Exiled after Myanmar’s ‘8888 uprising,’ journalist Aye Chan Naing keeps up the fight in a new era of danger and dissent

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When Myanmarese journalist Aye Chan Naing was 22 years old, he did something remarkable. Two months shy of completing dental school and with the prospect of a financially comfortable life ahead of him, he slipped quietly away from his family home in Yangon. Accompanied by three friends, he crossed the border into Thailand hoping to join an insurgency against his government.

There were no family farewells. Instead, Mr. Naing left a note for his parents explaining his reasons for leaving and saying he would be back in six months. Driven by a fierce moral courage given wings by the impetuosity of youth, he could not have known that 24 years would pass before he saw Burma, soon to be renamed Myanmar, again.

He left behind a country roiled by political unrest. The 8888 uprising – started by students on Aug. 8, 1988 – had spread nationwide to involve hundreds of thousands of citizens from all walks of life.

They were protesting against the totalitarian government of General Ne Win and his Burma Socialist Programme Party, whose Soviet-style economic policies had impoverished the country.

There were a myriad of other grievances, too. To Mr. Naing and fellow dissidents, the protests were also about the stranglehold on society exerted by a brutal military, the necessity of having military connections if one wanted to get on in life, and the corruption, nepotism and lack of justice that such a system spawned. A bloody military coup on Sept. 18, 1988 put an end to the unrest. Many thousands of citizens were killed.

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The Naing family was at the epicentre of this discontent, which had simmered for years. The family’s home was within the grounds of RASU, the Rangoon Arts and Sciences University, a hotbed of dissent. Mr. Naing’s parents held faculty appointments there. In the home, education was prized and political talk, invariably critical of the government, a surreptitious dinner-table discussion. It was simply too dangerous to speak openly in a country ruled with an iron fist.

Mr. Naing’s memories of childhood contain moments of high political drama. He was nine years old when U Thant, the Burmese Secretary General of the United Nations, died in New York City on Nov. 25, 1974. When U Thant was denied a state funeral, incensed students from RASU snatched his repatriated body from the funeral procession and brought it onto the university campus to hold their own ceremony for him. A literal tug of war over the corpse ensued between rival student factions and the government before the army stormed the university grounds to end the standoff.

As a boy, he witnessed these dramatic events from his apartment. He saw demonstrators being killed. He remembers his parents making food for the student protestors. He recalls tanks rolling down the road beneath his window at 3 a.m., searchlights probing his apartment, the military barking out commands to shut the curtains or be shot. Such memories fused with dinner-table talk to awaken Mr. Naing’s political consciousness. With all avenues to peaceful dissent blocked, he came to see armed insurrection as the only way to bring about change.

No sooner had he crossed the Thailand border than he met with exiled leaders from Burma’s ethnic groups – the Mon, Kachin and Chin, among others. To his dismay, he found them “living in a bubble,” surprisingly uninformed of the 8888 uprising. The absence of foreign news organizations in Burma coupled with the government’s total control of the media had effectively insulated the country.

Mr. Naing could not have known it then, but in time, as he found his career path, his efforts would become instrumental in bringing news of Burma not only to the wider world, but to the Burmese themselves.

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Prior to leaving Yangon, Mr. Naing had been given the name and telephone number of a single contact: Swedish journalist and author Bertil Lintner, Burma correspondent of the now-defunct Far Eastern Economic Review and an expert on Burmese affairs. It is no exaggeration to say the call Mr. Naing made changed the course of his life.

“Bertil’s wife – Hseng Noung – answered the phone,” he told me. “She invited me to visit them in Bangkok. So I did. I lived with them for the next three years.”

Mr. Lintner was keen to interview exiled Burmese. Mr. Naing was his conduit to them, setting up meetings and interpreting and translating what they had to say.

In the process of watching and learning from Mr. Lintner, he became a journalist. He began learning English, studying at the British Council and boosting his skills by reading English newspapers.

He joined the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF) and started a bimonthly publication, the DAWN News Bulletin, together with Max Ediger, an American running an NGO. Their focus was on human-rights violations.

All the while, Mr. Naing was living without documentation in Bangkok. When Mr. Lintner’s landlord threatened to alert the authorities to this fact, the Lintner family promptly found another place to live and took Mr. Naing with them. Mr. Naing calls his mentor “a remarkable man.”

