True Democracy: Myanmar Gives Freedom Of Media

28.02.2012

It was a newspaper article that just months ago, Myanmar’s draconian state censors never would have approved.

It told how prison authorities crudely attempted to cure a scabies outbreak by wiping down naked inmates with medicine-laden brooms — a demeaning act that revealed the poverty of the nation’s prisons and the decrepit state of its health care system

“In the past it would’ve been a very dangerous thing to publish,” said Zaw Thet Htwe, who wrote the story and was a political prisoner himself until last month. “It wasn’t allowed.”

But in a sign of just how much is changing in this long-oppressed nation, it was allowed. The article was not only published this month in the Health Journal, a Yangon-based weekly, but it hit the streets without having to be reviewed first by the government’s infamous censorship body, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department.

Journalists have been jailed, beaten and blacklisted for decades in Myanmar, and the government continues to censor reporting about politics and other subjects it deems sensitive.