Myanmar relaxes grip on media

 Feb 29, 2012  AP, Yangon - It was a newspaper article that just months ago, Myanmar's draconian state censors never would have approved.

It told how prison authorities crudely attempted to cure a scabies outbreak by wiping down naked inmates with medicine-laden brooms - a demeaning act that revealed the poverty of the nation's prisons and the decrepit state of its health care system.

"In the past it would've been a very dangerous thing to publish," said Zaw Thet Htwe, who wrote the story and was a political prisoner himself until last month. "It wasn't allowed."

But in a sign of just how much is changing in this long-oppressed nation, it was allowed. The article was not only published this month in the Health Journal, a Yangon-based weekly, but it hit the streets without having to be reviewed first by the government's infamous censorship body, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Department.

Yesterday, images of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, once a highly taboo figure, routinely appear on the front pages of everything except state-controlled media. And the days of buying foreign publications, only to find sensitive stories cut out, are over.

"It's much more relaxed," said Thiha Saw, chief editor of a news weekly called Open News, who said he's now able to write freely about fires, murders and natural disasters - all prohibited at various times in the past.

http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=224345