Across the globe, almost 44 million people are displaced and of those, over 15 million live as refugees in foreign lands, according to latest figures from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Among the legions who have been forced to flee violence and oppression are journalists, seeking to reveal the truth.
Many reporter refugees seek to continue their work from abroad, with a mission to reveal human rights abuses and provide good information for their compatriots back home. In a report published for World Refugee Day, June 20, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) highlights journalists in exile who continue with their work.
One large media-in-exile that is highly influential in its home country is the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), which has been able to operate stably because its headquarters is in distant Norway. Before DVB, other radio stations tried to operate across the border in Thailand, but poor quality transmitters and local armed groups prevented them from being effective.
The Norwegian government provided support to establish DVB in 1992, just one year after Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, the station has developed TV programming and shortwave radio broadcasting. It broadcasts back to Burma (also known as Myanmar) by satellite.
One of DVB’s founders and current editor-in-chief, Aye Chan Naing, was a student at the time of the 1988 democracy demonstrations.
“I joined the thousands of students who took to the streets. Because of the violence of the repression, I decided to leave Burma with the idea of joining the groups that wanted to organize an armed uprising,” Naing told media rights organization, RSF.
In Thailand, he and other students formed the “All Burma Students’ Democratic Front.” Naing worked for the organizations press service. Later, when Norway offered to help with the station, the Burmese government in exile asked him to go Oslo to run the station with others.
Now 30 years after the 1988 crackdown, he and other Burmese in exile continue to expose injustice in Burma through leaked footage and on the ground sources from their home country.
DVB also has staff working in Burma at great personal risk. Currently, 17 video journalists are in prison. Nevertheless, Naing says the risk for them is worth it.
“Our video-journalists are speaking on behalf of the entire Burmese population. Without them, the international community would know nothing of what is happening inside the country, and the Burmese would see and hear nothing but government propaganda,” he says.
Burma has one of the most oppressive regimes toward media. In Freedom House’s 2011 ranking of countries by press freedom, it places Burma near the bottom, ranking 191 of 196 countries. In Burma newspapers and magazines must turn over each issue to the Press Scrutiny Board for censorship before being published.
But DVB’s influence provides a significant challenge to government censors. According to research by RSF, 66 percent of Burmese say they watch DVB “everyday” or “often,” 20 percent say they watch it “rarely,” and the remaining 14 percent of those surveyed said they never watch it.
According to DVB, the station has 5 million regular viewers and listeners in Burma out of a population of about 54 million, and 10,000 unique visitors per day to its website, with traffic mainly coming from the United States and Singapore.
For years, large numbers of Burmese have fled across the border to Thailand, some because of oppression, others searching income-earning opportunities denied them at home. However, with Thai-Burmese government relations improving recently, Thailand has been more willing to refuse Burmese entry or forcefully repatriates them.
In recognition of World Refugee Day, RSF published a report, “Forced to Flee But Not Silenced” about refugee reporters who have continued their work abroad. Included in the report are stories of Bashana Abeywardane from Sri Lanka, Jean Bosco Gasasira from Rwanda, Cuban dissident Ricardo Gonzalez Alfonso, Iranian Kaveh Ghoreishi, and Fexreddin Hacibeyli from Azerbaidjan.
