Myanmar lifts ban on exiled media broadcaster

Myanmar has agreed to grant journalists from a prominent exiled broadcaster who previously faced lengthy jail terms limited visas to visit the country to cover news events, the group said Thursday. Reporters from the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) living outside Myanmar will in future be granted visas to travel into the country for work, according to DVB's deputy director Khin Maung Win.
The news came from Myanmar's information minister on Wednesday in a meeting with DVB's chief editor Aye Chan Naing, who got a five-day visa to meet officials after more than two decades in exile. "He agreed as a first step that journalists based outside, that means in Thailand and in Oslo, would be granted visas to cover events in the country. Of course we have to apply like other journalists," Khin Maung Win told AFP.
He said their journalists based inside Myanmar were still considered illegal, but DVB is now trying to open a permanent bureau in the country. "I think opening a branch office and recognising underground journalists as DVB journalists might come at the same time," he said, adding that the minister had promised to consider their proposals. "There are many more steps we still need to discuss with them."
Not long ago, journalists working for exiled media groups could be given long prison sentences if caught inside Myanmar, but dramatic political changes over the past year have seen the country begin to loosen restrictions. At one stage 17 video journalists working for DVB were imprisoned in Myanmar, some of them on sentences of more than 60 years, but all were released in a mass political prisoner amnesty in January, the group said.
They included Hla Hla Win, serving a 27-year prison sentence after she was caught with video interviews of monks criticising the former junta's crackdown on protesters in September 2007's "Saffron Revolution". DVB's coverage during the protests became the focus of Oscar-nominated documentary Burma VJ, which showed the risks of filming in Myanmar under the-then military junta. A nominally civilian government has since taken power.