ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

By WAI MOE | Burma’s military junta arrested two Rangoon-based journalists on Wednesday, bringing the number of reporters put behind bars since the beginning of the year to at least ten.

Sources told The Irrawaddy that Khin Maung Aye, editor of the weekly journal News Watch, and Tun Tun Thein, a reporter for the same publication, were arrested at their homes on the evening of November 5 and taken to an interrogation center run by the Special Branch Police.

Journalists in Rangoon said that the pair were probably arrested for a report on corruption in the country’s courts that appeared in the July issue of the journal. A journalist close to News Watch said that the publication had come under pressure from the authorities to reveal anonymous sources cited in the article.

Other sources suggested that the two journalists may have been targeted for having contact with exiled dissidents, or for publishing an article that had not been approved by the censorship board.

Staff at the News Watch office in Rangoon confirmed that the arrests had taken place, but provided no further details.

According to sources, before their arrests, the detained journalists had already been found guilty of unspecified offenses by a court in Rangoon’s Bahan Township and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. They are currently being held in Insein Prison.

Since the beginning of 2008, there have been at least 11 media-related arrests in Burma, including the detention of a poet, Saw Wai, who published a poem in January that contained the hidden message, “Snr-Gen Than Shwe is crazy with power.”

In February, Thant Zin, editor of the Myanmar Nation, and the weekly publication’s manager, Sein Win Maung, were arrested at their office in Thingangyun Township in Rangoon.

Another journalist, Zaw Thet Htwe, was arrested along with two of his colleagues while doing relief work for victims of Cyclone Nargis. Reporter Ei Khaing Oo, of the journal Eco-vision, was detained while reporting on the aid effort.

In September, Saw Myint Than, a journalist with Flower News Journal, was arrested under suspicion of sending information to The Irrawaddy, an exiled publication that is banned in Burma. He was released on October 20.

Ohn Kyaing, a veteran journalist and a member of the main opposition party, the National League for Democracy, was arrested in early October.

According to the Paris-based media watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, the Burmese authorities have recently issued a set of ten rules that local journalists must follow or face jail terms for disobeying.

One of the rules requires the submission of all photos, drawings, paintings, articles, novels or poems to the censorship board prior to publication.