The authorities in Burma have virtually succeeded in cutting off internet links to the outside world. On 28 September 2007, all Internet access was stopped completely. Following protests led by Buddhist monks that last week escalated into mass demonstrations calling for the restoration of democracy, the Burmese military government has turned its attention to stopping news getting out of the country as well as using tear gas and live rounds on protestors and rounding them up.
A blog on Globalvoicesonline.org said that information going out of the country was being strictly monitored and that the military government was “hunting down the sources.”
Information outflows curbed
Reports from Burma suggest that a communications shutdown in Burma has “slowed information to the outside world to a trickle,” UK newspaper The Guardian reported on 1 October. Internet services resumed briefly over the weekend, before disappearing again a few hours later. The number of reports to one exile group had been cut by half and websites with the .mm Burma suffix were unavailable, campaigners told the paper.
Searches conducted for phones, cameras
Security forces in Rangoon continue to conduct searches on passers-by, particularly in central Rangoon, the New Delhi-based website Mizzima, staffed by Burmese exiles, reported on 1 October. Eyewitnesses said soldiers and police were targeting people with cameras and mobile phones to stem the flow of information out of the country.
“The current situation is that it is extremely difficult and dangerous to get anything out. Riot police are charging anyone who brings out a camera or a cell phone. There are also random searches of bags,” an observer told Mizzima.
Communications blocked
“It is difficult to get information out because the internet has been closed,” said Moe Aye, an editor at the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a media group staffed by exiled Burmese activists that broadcasts to Burma on shortwave radio, satellite TV and which has an Internet platform.
The DVB said about half of all communications to the rest of the world were being blocked by the military government. A DVB spokesman said: “Some of our undercover reporters are still getting through - we are still getting around 50 per cent of it.”
Burma Internet users sometimes try to use proxy servers to access the web, creating what the Thailand-based news portal Burma Irrawaddy has called a “hole in the net”. But the shutdown has cut the number of active blogs to almost zero, the Guardian report said, with only a handful able to continue publishing via third parties.
“Assassins on air”
Meanwhile, Burmese TV captions on 1 October were describing the shortwave broadcasters BBC World Service, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe as “assassins on air”. On 1 October, Burma’s English-language MRTV-3 aired the following scrolling captions: “RFA, VOA and BBC among skyful of lies”; “Beware of RFA, VOA and BBC saboteurs”; and “RFA, VOA and BBC, assassins on air - keep public awareness of them”.
Internet in Burma
A report on the internet in Burma by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) - a collaborative partnership of four leading academic institutions from the UK, the USA and Canada, was updated on 27 September. The report said that the reported number of internet users in Burma in 2005 ranged from 78,000 to nearly 300,000 or around 0.56 of the population. Burma is one of only 30 countries with less than 1 per cent internet penetration, it said.
Burma regulates online access via legal and economic measures. This means high prices and that network-ready computers must be registered with the state-owned telecom provider Myanmar Posts and Telecoms (MPT) - the only source of new internet services - and Myanmar Teleport (MMT), formerly Bagan Cybertech, said to be the infrastructure arm of Burma’s internet system, and responsible for blocking content.
(Source: BBC Monitoring research 1 Oct 07/R Netherlands Media network Weblog)