In 1991, Mr. Naing attended a weeklong human-rights conference in Germany. During his return trip, he stepped unwittingly into the pages of a John Le Carré thriller. Airline officials from Sabena, Mr. Naing’s carrier, became suspicious of his travel documents. Sections of his passport were highlighted and the document stamped as fraudulent. He was nevertheless allowed to board the plane for the trip to Bangkok.

Terrified of being detained on arrival and sent back to Myanmar, where he faced torture and likely execution, Mr. Naing tried to erase the highlights with whisky. His hand was shaking so much that airline attendants took pity on him: Learning of his grave predicament, they told him to drink the whisky instead while they set about removing the highlights and stamp with liquor and razor blades.

On arrival in the Bangkok airport, Mr. Naing heard his name being called over the public-address system. He saw the police mistakenly detain another traveller, believing it to be him. Not trusting his doctored passport, he bribed some airport cleaners to give him their clothes so that he could escape. But he ended up instead in the departure lounge where he remained for three days, making desperate phone calls to friends and colleagues. The crisis was only resolved when the German ambassador to Thailand arrived with a plane ticket to Germany. Given this opening to freedom, Mr. Naing applied for asylum.

His stay in Germany was brief. The ABSDF wanted to open an office in Europe. Sweden agreed to play host, so Mr. Naing moved there to help set up operations. In 1992, he relocated to Norway, assigned by the Myanmarese government in exile – the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma – to set up DVB, the Democratic Voice of Burma. This non-profit radio station was funded by agencies in Norway, Sweden and the U.S. Getting a shortwave radio station in Norway was critical to DVB’s success. Prior to that, opposition groups had run smaller mobile radio stations out of the jungle on the Myanmar-Thailand border where they were vulnerable to attack. Establishing DVB operations in Norway essentially placed the station beyond the reach of the Myanmarese junta.

Mr. Naing viewed DVB’s mandate as providing “real information on Burma.”

“No one knew what the truth was,” he said, “because the government controlled the news, the narrative of what was happening with the opposition. We in Burma don’t just live by our nose for breathing. We live by our ears. Hearing your radio station was very strong.”

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Over the next decade, Mr. Naing worked assiduously to establish DVB and expand its reach. To counteract the station’s growing influence, the Myanmarese government resorted to subterfuge, dispatching spies to Norway to lure him back home. He never took the bait.

Things began looking up in 2010. A general election presaged democratic reforms. The military junta was dissolved one year later, succeeded by a nominally civilian government, albeit one still under the gimlet eye of the generals.

By 2012, a thaw in government repression allowed DVB’s network of underground journalists to come above ground and start reporting openly. Mr. Naing led this transition. The radio station’s offices in Norway were shut. Married and with children by now, he moved operations and his family to Thailand. Five years later, he felt optimistic enough to relocate work and home to Myanmar. It would prove a false dawn.

Myanmar’s fragile democratic progress unraveled when the result of the 2020 election was declared invalid by the Tatmadaw, the country’s armed forces. Mr. Naing and his family were back in Norway when the military launched a coup a few months later. This was followed by the brutal suppression of dissent. The United Nations Human Rights Office estimates that at least 1,500 people have been killed since the coup, including 200 tortured to death in military custody. Over 10,000 people have been detained.

A nascent, free press was an early casualty of the crackdown. The military blocked TV stations, disrupted the internet, banned news organizations and arrested many journalists, including seven from DVB. The DVB TV station was officially banned on March 8, 2021. In response, Mr. Naing has been in the process of taking DVB global – broadcasting online from offices and virtual hubs in Australia, the U.S. and Canada – and using a citizen-journalist network across Myanmar, providing daily accounts of the army’s lethal suppression of protestors.

“We still want to fight back,” Mr. Naing said, “but things in Burma have never been harder than now. The military cannot go beyond the current darkness.” Three decades of resistance have left Mr. Naing unbowed and defiant. But he is older now and looking to the next generation of journalist-activists to take up the mantle. He sees one of his main tasks as “getting the youngsters out the country.” And with an eye on history and his own personal experience, he exhorts them to play the long game.

