The grind of censorship

I have reached a record of censored articles. This week three of my articles were cut. I can't decide if that makes me stupid or just a massachist.

Every week I write articles that I know will never get published and every week I fume at the government for shaping not only direct references to them, but the cultural, social and economic perception of the country.

It has been ten months now. And although I swear and shout and rage at them right now I feel more resigned than actively angry. I am sad not mad.

Press freedom or the lack of it - I have become obsessed by it. I read books about Iraq under Saddam Hussein because I want to know about their Ministry of Information. I talk about it at a moment's notice. I wonder constantly what approach one should take to it. Should one bury the information? Hope your readers can read between the lines, hope your readers can understand what you mean when you carefully ignore the government's role in the poverty, the deprivation, the searing and ghastly spectre of neglect.

My tactics change. In recent weeks they have morphed into open defiance. When even self censored articles are cut I have started to feel that self censorship is futile. I would rather they didn't publish anything I wrote then publish what I perceive as a half truth. It is not a smart tactic. It is not really a tactic at all. It is journalism without publication, without an audience, without a reader. Perhaps it therefore is not even journalism at all.

Of course I still never write active criticism of the government, or not in so many words, but I will not shy away from writing about the Rohingya, or the dodgy role of Burmese companies or the lack of health care or trafficked victims. The government is present in the article in its absence, the hole that exists where it should be.

Censorship grinds you down. It slowly chisels away at you, until either you conform or you become so angry you can no longer work in journalism - most of the good journalists I know have stopped working as journalists in this country. They turn to the NGOs or the UN for work and they wait out their time until they can be journalists again. I have a feeling when my contract ends in two months I might also be one of them.