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Articles by Swe Win
Remembering an educator who opened doors for generations of Myanmar students
Shona Kirkwood (Photo: Aung Naing Oo) Shona Kirkwood, an educator and activist whose work opened pathways to higher education for Myanmar students shut out by poverty, dictatorship, and war, has died at the age of 61, leaving behind a legacy that stretches across Myanmar’s media, civil society, ethnic resistance movements, and democratic institutions. Modern Myanmar has been shaped by decades of military rule, civil war, and the gradual collapse of public institutions.
Ross Dunkley and the newspaper that sold Myanmar’s generals to the world
Ross Dunkley, pictured in his hometown of Perth, Australia, in November 2025 (Photo: Swe Win / Myanmar Now) The Myanmar Times co-founder reflects on his role in helping a brutal regime launder its image. . . Subscribe for full access Support our independent journalism by subscribing now. Subscribe now Already a subscriber? Log in
The shadowy past—and present—of the Myanmar Times and Frontier
On a sub-zero Oslo day in December 2021, Norwegian royalty and international dignitaries gathered at city hall for the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, honoured for safeguarding freedom of expression. Ressa opened her speech by paying homage to journalists everywhere who had given so much to report the truth and hold power to account. She then named eight journalists that embodied this sacrifice.
Myanmar Photojournalist Sai Zaw Should Be Able to Report Freely. He Should Not Be In Prison. - Tribune Content Agency
In 2023, celebrated photojournalist Sai Zaw Thaike traveled to Rakhine State in Myanmar, determined to report on the widespread destruction caused by Cyclone Mocha. However, after a week he was arrested, interrogated and allegedly beaten. In September 2023 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison with hard labor after a trial that lasted just one day. Sai Zaw’s friend and colleague, Swe Win, editor of Myanmar Now, is campaigning for his release, together with organizations like Amnesty International.
Myanmar Photojournalist Sai Zaw Should Be Able to Report Freely. He Should Not Be In Prison.
A colleague describes the reality of being a journalist in a country under military control and shares insights into Sai Zaw’s life in prison. Sai Zaw Thaike is a photographer for the independent Myanmar media outlet Myanmar Now. In 2023, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for taking photographs of the aftermath of a cyclone in the country. His story illustrates the crackdown on the media in Myanmar since the military launched a coup in 2021.
‘Russia Cannot Substantially Change the Dynamic of the Liberation Struggle’: a conversation with Igor Blaževič
In his mid-twenties, Igor Blaževič found himself living within range of snipers and artillery fire. His home, the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia, Southeastern Europe, became the epicenter of the Bosnian War, and his world was forever changed as his city fell under siege.As the war intensified following 1992, his friends went off to the frontline. Death became a daily reality. Living through this carnage changed him, setting him on a path to pursue humanitarian and human rights work.
Australian protest about King Charles reflects broader pain over colonialism - Swe Win
Columnists Actual . Favourites . Archive Aa Aa Aa - A + © Nikkei Asian Review visit website
How the killing of a Buddhist monk caught Myanmar’s junta in its own web of lies
Early on the morning of June 19, a group of elderly Buddhist monks, all abbots at their respective monasteries, took an hour-long flight from Yangon to Mandalay. They were Ashin Munindra, Ashin Gunikar, and Yaw Sayadaw, senior leaders of the Shwegyin monastic order, highly respected in Myanmar for its strict adherence to the Vinaya, the code of conduct for monks in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.
Are Min Aung Hlaing’s days numbered?
Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing attends a ceremony in Naypyitaw on October 15, 2023 (AFP) There are growing signs that Myanmar’s military supremo could be heading for oblivion as support for his leadership falls even among backers of his coup. . . Subscribe for full access to Get unlimited access to high-quality reporting from the frontlines and support independent journalism. Subscribe Now Already a subscriber? Log in Copy URL URL Copied
Any Authoritarian State Has its Own Media Strategy - the Myanmar Junta Is No Exception
Government Media 10 hours ago The text below is a slightly edited version of the author’s remarks to the M20 Media Freedom Summit held online in Delhi on September 6, 2023 by the M20 Organising Committee, which comprises 11 editors from India and a former judge of the Supreme Court. I am very pleased and very honoured to have been invited to this occasion to give a small talk. Just a few hours before this conference started, one of our journalists in Myanmar was sentenced to 20 years in jail.
In Myanmar, a once revered monk falls from the people’s grace
Around the turn of the 21st century, when I was still a political prisoner, I would often strain to hear the sermons of one of Myanmar’s most prominent Buddhist monks through the rusty iron bars of my cell. The voice of Ashin Nyanissara—or Sitagu Sayadaw, as he is better known to his many followers—is still a familiar one inside the country’s prisons. Broadcast through loudspeakers, his words invite inmates to seek liberation—not from their jailers, but from their own spiritual defilements.
