For Myanmar’s jailed reporters, Time magazine cover coincides with grim milestone: one year behind bars

In late October, in a meeting room inside Yangon’s infamously brutal Insein Prison, Reuters reporter Wa Lone met his three-month-old daughter, Thet Htar Angel, for the first time. The moment he took the infant into his arms a warm, white substance trickled from her mouth on to his shirt. The baby had vomited on him. Wa Lone, desperate for the feeling of fatherhood, seemed pleased.

“When I tried to clean it up, he said: ‘Don’t do that. I want to keep it on the shirt’,” Wa Lone’s wife, Pan Ei Mon, said during an interview Myanmar’s main city. “When I came to visit him the next week, he was wearing the same shirt, and the stain was still there.”

Pan Ei Mon, 35, gave birth to Thet Htar Angel in August, while Wa Lone, 32, and his reporting partner Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, were on trial for allegedly possessing secret government documents that prosecutors said were “useful to enemies of the state”. They were arrested in December 2017 after exposing the extrajudicial killing of 10 Rohingya men during the military’s brutal crackdown on the stateless minority last year. They were convicted in September 2018 and sentenced to seven years in prison for violating Myanmar’s official secrets act.

On Tuesday, they were among the persecuted journalists recognised by Time magazine as its annual “Person of the Year”. On Wednesday the pair will have spent a full year in prison.

The others recognised by Time were Jamal Khashoggi, the columnist for The Washington Post killed inside Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul in October; the staff of the Capital Gazette newspaper in the US, where five employees were killed in a mass shooting in June; and Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, the chief executive of the Rappler news website, who has been made a legal target for the outlet’s coverage of President Rodrigo Duterte.