On the front lines of the Myanmar military’s crackdown

Reporter Ali Fowle reveals what it is like on the ground when protesters are being shot, friends and colleagues are being arrested and you are forced to sleep in safe houses.

The first images I remember seeing of Myanmar were at my grandmother’s house. Disintegrating home video reels and grainy black and white photos showed my father as a smiling toddler in a tropical garden. Originally from the United Kingdom, they had moved there from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to work in the oil industry in the 1960s, when the country was known as Burma. I imagined it to be a romantic and magical place. It was years until I learned of the tragic history that unfurled after they were forced to leave. When my flight touched down in Yangon on my first official visit to Myanmar in 2012, I was amazed by how familiar the country looked. It seemed little had changed since those old videos were filmed. Men and women still wore traditional dress and carried tiffin jars and umbrellas, girls in green school uniforms wore jasmine flowers in their hair, ox carts and barefooted monks in maroon robes lined the unpaved roads. Myanmar felt like a country frozen in time. In the 50 years since my grandparents left, Myanmar had been ruled by brutal military regimes, which had isolated the country and stalled development. I was both nervous and excited to be in Yangon for the first time. For the past three years, I had been working at an exiled Burmese media organisation, the Democratic Voice of Burma, or DVB. The only contacts I had in the country were underground journalists who had spent years secretly recording and smuggling out footage so that DVB could broadcast uncensored content from its satellite channel.