Myanmar’s Tragedy, Frame by Frame

The Jakarta Post   |  Wed, 01/23/2008 10:17 AM  |  Profile

Aung Zaw is the founder and editor of The Irrawaddy, the Thailand-based magazine which played a key role in distributing stories and images from September's protests in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma).  Trish Anderton profiles the journalist and former student activist.

Aung Zaw was 20 in 1988, a kid running from the law, hunted by Burma's intelligence service for his role as a student organizer. He fled to his family's country house, far from their home in Rangoon, but his mother came to tell him to keep moving.

So he did the sensible thing to do in this land of 400,000 Buddhist monks: he donned the now-famous saffron robes, shaved his head and went into hiding at a monastery.

"There was a senior abbot in the house," the journalist recalled in a hotel room in Bangkok. "He said, 'There's nobody in my monastery, so I need company, come with me.'"

They traveled by water -- "it's funny, monks driving a speedboat!" -- to a remote spot in the countryside.

A city boy, Aung Zaw found himself soaking up a kind of peace he had never experienced before. During the day he and the abbot visited other monasteries by boat. In the evening he would hike to the nearest town to catch the news.

"We had to go through a rice field, a beautiful rice field and [past] a big lake. They fixed a big old antique radio so I could listen to the BBC every night. The laymen came in support to listen with me, smoking big cheroots and talking politics. It was a beautiful time."

It was also a time of recovery. The young activist had been arrested earlier that year and held for a week in the notorious Insein Prison.

"Even a week is enough for me. I couldn't stand it," he says. "They beat you or punch you for two hours. After that you crawl back to your cell."

The rural respite turned out to be brief. Things were heating up in Rangoon. Two months later, Aung Zaw traded in his robes and headed back to take part in demonstrations. In a now-familiar pattern, there was a brief, heady time of rebellion on the streets of the capital. Then the full weight of the military came crashing down. Thousands of protesters were killed. Aung Zaw fled across the border, and has never returned.

Two years after he left, he launched the Burma Information Group in Bangkok to document human rights abuses in his native country. It grew into The Irrawaddy, a monthly magazine and online news operation based in Chiang Mai.

The outpouring of images from Myanmar during this year's protests seemed spontaneous, but it was not, says Aung Zaw. "There are photographers, both professional and unprofessional ones, who were out on the streets knowing something was going to happen. And they were waiting."

Now they are waiting again, he adds. Despite the brutality of the crackdown, he does not expect to have trouble finding correspondents in the future. "I think more people will work for us now. It's nothing to do with the money, because the amount is very, very small ... I think they just want to tell what is going on inside the country."  

That desire comes with considerable risk. He worries about his stringers in Myanmar. "We have to be careful," he says. "We have a very comfortable life here, and I don't want to take any credit from what they're doing. They're very brave people. I need to protect them as much as possible."

Part of the magazines's budget comes from the U.S. State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy. Aung Zaw insists that has not compromised The Irrawaddy's integrity. "As long as we can exercise our independent policy freely, we have to take it," he argues. "We don't have other alternatives yet." He hopes the magazine will be self-supporting someday.

Meanwhile, he waits to go home, and wonders if he ever will. He knows activists who left Burma in the 1960s and died waiting to go back.

"We've seen a lot of people, even our age, die. I just don't know. I think there's still hope to go home. But you don't know."

If he does get back to Rangoon, or Yangon as it's now known, he knows where he wants to go first: the glittering Shwedagon Pagoda, a focal point of the demonstrations in 1988 and again this year.

"I want to hear the sounds of bells, and the people. The peace," he says. "I miss that feeling of peacefulness, which I can't find here a lot."

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