(SEAPA/IFEX) – A campaign to relocate Burmese refugees to camps along Thailand’s border with Burma is endangering and raising anxiety among exiled Burmese journalists who are operating from within Thailand. Although the relocation program is not specifically aimed at exiled Burmese reporters and editors, it magnifies their risk of arrest and deportation as they struggle […]
(SEAPA/IFEX) – A campaign to relocate Burmese refugees to camps along Thailand’s border with Burma is endangering and raising anxiety among exiled Burmese journalists who are operating from within Thailand.
Although the relocation program is not specifically aimed at exiled Burmese reporters and editors, it magnifies their risk of arrest and deportation as they struggle to provide alternative and independent sources of news and information on developments in Burma.
Long ruled by a military junta, Burma has stifled press freedom since the late 1980s and hardly any independently-sourced information can escape from, or flow freely within, the country. In Burma, independent-minded journalists risk imprisonment and all mass media outlets are owned or controlled by the state and business interests with links to the government.
As a result, many Burmese journalists have fled abroad. Burmese news media outlets are operating from the United States, Europe, South Asia, China, and Southeast Asia. In Thailand alone there is a substantial community of exiled Burmese journalists producing nearly a dozen publications and online reports on developments within Burma. Taking into consideration reporters working for foreign news services, those publishing their own reports, stringers for smaller publications or periodicals and former political advocates trying to make a transition to independent journalism, there could be as many as 100 Burmese journalists in Thailand.
In what observers see as a move to improve Thai-Burmese relations, however, Thailand gave an estimated 4,000 refugees living within its borders until 31 March 2005 to relocate to camps along the Thai-Burmese border. The effect was to trigger a rush of journalists into hiding and to force others into camps that cut off their access to their sources or any means of producing and delivering news on Burma.
“Irrawaddy”, an independent Burmese news magazine publishing out of Chiang Mai, Thailand, recently noted that even former political activists registered as “Persons of Concern” (POCs) with the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), “will be deemed illegal immigrants by Thailand if they do not move into the camps . . . As illegal immigrants, Burmese refugees may be subject to arrest, detention and deportation. Thailand will also refuse to grant them exit clearance to resettle in third countries, even if those countries have already accepted their asylum applications.”
On 5 April, the Burmese online news agency http://Mizzima.com, based in New Dehli, reported that many exiled journalists in Thailand, including three Burmese staffers for the exiled Democratic Voice of Burma radio station, had gone back to the camps. Many have petitioned the UNHCR to allow them to stay outside the camps so that they may continue their journalistic work.
Mizzima said, however, that the UNHCR told the journalists they could be arrested and repatriated to Burma if they left the camps. Once inside the camps, Burmese journalists, like the rest of the POCs, are reportedly denied access to the Internet, mobile phones or any other means of keeping in touch with the outside world.
