By Peggy Simpson
To Aye Aye Win, courage means “to stand for the truth.” That may not sound like a tall order. But Win works in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, “where telling the truth could be deemed as a crime and you may be making the regime unhappy with the truth you expose.”
Win has been named a Courage in Journalism Award winner for 2008 by the International Women’s Media Foundation for her work for the Associated Press in Myanmar, where foreign correspondents rely on her on-the-ground reporting about events they often are barred from seeing.
Win is following in the footsteps of her father, Sein Win. He worked in Burmese newspapers after World War II and in 1958 became publisher and editor of an English-language paper, the Guardian, which was nationalized by the socialist government. He was jailed three times, including in 1965-68. He lost his job after being freed from jail, but the AP snapped him up in 1969.
Win took over for her father in December 1989. She had grown up watching him work around the clock to get the news out and watching as the military demanded unsuccessfully that he reveal his sources. She always wanted to be a reporter. Her dad told her it was not a woman’s job. “He was worried I might also be sent to jail. He was very, very cautious. He kept discouraging me. But he knows he can’t control me.”
With no journalism courses available in Myanmar, Win got a master’s in English at the University of Rangoon and tutored in its English department, from 1979-87. She also apprenticed herself to her father in his AP office. After a decade of that, she worked briefly as translator for the government but realized that was not a good fit. “Right from graduation, I wanted nothing but to be a journalist.”
Finally, her father agreed she was ready. Looking back, she regrets “wasting so much time” but she also understands what her father was doing. “Earlier, I would have been much more hot-headed. In college, I would join any anti-government regime…I have a little rebellion inside of me. …By having me wait, he had me more sober.”
Win internalized the lectures her father gave her about being an AP reporter: “He would say you have to set your emotions aside…When I write and report it has to be very straight and unbiased.” In Myanmar, however, military and government officials have wanted to control the news, not have unbiased reporting.
Win knows the risks but doesn’t dwell on them. She strategizes on ways to minimize her visibility while reporting. She recruits sources, including from her own family. Her mother is a physician but housebound after a stroke. An avid newshound, she monitors the TV and radio. Win’s daughter also is a physician, working in a remote area where there are many protests. She often is the first person to know about bloody clashes between protestors and the military, when casualties show up at the hospital.
Covering protests always is dangerous, but as an AP reporter, also necessary. Win and her husband, also a reporter, cover protests in a team, “with at least one or two of our close friends…We don’t stay alone. If anything happens, no one would notice that you’ve been beaten or taken away.”
Covering the country’s pro-democracy leader and Nobel Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, is another challenge. In 1997, Win and her husband were part of the crowd around Suu Kyi when the riot police spotted her. At first, she pretended not to hear their orders to leave but says “you have to know when you finally have to give up.” The road already was blocked and the police moved a bus toward Win and her husband and told them to get on. The police batons were out, ready for use if they refused. They boarded the bus.
But after being driven far from the scene, she says she told the police officer she had to stop to buy water. At a small store, Win not only bought water, she let the locals know what was happening. “People saw us being taken away. They can still lock us up but we have to have people see us.”
Until recently, Win was the only female journalist from Myanmar working for the foreign media. Now there are five. That made it difficult to blend into a crowd. In 2001, for instance, when Aung San Suu Kyi was travelling, the military blocked reporters from the Rangoon rail station. Her male colleagues posed as travelers. “I walked 10 feet behind and thought I was smart enough to escape the military-intelligence police but then someone shouted ‘That’s her! That’s her.’ And they came to me and said I had to leave.”
The climate has eased since 2004, with a change in government. The country is in the midst of a seven-step roadmap aimed at a general election in 2010 that Win hopes will lead to a democratic government. Still, government briefings can be tense. At one in 2006, a military policeman was asked about protestors trying to derail the democratic process. “He said, ‘anyone who protests will be crushed.’ I stood up and asked, ‘When are you going to take action against the protestors you say are breaking the rules?’ And he replied, ‘if you are one of these people who try to jeopardize the political process, then you also will be annihilated. You will be crushed.’ ”
So far, she never has gotten that midnight knock at the door, from police wanting to arrest her, unlike her husband and her father. “I always have that fear. A common danger is you can be picked up at any time for suspicions they have about you. We always worry that if what we write is too sensitive, they will call and ask where we got our sources. We won’t tell but they can pick us up.”
She steers away from analysis and sticks to facts. That was true when a deadly cyclone struck May 2-3, 2008. The death toll was about 130,000 dead and missing, higher than for any one country in the tsunami several years earlier. There was an international outcry when the government balked at letting in relief agencies immediately.
“I focused on covering what was happening on the ground,” she said, “not on criticism of the government.” That was “very, very hard,” because electricity was off, telephone lines were cut.
Win, tied to the AP desk to keep track of the crisis, enlisted friends with video cameras to document the destruction, despite local government opposition. Her mother monitored the radio nonstop, letting her know when the government slipped in the latest casualty figures.
On May 14, Win was rushed to a hospital and treated for exhaustion. Doctors prescribed bed rest but, with her husband and colleagues helping, she was working the telephones from the hospital the next day and back in the AP office the following day. “When there’s news, I still want to do it,” she says. “I think this work is very addictive. But I don’t see this work as unhealthy. It makes me very active.”
She sees her reporting as “doing a service to the people and even to the country, I’m letting the people inside the country, as well as outside, know what is happening. It is a great job – to at least tell the truth, so the world can see what is happening inside the country.”
Peggy Simpson is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.