Postcard from Burma: An Orwellian Flashback

When I was in Rangoon not long ago, reporting “The Burmese Spring” (available to subscribers), nobody I met seemed more energized by the signs of political change than Burmese reporters. For decades, until Burma’s military dictatorship began to unwind itself last year, local journalists labored under a censorship system that was diligent even by the standards of autocracy: the Ministry of Information Press Scrutiny and Registration Department applied its red pen not only to the news but also to fairy tales and winning lottery numbers and horoscopes. Last year, Burma extended a four-year reign in the world’s top five jailers of the press, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. A newspaper editor once showed me how the censorship system worked. He handed me a four-inch stack of paper, his latest batch of rejections from the censors, each page marked with red-ink circles around offending phrases. A typical cut: a sentence comparing the architecture of the capital, Naypitaw, to architecture in Pyongyang. Also censored: the word “censored.”

So, it was difficult to know how much to believe, early this year, when the head of the scrutiny department, U Tint Swe, began proclaiming himself a dinosaur. “By this time next year,” he told Burmese journalists in March, “if you want to see censorship, don’t come to Myanmar, go to China.” (The Chinese Embassy complained.) The censor-in-chief seemed to be savoring the pose of liberator, telling a local paper in June, “When we have parliament and government working on democratic process, how can censorship work at the same time?” He was right, of course, not that anyone expected him to be the one to point it out. Even the building where the censors conducted their daily ministrations seemed to be poised for extinction. The sign outside had become so bedraggled that, when I paid a visit in April, the “o” was dangling off the bottom of “Inf rmation.”

And yet, in a reminder of how fragile Burma’s changes may be, the regime’s instincts for thought control are still firing erratically. In March, a prominent astrologer predicted that the regime would not grant full freedom of the press this year, and, sure enough, the scrutiny board promptly struck the astrologer’s remark from any press reports. More serious, the government let it be known that it intended to keep a tight grip on the press. More than two months after officials promised to close the scrutiny board, it endures, and two weeks ago it suspended the publication of two journals—the Voice Weekly and Envoy—for violating unspecified “rules and regulations.” Reporters rebelled; they organized rallies against the suspension, and marched through Rangoon and Mandalay wearing T shirts that said “Stop Killing the Press.” To everyone’s surprise, the state backed down, agreeing to allow them to resume publication.

More trouble remained, however: last Friday, the government announced the formation of the Myanmar Core Press Council to regulate the press. It didn’t take long for the editor Thiha Saw to discover, as he put it, that the new body “looks like it will be replacing the tasks of the censorship board.” Reporters rebelled once more, and, once more, the state backed down, agreeing to postpone the formation of the council until an understanding can be reached.

Viewed one way, all this back and forth is strangely encouraging; under the old system, nobody would’ve been able to criticize the censorship board, much less take those objections to the street. But it is also a reminder that the new government has adopted more of the vocabulary of freedom than the spirit of it. In the Myanmar Times, in May, the outgoing head of the scrutiny department, U Tint Swe, outlined his image of the future, when publishers who “break our rules” will not be punished as criminals, but sued in civil court. And then, in a phrase that Orwell could scarcely have improved upon, he added, “All citizens have the right to write what they believe and think, but not necessarily to distribute it.”

Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Evan Osnos