‘Skeletons covered in skin’: inside Myanmar’s labour camps
Eight prisoners made a break for it, ignoring the pain in their emaciated bodies as they sprinted from the labour camp in Kabaw Valley in Myanmar’s northern Sagaing Region. They didn’t get far. A rabble of guards and deputised inmates pursued them, picking them off in the barren fields that surrounded the camp and beating them mercilessly. Four of the would-be escapees died. The rest, put back to work in shackles despite their severe injuries, wished they had.
The Force of Religion in Political Aims
Demonization, a key tactic in religion, is precisely the reductionism and making wicked of any political enemy. Of all the burning issues confronting the world today, nothing causes greater concern — and greater perplexity — than the force of religion in pursuing political aims. I make this statement precisely: It is not the force of religion pursuing religious aims in themselves; religion is unable to pursue global political aims without first becoming ideologized.
Despite calls for reform, prisoners continue hard labour in shackles
ZIN KYEIK LABOUR CAMP, Mon State - Prisoners continue to conduct hard labour in shackles in a Mon State labour camp, Myanmar Now has found, despite calls for reforms by lawmakers and investigations into prison abuses by a UN rights envoy and the International Labour Organisation. In September, a special report by this news agency revealed widespread corruption and human rights abuses, such as continuous shackling and beatings, in Myanmar’s 48 prison labour camps, which hold some 20,000 convicts.
Exclusive: Abuse and corruption exposed in Myanmar's prison labor camps
NAUNG CHO TOWNSHIP, Myanmar (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In the sweltering midday heat, several dozen convicts shackled at the ankles hacked with hoes at shrubs and grass in a field in Myanmar's northern Shan State. "One! Two! Three! Four!" one of the men shouted, waving a long bamboo cane to the beat of the hoeing. A prison warden looked on with a rifle slung over his shoulder and holding an umbrella for the blazing sun.
EXCLUSIVE-Abuse and corruption exposed in Myanmar's prison labour camps
"You will bribe to get a better task, you will sacrifice your body, or you will toil as an animal. You had no other options - we were all slaves." NAUNG CHO TOWNSHIP, Myanmar, Sept 1 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In the sweltering midday heat, several dozen convicts shackled at the ankles hacked with hoes at shrubs and grass in a field in Myanmar's northern Shan State. "One! Two! Three! Four!" one of the men shouted, waving a long bamboo cane to the beat of the hoeing.
Nationalist Buddhists protest at US Embassy against its use of word ‘Rohingya’
Hundreds of Buddhist nationalists staged a protest in front of the United States Embassy in Yangon on Thursday afternoon, to oppose the embassy’s use of the word “Rohingya” to refer to the stateless Muslims in western Myanmar’s Rakhine State.
INVESTIGATION-Abuses, exploitation rife in Myanmar’s forgotten prison labour camps
NAUNG CHO TOWNSHIP, Shan State (Myanmar Now) – Under the glare of the midday sun, several dozen men wearing blue outfits, with shackles around their ankles, stood grouped together in a field of shrubs and tall grass. One man among them, holding a long bamboo cane, started to shout at the thin-looking prisoners and they began to use hoes and spades to clear the thick vegetation. “One, two, three, four!” he yelled rhythmically, setting a quick pace for the work.
SPECIAL REPORT - With official help, Myanmar’s radical Buddhists target Muslim-owned businesses
ATHOKE, Ayeyarwady Delta (Myanmar Now) – Last year a Muslim businessman called Lwin Tun set up a factory in Labutta, a town in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Delta. He spent $330,000 on buildings and cooling systems, but couldn't buy the product his factory was meant to process: meat. That's because Labutta's seven cattle slaughterhouses, also Muslim-owned, had suddenly gone out of business.
Back to Jail in Burma
YANGON, Myanmar — Today I go back to Insein Prison, where I was detained in the late 1990s and where throughout the decades of military rule in Myanmar, most political opponents were interrogated, tried and held. I was taken there directly from my home in 1998, as a 20-year-old university student, and was given a 21-year sentence on charges of distributing subversive pamphlets. I served seven years, in Insein and two other prisons, before being released in a general amnesty in 2005.
The New York Times
YANGON, Myanmar — Five years ago, when Myanmar was still under military rule, some Western and Chinese friends asked me how there could be such oppression in a country where Buddhism, which preaches nonviolence, is the predominant religion. I was in self-imposed exile at the time, studying journalism at the University of Hong Kong, and I would answer that the country’s military leaders were immoral, Buddhists in name only.
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