Myanmar layoff was no surprise

I have been laid off.

Not by the newspaper you are reading — though you never know what might happen — but by the English language version of an independent news website out of Myanmar, also known as Burma.

Part of me knew when it started that this gig with The Irrawaddy wasn’t going to last long. The fact that it stretched more than nine months is pretty remarkable.

The gig started about three weeks after I retired from newspapering in Jay County.

I had a connection to Myanmar because I had done some journalism training there in 2012, and I continued to follow news out of that country via several websites, including The Irrawaddy.

The 2012 experience could not have been better. The folks in charge of the military-led government were beginning to release their grip. The leader of the National League for Democracy — Daw Aung San Suu Kyi — was still under house arrest. But there were signs of change in the wind.

An election for parliament was scheduled and candidates from the National League for Democracy (NLD) were being allowed on the ballot. No one wanted to get overly optimistic, but the military leadership seemed prepared to usher the country into a new era.

At a memorable conference I attended near the end of my month there, the military government spelled out almost astounding plans for increased press freedom.

And things looked good. For a while.

The election was held. The NLD did well. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. And after an election in 2015, she found herself as the de facto head of state.

(She was prevented from holding the presidency because she had married a Briton, and the military government had inserted a clause in the constitution making it impossible for anyone who had married a foreigner to serve in that office.)

So last fall, the NLD seemed likely to be re-elected to power. COVID-19 was a bigger issue at the time than politics.

That’s about the time I signed on as a part-time copy editor for the English language version of The Irrawaddy’s site.

The work was quirky and unpredictable. There were no typical days.

I might get three long stories to edit, fixing the English, cleaning up the language, clarifying the information. Or I might get none. Or I might get a series of breaking news posts for the website’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Politics and COVID dominated the subject matter throughout the fall and into the winter.

Then came Feb. 1.

The military, whose proxy parties had been humiliated in a landslide election that went to the NLD, decided to seize power in a coup.

Using the pretext of “election fraud” based upon unsubstantiated charges of ballot tampering, the military upended the constitution, put Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under arrest and rounded up dozens of its political opponents in the NLD.

(If that sounds spookily familiar, trust me that you’re not to first person to feel that way.)

Instantly, the part-time job of a retired newspaperman in small-town Indiana changed.

The Irrawaddy was facing legal action from the military regime. Bylines of reporters disappeared, replaced by the generic “By THE IRRAWADDY.” Photos of editors in the “about us” portion of the website disappeared. Staff members went into hiding to avoid arrest as the military regime took action against journalists across the country.

And my gig became a seven-day-a-week matter. (That fact brought a bemused smile to my face. One of the papers I had worked with in 2012 was 7DayNews. When the coup came, it shut down entirely.)

So, the copy kept coming. Every day.

At one point, for a period of weeks, I found myself editing stories every day that updated the civilian death count, complete with grisly photos of people shot in the head. Not a good way to start the morning.

As the resistance — the civil disobedience movement — continued, eventually there was armed opposition to the regime’s brutality. Militias formed. Homemade bombs were detonated around government buildings.

Diplomatic efforts were an exercise in impotence.

By June, it seemed that something approaching a permanent stalemate had developed.

The situation was bad, and by every indication it was going to be bad for a long, long time.

That’s when I started wondering when I would get the axe.

The Irrawaddy’s primary work is its Burmese language website. The English version is aimed more at the international community, diplomats and business people for the most part.

So the email from Kyaw Zwa Moe came as no real surprise.

“Thanks for your understanding and thoughts for our people. I don’t know how long this struggle will take. … But we have no choice but to do what we are supposed to do. … Hope we’ll get a chance to meet up in the future.”

Me too.