Episode #100: Mratt Kyaw Thu
The past ten years of Myanmar’s history have certainly not been boring, and journalist Mratt Kyaw Thu has been there to chronicle a lot of it.
Hailing from the southern part of Rakhine state, Mratt notes that there were limited opportunities and resources there. He recounts that he read nearly every book in his local library, propelled by a “knowledge to survive” that drove him to learn as much as he could about the world. Eventually Mratt made his way to Yangon in 2005. This alone was quite an achievement, as he estimates that 95% of ethnic people in those days didn’t have the funds to travel to the city even once in their life.
In Yangon, however, he was soon made aware of his outsider status. City people asked openly about his accent. As he later learned, he was not the only one—many non-Bamar who relocated there reported similar, strange encounters. “This kind of weird and awkward question they always ask. Many ethnic people experience that kind of awkward moment in their life,” he remarks.
Mratt attended Dagon University, graduating in 2009 with a degree in English. He subsequently joined a philanthropic group, which led to his first encounter with journalism. However, he soon learned there were many issues he had to carefully navigate, such as things which could be reported…and which not. “It's really sensitive for my own people in my state,” he recalls “because you cannot talk about Muslim people. You cannot talk about Christianity, you cannot talk about the other religious and ethnic stuff too much before 2012.”
And yet, things changed fast. With Aung San Suu Kyi just released from house arrest, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama arriving for state visits, and the State Censor position being dissolved in 2014, the ground was certainly shifting fast under his feet. “We journalists always remember these years between 2014 and 15, as a golden year of the journalism, you can write everything you want!”
With this growing freedom came the promise securing a real livelihood as a journalist, working for one of the over 100 papers that were now getting off the ground. “Many young people, including me, we started to apply the journalism, and you can even get a job at any news media.” Still, things were somewhat chaotic during that time. Mratt recalls that the rapid growth of local journalism was far from objective, with political parties, activist groups, ethnic communities, and student unions all rushing to publish their own newspapers… with agendas sometimes masquerading as “news.” Mratt experienced this directly when he landed his first job at a newspaper, which he soon learned was a propaganda outfit in disguise. Cursing management and overturning tables, he quit, moving on to Mizzima, a news organization, where he ended up on the crime beat. He also began covering stories about land grabbing, detailing how the military was snatching up bits of prime real estate throughout the country.
The 2015 elections brought the NLD into power, with more even more changes and opening in its wake. Whereas just a few years earlier anyone could go to prison merely by being caught in possession of a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi’s, it had become de rigueur for just about every emerging paper to put her photo on the front of every edition.
With Aung San Suu Kyi’s election, the game changed again. Journalists who reported critically on her leadership found themselves at odds with readers who had supported her secretly against the former regime for decades. “I think, at the time, this was the starting point of the breaking up between the audience and the newspapers,” Mratt recalls. “Because from that moment, half of the newspapers chose to support Aung San Suu Kyi and half of the newspaper chose to do more like absolute journalism.”
Mratt began filing a series of reports about the drug trade, tracing the routes that traffickers used to smuggle in methamphetamines from the Golden Triangle region. He even travelled along some of these suspected routes. In the process, he began to make friends with a number of senior police officers. On one occasion, he was offered the chance to ride along with them for an upcoming bust of some traffickers. But as fortune would have it, something very, very different would occur that evening instead, and the upshot from it would impact not only Mratt’s career, but the trajectory of his country as well.
It was October 9, 2016, and Mratt was in Maungdaw, a city known for its electricity outages. But at 2 am, the lights suddenly went on! This very unusual occurrence piqued his curiosity, and he began calling his sources. He learned that Muslim residents of the city had staged on attack on the police. Because of a curfew, he was not able to get to the scene until 4 am. Once there, he found the corpses of nine policemen, including some who were beheaded. Mratt instantly realized the significance of the moment.
“Actually, me and my photographer were there to trace the drugs, trafficking stories, but in the morning, unexpectedly, that story just broke. As a reporter, we were so lucky that we got the story, which nobody got before. We went there, and we filmed everything, we interviewed almost everyone there on the ground.”
The Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) was initially thought to be behind the attacks, but much was still uncertain in the wake of such unexpected violence. As for Mratt, however, he unwittingly became part of the story. A New York Times colleague had called to ask about what he had witnessed; Mratt agreed to talk, but only with the understanding that it would be entirely off the record. So he was shocked when an article soon appeared quoting everything he had said, attributing it to him by name! “I received a lot of threats on my email that I'm destroying my country's reputation, and breaking national security… I even received death threats at the time.”
Mratt was also informed by several sources that a second attack would be coming during the rainy season. He urgently warned authorities at every level, but his words went unheeded; not long after, he watched in stunned silence as about 30 police stations were attacked on August 25th, 2017. This violence became the impetus for the displacement of over 90,000 Rohingyas. “Can you imagine that kind of moment, that you tell the whole country that there will be a second attack, and then no one listens?” he asks rhetorically. In the end, he has no idea why so many people ignored his warning.
Mratt tried to get back into Maungdaw, but found it much harder to enter this time around. Preparing small gifts of betel nuts and petroleum and donning the dress of locals, he and some reporter colleagues eventually managed to slip past the numerous checkpoints. Once in town, however, they were identified as outsiders by someone who appeared high on yaba, and who gathered a mob to harass them. The man and the mob didn’t believe that Mratt and his colleagues were reporters, thinking instead that maybe they were spies or agent provocateurs of some kind, and the situation got dangerously tense. They first took refuge in a monastery, and eventually managed to escape in a hired car. As the landscape whizzed by, Mratt was shocked to see entire Muslim villages burned to the ground. However, this was a story he knew he could not report on, as the consequence would surely be arrest, if not worse.
From there, the conversation turns to how Mratt’s home region of Rakhine has been faring since the military coup. “Everyone's talking about Rakhine and the Arakan Army [AA], and why they don’t fight against the military.” Mratt notes. “Well, all the people in Rakhine State say that it's enough for us! We had like five years of very intense fight in a Rakhine state from 2015 to 2020.” Mratt recalls how, before the coup, many Bamar openly supported the Tatmadaw in their offensives against the AA, with some celebrities and social influencers even posting that Rakhine who refused to sing along with the national anthem should be executed.
Complicating matters today are the array of negotiations taking place, many behind closed doors, which include not only members from the AA but also a number of other ethnic groups. Interestingly, the negotiations also involve mediation by representatives from Japan and China. Historically, both countries have entanglements in the region, with ethnic groups and the military alike.
While Mratt feels AA authorities have a plan in mind, he is not privy to what it might be, although he suspects they might be angling for a kind of autonomous region within the country. He believes that while the AA has clearly been winning the “battle on paper,” they are only just beginning to control the local administration.
At present, Mratt is focused on telling the story of the ongoing conflict as best as he can. He is currently doing so from Spain, as he had to flee for his life from Myanmar because being a journalist has become so dangerous since the coup. “It’s chaos right now,” he acknowledges. “The whole journalism scheme, but it's already destroyed.” On one side, the military has tried to prevent journalists from reporting on their atrocities, yet on the other, many readers want to hear updates about PDF victories. With the lack of on-the-ground reporting, it is increasingly hard to know what is true or what the fuller context surrounding a story is; reports are rarely fact-checked.
“I have to personally explain that the revolution or the killing is not going to be finished very soon. It will take time, maybe one or two years,” he says, noting that this kind of attitude contrasts with an audience that wants to read about signs of an imminent victory. For this, he blames local reporters who have pandered to their readership. Mratt puts it simply: “The media has failed to educate the people.”
These days, Mratt has difficulty even seeing those Facebook memories that pop up automatically from previous years—they now seem filled with false optimism and fake news. “People learned a lot,” he says. “So I think those kinds of lessons learned will be something different in the future for my country and for my own people.”
To follow along with Mratt’s ongoing journalistic work, navigate to his page or follow him on Twitter.