“I thought I would be back after six months,” he reminds them, “and it took over 20 years.”

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Mr. Naing’s journey from budding dentist in Yangon to chief executive officer of a banned radio station 8,000 kilometres away in Oslo, the far-flung beacon of democracy and freedom to his troubled land, is testimony to his resilience and conviction. His accomplishments have garnered accolades, such as a prestigious International Press Freedom Award in 2021 from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

And yet, impressive as these achievement are, external markers of a lifetime’s arduous journey tell only part of the story. What escapes the glare of public recognition is another journey, arguably more extraordinary – for without it, none of these successes are possible. Mr. Naing undertook it out of sight, in solitude, alone with his thoughts and fears, often in the small hours of the morning. It entailed a personal struggle that was painful, testing the limits of familial bonds, parental love, filial respect and proving the ultimate test of his moral courage.

When Mr. Naing’s parents found the note that he had left informing them of his flight, they immediately set out in pursuit, determined to head him off and bring him home. Through mutual contacts, they latched on to his movements. But the trail ran cold and their son slipped through their despairing fingers. Mr. Naing’s love for his mother was such that he resisted contacting her for the next five years. He knew that if she asked him to return, he would not be able to say no.

Let us pause for a moment and reflect on this. Put yourself in this young man’s shoes and try and fathom the depth of this resolve. And as you do, marvel at his mother’s response to her son’s actions when they next spoke after all those years of silence.

“Don’t come back!” were her first words. “You have done something you believe in. Finish it. If you come back in the middle, you will be welcome from our back door, not our front one.” There was awe in Mr. Naing’s voice when he relayed these words to me. “Can you imagine that?” he asked me. “I am so proud of my mother!” And then he lapsed into silence, overcome by the memory of it all.

When Mr. Naing set out for the Thailand border as a young man, his life irrevocably changed. With the cockiness of youth, he thought he was in control of his destiny, but the grand play of political events determined otherwise. What sustained him when his plans went awry was his moral courage. Inaction – a failure to respond to the injustices of life under the boot of a junta – was not an option. He has held to his moral compass ever since. That his path was made easier by his parents coming in time to follow the same lodestar cannot paper over the pain they all must have felt at a wrenching separation.

“My struggle is nothing,” Mr. Naing said as I took him step by step over the course of his life. “Millions have given more. I have paid a price, but I have been recognized. Others have sacrificed a lot more without recognition.” When he feels depressed by events, he admonishes himself: “I should not be complaining at all. Think of your country, not yourself. Our listeners needs us.”

He also has no regrets about turning his back on six years of study and a career in dentistry. He laughingly notes that when he left his country, he was also leaving behind the prospect of a Porsche or Tesla in the garage. But then he turned serious again: “Living in an oppressive situation and being educated and rich – there is no luxury in that.”

Aye Chan Naing’s riches now are more abstract. They include the pride his parents and siblings have taken in his accomplishments and the thanks of fellow Myanmarese people for keeping them informed of what is going on in their oppressed country.

“You changed our nation,” they have told him, and there is no hyperbole in this.

As our interview came to a close, he briefly excused himself and returned to show me a gold plaque. It was given to him by YouTube, in recognition of DVB reaching a million subscribers.

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Moral Courage: About the series

Journalists are key to civil society, keeping readers, viewers and listeners informed of events both local and international. At times, this work entails exposure to grave danger. The factors that motivate journalists to continue this work despite these threats are many and complex, but central to it all is moral courage. Simply put, to some journalists, doing nothing in response to the egregious behaviour of corrupt or genocidal politicians, human traffickers and drug cartels is worse than the repercussions that come from exposing such crimes. These journalists are driven by a moral imperative to risk their own safety and psychological well-being for the story – and the price paid for this steely determination is invariably steep.

Anthony Feinstein, a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, is an authority on the psychological effects of conflict on journalists. Together with Dr. Feinstein, The Globe and Mail is running Moral Courage, a project that will feature frank and intimate interviews between Dr. Feinstein and a journalist working in hazardous situations around the globe. Each story showcases the work of these journalists, the factors that explain why they feel compelled to pursue such an all-encompassing mission and the personal consequences their work entails.

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