A junta-controlled court on Wednesday sentenced The Irrawaddy’s former publisher to five years in prison for sedition, in the regime’s latest move to crack down on Myanmar’s independent media, which have been exposing the regime’s atrocities since the coup in 2021.
U Thaung Win was arrested at his home in Yangon on Sept. 29 last year and charged with violating the Publishing and Distribution Act by reporting news that “negatively affected national security, rule of law and public peace”. He has been detained at Insein Prison since his arrest.
However, Western Yangon District Court sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment and fined him 100,000 kyats (about US$47) under Article 124-A of the Penal Code, which deals with the crime of sedition. The court has also issued arrest warrants for three other editors from The Irrawaddy, a court source said.
U Thaung Win applied for a publishing license for The Irrawaddy in late 2012 after Myanmar launched democratic reforms the previous year. However, he was never involved in the editorial department or its decisions. His arrest came a year-and-a-half after the regime first targeted The Irrawaddy by filing a lawsuit against it. After that its journalists went into hiding to avoid arrest by the junta, and The Irrawaddy now operates offshore. U Thaung Win left the organization when it moved offshore.
Sources close to the case said crony businessmen who enjoy cozy relations with the junta, including U Aung Ko Win of Kanbawza (KBZ) Group of Companies, were the motivating force behind the regime’s prosecution of the former publisher.
Since the coup, The Irrawaddy has been at the forefront of reporting on the regime’s atrocities against civilians while exposing the network of crony businessmen who enjoy shady links with the regime both at home and abroad. In September 2022, The Irrawaddy published a story about the close relations between regime chief Min Aung Hlaing and U Aung Ko Win. U Thaung Win was arrested by officers from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) three days after the story was published. The CID is under the regime’s Ministry of Home Affairs led by Lieutenant-General Soe Htut, who is close to U Aung Ko Win.
During his trial, U Thaung Win, who is in his mid-50s, testified that his involvement with The Irrawaddy was limited to the use of his name in applying for a publishing license, and that he wasn’t involved in the editorial process. A former political prisoner, U Thaung Win took part in the pro-democracy uprising in 1988 as a university student.
U Ye Ni, the editor of The Irrawaddy’s Burmese Edition, condemned the junta’s sentencing of U Thaung Win, saying the former publisher had nothing to do with the news outlet’s coverage.
“But we’ve learned that he has become a victim as KBZ’s U Aung Ko Win was not pleased with our coverage and we have shared this exclusive information with international diplomats and embassies,” he said.
Since the coup, the regime has banned more than a dozen news outlets, including The Irrawaddy, which was founded in 1993 in exile.
The jailing of the online news agency’s publisher is the latest in a series of steps taken against The Irrawaddy by the junta since it seized power in February 2021.
In March of that year the military regime sued the news outlet under Article 505 (a) for “disregarding” the armed forces in its reporting on the anti-regime protests that were occurring at the time. The police opened a case against The Irrawaddy as a whole rather than against individual employees, making it the first news outlet to be sued by the regime after the coup.
On two occasions later that year, The Irrawaddy’s office in downtown Yangon was raided by regime troops. No one was arrested during the raids.
In August last year, Zaw Zaw, a former photojournalist who had once worked for The Irrawaddy, was sentenced to three years in prison for incitement. One staff member was temporarily detained in early 2022, and the home of one of the news organization’s editors was also raided.
In October 2022, the junta officially ordered the closure of The Irrawaddy and revoked its publishing license.
Myanmar was the world’s third-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 42 members of the press behind bars, at the time of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Dec. 1, 2022 prison census.
