It has been 20 years since Myanmar’s intelligence agents detained the writer, who was a university student at the time. Yet far too little has really changed in Burma since then.

ผู้สื่อข่าวเมียนมามักคุ้นเคยกับสภาพการทำงานที่ยากลำบาก แต่การรัฐประหารโดยกองทัพในเดือนกุมภาพันธ์นี้ ทำให้เกิดคำถามที่ว่า คนในวิชาชีพสื่อสารมวลชนจะยังทำอะไรได้บ้าง โดยที่ชาวเมียนมาได้ทำอาชีพนี้อย่างจริงจังแค่ 10 ปีหลังนี้เอง

Myanmar’s journalists are no strangers to working in hostile settings. But the February military coup throws up questions about what may be left of the profession of journalism, which has been around for just a decade in the Southeast Asian country.

ASEAN has been testing its non-intervention habit in ways never done before, playing what is to date its biggest, most active role in relation to Myanmar’s handling of the Rohingya issue. But ASEAN’s role is little known or cared for inside the country, where the mainstream attitude is usually apathy or hostility to this minority community. Aung Zaw Min looks into why this so, in this feature for the Reporting ASEAN series.

“I didn’t want to be a journalist, but of course I didn’t want to be a political prisoner either,” editor and author Kyaw Zwa Moe said. “But I just did what I believed I should do.” He talked to Reporting ASEAN’s Johanna Son at the July launch of his book ‘The Cell, Exile and New Burma’ in Bangkok.

Myanmar may be a politically freer country, but has many more challenges to media freedom today. In this chat with Reporting ASEAN’s Johanna Son,  Yin Yadanar Thein, the co-founder of Free Expression Myanmar, says the country’s undemocratic habits – including the Aung San Suu Kyi-led government’s policies toward the press – will take a long time to unlearn.

The visit this week by democracy icon Daw Aung San Suu Kyi will certainly brighten the spirits of the Thai people and could also lift the profile of the Thai junta and Myanmar’s top leader. Yet Achara Ashayagachat of the Bangkok Post argues that we shouldn’t romanticize too much about “The Lady” and her capacity.

A sense of apprehension and impatience, at times reluctantly expressed but nevertheless real, is fast tempering the heady optimism about Myanmar’s political change nearly two months into the Aung San Suu Kyi-led government. Johanna Son analyses the reasons behind this feeling of discomfort in this piece for the ‘Bangkok Post’.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi led her party to a decisive landslide victory in last year’s elections in Myanmar. Democracy may have won but real struggles regarding governance will be the true test of her leadership. Mia Gomez looks at the challenges the new government faces in this story for the ‘Reporting ASEAN: 2015 and Beyond”‘ programme.

BANGKOK, Aug 27 (IPS Asia-Pacific) – Busy shedding off its reputation as a recluse after decades of self-imposed isolation, Myanmar is playing catch-up with it neighbours and may well become a middle-income nation by 2030, the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) says in a report released this month.