Danny Fenster, managing editor of online magazine Frontier Myanmar, is the first Western journalist to be jailed in recent years in Myanmar
Managing editor for Frontier Myanmar Danny Fenster is pictured in this undated handout obtained May 25, 2021. He has been jailed for 11 years in Myanmar. Picture: Handout via REUTERS
He is the first Western journalist to be jailed in recent years in Myanmar, where a February 1 coup by the military against an elected government led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi ended a decade of tentative steps towards democracy and triggered nationwide protests. Fenster was arrested while trying to leave the country in May and has since been held in Yangon’s notorious Insein prison.
The US has been pushing for Fenster’s release. The US embassy in Myanmar did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday’s verdict. During nearly half a century of harsh rule by the Tatmadaw, as the military is known, news reporting was tightly controlled by the state but Myanmar’s media blossomed after the a quasi-civilian government introduced tentative reforms from 2011.
Frontier Myanmar’s publisher, Sonny Swe, who spent eight years in prison during the previous era of military rule, announced Fenster’s imprisonment on Twitter under the message: “A lot of things are going so wrong in this country.”
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