Radio Australia’s new Burmese language service began November 9, with two news broadcasts. Radio Australia’s Chief Executive, Hanh Tran, said Burma’s elections next year and increased international attention on the military-led country prompted the decision to start the new radio service. “This is the first new language service for Radio Australia in more than 15 years,” he said.Mr Tran told Radio Australia’s Connect Asia programme that the creation of the Burmese service expands the broadcaster’s brief to provide impartial news and information to the region. “Our audience has always been those who are in developing countries. Their access to information is limited, for reasons of poor infrastructure, or state control, or sometimes the reasons relate to stability in the region: he said.
“We don’t go along the activist path of regime change or anything like that. In fact the service we provide Burmese people is no different from what we provide people in China, in Vietnam, those countries (that) are having very good bilateral relations with Australia.”
The broadcasts will be transmitted to Burma seven days a week on shortwave frequencies 12010 and 17665. The Burmese service will begin as a 15-minute news broadcast on shortwave, satellite and online at 5:30 am local time (2300-2315 UTC), and repeated at 7.30 am local time (0100-0115 UTC) on the same frequencies. More broadcasts will be added in the evening as the service grows.
Cherry Mangrai, producer of the Burmese service, says though access to the Internet is limited in Burma, she expects a wide audience to tune in via shortwave. “A lot of people would have transistor radios that they can tune in on shortwave, and that is still very very popular in the whole of Burma, so my [potential] audience is I think, 50 million plus,” she said.
Ms Mangrai says there currently are four shortwave radio services broadcasting into Burma, two from the United States and two from Europe. Of Radio Australia’s addition to the field, she said: “Coming from this region closer to Burma, it would be very good, would be very refreshing for the people in Burma.”
(Source: Australia Network/Radio Australia/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)