Reporters With Thought Borders

Ross Dunkley reads The Myanmar Times newspaper that he works for, before a hearing in his trial at Kamaryut township court in Yangon April 4, 2011. (Photo: Reuters)

Monday, April 18, 2011
By SIMON ROUGHNEEN
The Irrawaddy news

To compare, a Cambodian World Food Program staff member was given a six-month jail sentence in Cambodia, after downloading and printing material from KI Media, a political blog that runs material critical of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and Prime Minister Hun Sen. While the sentence was light compared to those handed out in Burma, the fact that it was issued at all is a cause for concern, said Sopheap Chak.

PHNOM PENH—Ross Dunkley, the sole foreign owner invested in Burma’s state-controlled media, faces charges of assaulting a woman and breaches of the country’s immigration laws, in what many observers, including some of Dunkley’s own business partners, view as a power play aimed at ousting the Australian from his stake in the Myanmar Times.

Dunkley has since been released on bail, part of which was paid by his Burmese business partner, Tin Tun Oo, who was named CEO of the Myanmar Times in the days after Dunkley’s initial arrest. Dunkley has subsequently downplayed the conspiracy angle, and hopes to be acquitted soon.

He is well known in media circles in Cambodia after buying into the Phnom Penh Post, one of the country’s two English language dailies, back in 2007.

Cambodia is a challenging media market with freedom of expression under threat from a combination of formal and informal codes that inhibit the country’s press, according to several observers.

Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior officials do not shy from suing media, and the Phnom Penh Post has been hit with lawsuits in the past, while a local NGO, the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO), points to numerous cases of journalists being threatened with violence or worse, in a scenario akin to the Philippines, where guns are used to cow reporters operating in an otherwise free media environment.

Blogger Sopheap Chak, who writes regularly for a number of online publications, told The Irrawaddy that sometimes her friends express concern if she is too outspoken, telling her that “Cambodia is not like America or Europe.”

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