Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo worked meticulously last year to unpick events that led to the slaughter of 10 Rohingya men in the village of Inn Din in the Myanmar province of Rakhine. This was one of many massacres committed after the army sealed the province off and began a systematic campaign of terror which has driven the majority of the Muslim population into Bangladesh. The report published by Reuters after the arrest of its two reporters was unprecedented. It provided a detailed record of the kind of planning, incitement to violence, and murderous brutality that led a UN investigation team last week to recommend that Myanmar’s army leadership should be tried for genocide.
For doing their job and with exceptional courage, the two Reuters journalists were sentenced by a court in Yangon on Monday to seven years in prison. Allegedly, they had breached the colonial-era official secrets act. But the charges and the trial were both travesties of justice, designed to intimidate the press and discourage further scrutiny of the army campaign against minority Rohingya Muslims. One police witness even admitted in court that the two men were the victims of a set-up. The journalists had been given documents by the police, and were then arrested.
Once again, Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto head of government, has watched silently while injustice is committed on her watch. In the years since she was released from house arrest, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s fall from international grace has been spectacular. Her failure to speak out against war crimes committed by the army, or to defend the principles of a free press and the rule of law, are a betrayal of all the friends and allies who campaigned tenaciously for her release.