Six surprises in (un)covering Myanmar

Going to Myanmar as a journalist was unthinkable only six months ago

By Veronica C. Uy, Published in the PJR Reports, March-April 2012

unintended selfie

1. I am going to Myanmar.

Going to Myanmar as a journalist was unthinkable just six months ago. Journalists used to go as tourists and ran the risk of arrest, detention, and deportation when doing their job. I got the call Sunday night that we were scheduled to leave Wednesday for the following Sunday’s by-elections.

What new me would come out of Myanmar?

For giving away leaflets in a market on the 10th anniversary of the 8888 Student Movement, an activist-friend, now migrant-rights advocate Ellene Sana, was detained for a week in a “military guest house” on charges of fomenting unrest before she was deported. The delightful anticipation of covering an off-beaten place (we thank the Department of Foreign Affairs [DFA] for including media in the official Philippine team of election observers), if not an off-beat topic, was curbed by journalist-friends’ admonition to be careful of the “ruthless junta.”

2. Myanmar is a place for time-travel.

Myanmar belongs to a small, exclusive club of countries hardly touched by 21st century technology. Other remote places are naturally detached from the rest of the world due to distance or inhospitable climate. The dictatorship of its military junta and the resulting economic sanctions have isolated it so that it has achieved what 1970s crooner Jim Croce wanted, Time in a Bottle. Myanmar could be the Philippines of that decade, with its aircon-less and decrepit taxicabs and buses, its intermittent phone (and Internet) connections, and power-supply fluctuations (its five-a-day brownouts can make you feel you’re in Mindanao), and well, its dictatorship.

On the eve of the elections, when Daw (Lady) Aung San Suu Kyi took a trip to the district of Kawhmu, a largely rural area dominated by the ethnic group Karen a couple of hours away from Yangon, my boss Roby Alampay and I joined a convoy of vehicles that followed her. We were told that the place did not have hotels or inns, so we brought enough clothes, food, and water for an overnight stay in the van.

We went ahead of the pack, and took pictures and videos and interviewed Suu Kyi supporters at major stops, then waited for her convoy that included journalists from all over the world. After allowing the elections and The Lady’s candidacy and campaign, the junta is unlikely to cause her any harm. But hey, we wanted to make sure.

By sunset (we left Yangon around 3 p.m.), and on a dusty road (this is an exaggeration, the road was more like a dried river-bed with rough dirt waves and troughs threatening to disassemble our van), it became clear why The Lady and her National League for Democracy (NLD) planned this: They wanted us to see what under- or non-development has brought to the people of Myanmar.

If you ignore the poverty and the people’s hardship, one can easily fall into the trap of romanticizing a Myanmar in suspended animation, especially in Yangon, where hotels provide the convenience and comfort of running water, pre-ordered food, electricity, and Internet connection. The people we interviewed were sickly and undernourished (although surprisingly not miserly with their generosity and their appreciation of the small opportunity for democracy and progress that the junta was allowing).

3. Covering peace can be exciting.

Conflict is the stuff of primetime news, or as fellow Myanmar by-elections Philippine observer Tony Velasquez said, “‘pag walang dugo, di e-ere (no blood, no airing).” But after decades of conflict, the junta seems ready to give the people a chance.

The thought first struck me at the garden of Suu Kyi’s sprawling lakeside mansion about two hours before the scheduled 9 a.m. press conference. Against a background of blaring campaign songs, with siblings in journalism of all colors and shapes milling about, the air vibrated with excitement. The warm 40-degree wind cooled as it passed the trees. A day earlier, the Myanmar foreign minister had announced that media coverage of the elections was free-for-all, with reasonable restrictions against delaying or stopping the electoral process.

The Burmese exiles who have since returned—really, freedom fighters who fought with their pens, guns, and wits—could not hide their cautious optimism. “The people seem to be smiling more,” they said.

The following day, when the NLD was announcing that they had won most of the 44 seats they were gunning for, the singing and the dancing in the streets reminded me a little of Edsa People Power in 1986. The hip-hop campaign jingle that called on “Myanmar (to) wake up” stung my small eyes.

see video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TyMmedKS98&feature=share

4. The size of the sacrifice determines the size of the god.

Aung San Suu Kyi is a god among her people. She symbolizes their suffering, their struggle, and their strength. She had given up being a wife and mother to be with her people. She was in Myanmar when her husband Michael Aris died of prostate cancer in London on March 27, 1999. He had petitioned the junta to allow him to visit Suu Kyi one last time, but they had rejected his request. He had not seen her since a Christmas visit in 1995. The junta had always urged her to join her family abroad, but she knew that she would not be allowed to return. She did not see her sons Alexander and Kim until about 20 years after, in 2010 when the junta started its reforms, among them releasing her from house arrest and allowing her sons to visit.

Following her convoy, we felt her people’s adoration, receiving their residual love as they gave us flowers and cheered us on, as if we were somehow instrumental in the small freedoms of expression that they were enjoying and that they hope would soon translate into freedoms from want and hunger.

As a mother, whose greatest gift are my children, I realized that normal, average life is a blessing I enjoy because some had chosen—perhaps tentatively—to become divine during the dark days of our own martial law.

5. So this is what a parachute journalist feels like.

Even while I’ve written about Myanmar as a reporter covering the DFA, the articles were usually in relation to diplomacy, or the Philippines’ and the international community’s efforts to persuade the military junta to a roadmap to democracy, and then actually following that roadmap. But in Myanmar, I came and went, inspired by stories of charm and courage.

6. Sunsets can be pink.

In the afternoon of April 2, on the way to the airport, a pink sun bid us goodbye. Nobody in the moving van—particularly the visiting Filipinos used to glorious, fiery sunsets—was able to capture it.

____________________________________________________________

Former Inquirer.net reporter Veronica Uy now reports for Interaksyon.com