Burma and the ‘new journalism’
Albi Furlan examines the rise of new, demotic media in response to the recent Burmese Saffron Revolution.
For a while now, it has seemed just a matter of time before bloggers with camera-phones began to report the breaking news earlier and more efficiently than the “conventional” media. Unfortunately, the event it took finally to spur this shift was the Burmese uprising.
Events in Burma have rendered many new truths vivid to the international community, chief amongst which is the fact that you simply cannot silence the internet community, regardless of how strong a grip a military regime has over the information infrastructure.
CNN has recognised this and launched “i-Report”, a service where any user can upload newsworthy videos they have taken with their camera-phone. The Times and The Guardian were punctual in their coverage of the ‘Saffron Revolution’ two weeks ago, immediately displaying pictures of an orange wave of marching monks approaching a grey wall of shielded police with batons and flip-flops.
Yet the same articles which covered the protests reported simultaneously on the fact that journalists were being escorted out of the country, with up to a dozen forced out of Burma within the first day of the rising, after an army blitz at a local hotel.
Kenji Nagai, a 50-year-old Japanese photojournalist, was not so lucky, and he died after being shot by Burmese Army forces. Since then, it is estimated that another 13 people have died and plenty more, many of them monks, have simply ‘disappeared’, a common fate under military regimes.
Last monday, only three days after the start of the revolution, The Guardian correspondent in the region signed off as “South-east Asian correspondent”, without giving the precise location. An article on the same page was signed by two journalists in New Delhi. A Times correspondent was writing from the Burmese border.
Following this forced exodus of journalists and photographers from the region, we have to thank the locals who have, or had, access to the internet. Burma only had 31,000 internet users out of a population of 47 million before the military junta, headed by General Than Shwe, completely shut down the internet. This must have been as easy as flicking a switch, as the majority of public servers within the country are under the iron grip of the military.
Now the bloggers will have to hide. The military regime, having dealt with the more immediate threat of the marching monks, has turned its attention to those who might spread information about the way it is handling the crisis.
After 45 years of military rule and rebellions quenched with blood, the worst in 1988 with an estimate of over 3,000 dead, the methods employed by the Burmese junta to stop the uprising are no secret, but this does not mean they should not be heard outside the country.
The few reports that do trickle out of Burma via connections to foreign servers through the mobile phone networks (landlines have also been switched off) talk of monks being stripped, beaten and forced to give up their monkhood in public. The aim is clear: to shame the monks and decrease the level of influence they have over the general population.
The Times interviewed some of the unlikely heroes responsible for broadcasting these atrocities to the world. They are normal men and women who talk about their lives under the regime before the Saffron Revolution began and became a red massacre. Now, finally, their daily reality can be recognised by the outside world.
