. From outside, we tell the story as much as we (can).”

Aung Zaw says he was jailed for a week in 1988, while his younger brother spent eight years in detention for participating in student demonstrations against the junta.

Irrawaddy magazine comes out in print, but is also online. It has become one of the most visited news websites on Burma and Southeast Asia. At the height of the Saffron Revolution, it had 20 million hits in a month, a phenomenal jump from its regular average of 80,000 hits per month.

SHORT ON FUNDS, STAFF
Aung Zaw says most of the Burmese media in exile are understaffed and underfunded. Yet while their apparent staying power is admirable, what is really remarkable about them is their army of sources within Burma itself.

“We have a lot of sources inside the country,” admits Aung Zaw. “We rely on the telephone, Internet, email…talking to sources. Some of our sources have been with us for 10 years, but some of them we don’t meet or have met just recently.”

“We are not disconnected,” he says. “Ideas keep flowing inside and outside Burma.”

This can only be an indication that while the Burmese themselves are left in the dark about much that is going on in their own land, many of them understand that the rest of the world needs to know as much as possible about Burma if they want to put a stop to the junta’s abuses. Thus, there are those who risking the ire of authorities and investing considerable sums just to get information out of the country.

CLEARANCES REQUIRED
After all, in Burma, to own a computer and other electronic devices capable of accessing outside information, one must first secure government clearance.

Too, Internet access is not only limited, but also has very prohibitive rates and highly controlled. A mobile phone’s Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card, meanwhile, costs $1,500 to $2,000 each.

One senior editor in Rangoon theorizes that it is the younger generation that has become very creative in communicating with the outside world. “We have no (open) access to Yahoo, gmail, YouTube, and the like,” he says, “but everyone seems to be breaking the rules…they have secret access.”

Still, the information from Burma often comes in trickles. Or at least it seems that way to impatient editors at international news organizations. This has prompted some media companies to send their own reporters to Burma — itself a tricky operation, since Burmese embassies are quite strict with granting visa requests; anyone who identifies his or her occupation as “journalist” is turned down. Journalists who intend to make several visits to the country therefore tend to use aliases in their reports to avoid difficulty in securing visas for subsequent trips.

DEPORTATION, DEATH
Old Burma hands, though, say that any foreign visitor to the country is likely to be the subject of surveillance by authorities, and advise caution in talking to the locals and discretion in taking photographs.

“You just have to be careful who you are with, just use your common sense,” says a foreign photojournalist who has been in and out of Burma for the last 15 years and is now working on a photo book on the military junta. “Just don’t draw attention to what you’re doing.”

But the risks confronting members of the foreign media are obviously less compared to those faced by local journalists. According to one business magazine editor in Rangoon, the worst that could happen to a foreign journalist in Burma is deportation and seizure of photographs, discs, or printed materials about the country.

Then again, during one of the biggest of the monk-led rallies in 2007, Japanese photographer Kenji Nagai was shot and killed by a Burmese soldier. Nagai was working for APF Tsushin, a media company based in Tokyo.

It’s a situation that could test the resolve of anyone, but to the likes of Aung Zaw, it’s also one that highlights the role of media in society. “Without a free media,” he says, “a democratic society is incomplete.” What more for one under an autocratic regime.