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Journalism of Courage
Update 3 on the fifth day of Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyis trial reaches a newsroom in Vikaspuri just as the west Delhi suburb is slipping into another summer afternoon slumber. The terse message in Burmese,mailed to assistant editor Mungpi,comes from an undercover reporter near the Insein prison in Rangoon,where Suu Kyi is being tried: The defence counsel entered the prison at 10 a.m. Security is tight. There are plainclothes security officials,police vehicles and prison vans. Women from the National League for Democracy are here. There are many youths too,waiting in the rain.
Mungpi,31,an UNHCR refugee from Myanmar,is one of 20 people working at Mizzima,an independent Myanmar news agency which has been running from Delhi for a decade now. Its present home is a bare second-floor apartment,one of whose rooms is also home to Mungpis family. Here,the staff clean up copy,translate the news into English and upload it on to the agencys website,where it is read by Myanmars people hungry for information outside of sanitised government versionsa continuous ticker on democracys thwarted progress in Myanmar from a newsroom in exile.
Mizzimas moment came during the monks protest of 2007 and the subsequent repression by the junta. The number of visits went up to 3 lakh till the junta blocked Internet access to all websites like Mizzima,including to the Irrawady News Magazine. Even then,we managed to upload stories from inside the country, says Myint. Initially,Mizzimas target audience was the global community interested in what was happening in Myanmar. Today,40 per cent of our audience is inside Myanmar, says Myint. Of the countrys 55 million people,only one per cent has access to Internet. But that small section uses the Internet effectively. Even though our website is banned in the country,our readers know how to access it through proxy servers.
The Mizzima team in Delhi is a close-knit one,with one Indian,Mukey,the cartoonist. Most havent been home for years now. Mungpi,31,who comes from the Chin state,says,My mother died last year. I dont know how my father and brother are doing. The Myanmar community in Delhi is a tiny one-barely touching 3,000-and the journalists often find themselves lost in an alien land. Mizzima journalists are paid very little and living standards are not high. As refugees in India,they often have difficulty renting houses. Its an uncertain life and full of daily trials. In the midst of all this,to work as professional journalists becomes difficult sometimes, says Myint.
In the newsroom,work continues between power cuts and conversations over the American who swam to Suu Kyis house on University Avenue in Rangoons Bahan township. The germ of another story idea,one that is uploaded on to the website in the evening: Do you know John Yettaw?
