U Thaung, Myanmar
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Sat, Apr 1 2000
U Thaung was one of the most prominent victims of General Ne Win’s military regime, which ruled Myanmar (previously Burma) for more than a quarter of a century and transformed the country into one of the most secretive nations in the world. The chief editor of the Burma Times and The Mirror Daily before he was thrown into prison for three years for criticizing the regime, he was eventually forced to seek political asylum in the United States. He remains an outspoken critic of military rule in Myanmar, writing numerous articles, essays and books, and taking part in pro-democracy meetings around the world.
Born Oct. 4, 1926, in Nyaung Oo, Myanmar, U Thaung began his journalism career in 1947 as a reporter for the Burma Times in Rangoon, rapidly working his way up through the ranks to become chief editor of the paper in 1951, at the age of 25.
In 1957, he started his own daily newspaper, Kyemon (The Mirror Daily), which he also edited. The paper almost instantly became the biggest-selling paper in the country, with a circulation of 55,000, three times that of the country’s second largest paper, by the time of U Thaung’s imprisonment in 1964.
In 1958, after the ruling Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) split into two wings, Prime Minister U Nu asked the army’s chief-of-staff, General Ne Win, to head a caretaker government. “When General Ne Win took power in 1958, the first thing he did was build a concentration camp on a far-away island in the ocean to tyrannize the Communists and dissidents,” U Thaung said. “More than 40 percent of the victims were writers and journalists.”
U Thaung’s paper was confiscated as an “enemy of the people,” but allowed to publish again after elections to the Chamber of Deputies gave an overwhelming majority to U Nu, who resumed office in April 1960. U Nu’s administration, however, proved ineffective and General Ne Win seized power in a bloodless coup in March. A revolutionary council suspended the Constitution and instituted authoritarian control through the one-party rule of the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP). Foreign journalists and publications were banned, and by September 1964 all local newspapers had been either shut down or nationalized.
In 1964, U Thaung and three of his editors were imprisoned without trial and The Mirror Daily was nationalized. “At that time, political prisoners were kept incommunicado,” U Thaung said. “Spouses did not know when their husbands would come back and faced great hardship outside the jails. As a result, about half of the prisoners’ marriages were destroyed. Mine was one of them.”
After being pardoned in 1967, U Thaung was given a bureaucratic post in the Ministry of Information. He was permitted to write columns again, only to see his license to write revoked when his critical comments gained a wide readership. After ten years, Thaung was allowed to go to the United States to work as a feature writer for The Missourian, a small newspaper in Washington, Missouri. However, his critical writings — in particular an article in Reader’s Digest about his three years in jail — soon led the Burmese authorities to revoke his passport. Stranded in the United States, he was granted political asylum.
Since then, he has written numerous articles and essays criticizing the military regime in Myanmar. He has written 26 books, including the best-sellers General Ne Win and His Executioners (1990) and A Journalist, a General and an Army in Burma (1995), and is presently the chief editor of the New Era Journal, which is compiled in the U.S., printed in Bangkok and secretly disseminated in Myanmar. He is also an editorial consultant for Radio Free Asia in Washington, D.C.
Although confident that democracy will return to Myanmar in the near future, U Thaung is less optimistic about the prospects for independent journalism in his country. “Even today, journalists are not welcomed by some groups that claim themselves as fighters for democracy in Burma. ... The Prime Minister of the democratic government [in exile] ... is not happy with some of my writings and ordered that I must be barred from his government functions and meetings. I was also banned from preaching democracy through the Burmese Democratic Radio Service managed by his government. ... Thus, when Burma is free from the fascist generals, journalists like me will certainly be sitting ducks for the democratic leaders as well.”